I stopped pitching my bosses and pitched strangers instead

01Lived

I was working as a marketing consultant for large health club chains, living in an apartment in Goodlettsville, just outside Nashville, Tennessee. For a while I’d been going on about ways to improve how clubs did their promotional work, value-added services and so on. The two owners of the business I worked with weren’t bad listeners. They were just so busy, flying all over the place getting new deals, that they never really listened. So I thought, I’ll give it a shot myself. I created a proposition, put it into pitch letters, spent hours in the library in Nashville working through the Yellow Pages for health clubs around the country, and posted them. No email back then. A couple of clubs wrote back, interested. I hadn’t thought much further than testing the water. Then serendipity did its bit: one of the club owners who got my letter knew the owners I was consulting for, and because my idea was similar to what they did, but different, he contacted them and asked for their thoughts on the promotion. I was asked to a meeting with both of them together, which was rare. To my surprise they were cool about it. They were life-long entrepreneurs, and they approved of the hustle and the guerrilla tactics. We started implementing some of the ideas.