Founders at Work.pdf

440 Founders at Work
before the annual meeting, so they were really under the gun. As I recall, they
had 5 or 6 days to get those reports in the mail; otherwise they had to reset the
annual meeting, and it would have been a huge disaster. It would have clearly
put us out of business instantly—even though we had told them the right number
and we could prove it by showing them the fax we sent them.
So I called the 800 number and it was going to somebody’s pager. Back in
those days, you couldn’t leave a voicemail. It just said, “Please leave a number
to call.” So we did that. Nobody ever called back. Because we had a good relationship
with AT&T, we identified who owned the 800 number. It was a paging
company down in Dallas, Texas.
We called the paging company and without revealing what the situation was
specifically, we said, “We have a situation here where we got a number mixed
up and your customer will be getting a lot of phone calls he doesn’t want to get.
We’d like to make it right by him and by you.” The company wouldn’t give us
the time of day. They said, “No. Because of privacy issues, we won’t contact him
and you certainly cannot contact him. All you can do is leave a message.” So we
tried and tried, and worked it up the ladder. They wouldn’t budge. They were
just intractable. This consumed about 2 days. Then Josiah Cushing, one of the
college grads I had hired, during our staff meeting said, “Ron, why don’t you try
hiring a private detective?”
I said, “Well, let’s try this. It’s an interesting idea.” So I went to the Boston
Yellow Pages, looked under “private investigators,” and found an ad that
appealed to me. I called the private investigator and I said, “Here’s an 800 number.
It belongs to somebody that has a pager. All I need from you is to know the
name and the personal phone number of this person.” He said, “No problem.
It’ll cost you $100.” And I said, “That’s fine. How long will it take?” He said, “It
will probably take about 4 hours.” I thought that was pretty impressive.
He calls back 3 or 4 hours later and said, “Ron, I’ve got good news and bad
news.” I said, “Give me the good news first.” “The good news is I’ve got who it
is.” “Well, what’s the bad news?” “It’s going to cost you $200, because when we
got the name of the person, he had an unlisted number, so we had to do two
searches.” I said, “Fine. We’ll send you a check for $200. It will be in tonight’s
mail.”
I then call the person up. He is in Dallas, Texas. The whole company was
hinging on this, plus the situation with the pharmaceutical company, and I
was scared to death about how to make this call. So I just thought, “Be as honest
as possible,” and I said, “Look, I represent a company that’s printed your
number in a document that’s going to be very widespread shortly. Otherwise,
they have to republish the whole thing, and it’s a real mess. What I’d like to ask
you is: we’d like to acquire your 800 number. Give us the right to that and we’ll
do whatever we can do to make it right for you. All you have to do is tell us what
you’d like to have us do.” And he said, “I understand. I’ll be happy to help you
out. If you could buy me a years’ worth of pager subscriptions, that will be fine.”
That was like $400. He could have said $100,000, and they would have done it.
He actually said a year, but I said, “No, we’ll give you 2 years. We’ll be happy to
do that.”