Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Chutzpah

America is a great country, and I love its entrepreneurial spirit. But sometimes people go a little too far. Here's an example. (By the way, I never left a voice mail message.)

Dear Mr. Levy:

Thank you for your voice mail. My fee for a one day visit at your office in Boston is $9,800. I believe you to be a man of integrity, so if don't (sic) get any value from my one hour presentation then you owe me nothing.

I would like to share a few observations and propose a hypothesis on the topic of business continuity and disaster recovery. Discontinuity can provide a rare opportunity for sustained competitive advantage to be gained quickly.
  • Decades of profits in one year
  • Double digit market share gain
  • Enhanced brand name and goodwill
I have faith that your company and our country will emerge even stronger after any potential crises. This is because we value the rule-of-law, meritocracy and a market based economic system.

The last 10 years of my professional experience has been in sales for independent software vendors. I attended the PhD program in Economics and Applied Statistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Thank you for your consideration. If you have further interest please feel free to call my cell phone at (415) 238-****.

4 comments:

  1. Transferred from Facebook:

    Michael: for another thou, he'll help you explain it to the donors!

    Lisa; Talk about setting yourself up for failure...If you don't get any value, you owe him nothing. That seems like a risky proposition when you're flying out from San Francisco (as evidenced by the 415 area code.)

    Jim: And my brother-in-law is a Nigerian minister who needs a bank account. For 20%... The guy is lucky you didn't post his name and #.

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  2. Laughing out loud. Gee, everyone is trying so hard! Talk about "Bonfire of the Vanities" . . .

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  3. From Facebook:

    Sally: Notice he doesn't say he completed the PhD program - I was going to say something sarcastic but I realized he must be desperate and possibly grandiose if not delusional. It's too pathetic for sarcasm.

    Jon: Hard to pass up an offer this good. And you wonder why so much software is vaporware.

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  4. Interesting; he sent you a canned email ... complete with ta_ute (mistake/dropped word). Is it $9800 for one day or one hour? For 98 CENTS I'll talk to you about enterprise risk management (a/k/a business continuity) - I won't give you a program for 98 cents, but this ex-medic will give you a worthwhile overview - or you can go to my Web site for free (http://JohnGlennMBCI.com) and apply the savings toward a snow blower .

    John Glenn, MBCI
    Enterprise Risk Management practitioner
    Hollywood/Fort Lauderdale Florida

    ReplyDelete