→ in the middle of the street
→ being grabbed by the nose by a gangster
→ who’s sitting in a car
→ that’s about to start moving?
Well, I had. Here’s the story:
One of my first jobs as a student was selling books from a folding table in the street. Every day we sold books to people going from a subway station to a bus stop. One day, someone decided to throw in a couple boxes of cigarettes along with the books.
Didn’t look like a good fit at first.
But then I started offering cigarettes to people who were looking at books. It worked.
By just asking, "Need cigarettes?" I made almost as much revenue as from books. And what’s more, they were buying from me at a higher price than they would at a cigarette kiosk just 50 feet away.
I started to buy cigarettes at this kiosk and sell them at my folding table at a 20% surplus.
The next thing I noticed was a queue of cars at a traffic light. I figured I could walk from car to car and offer cigarettes to drivers and passengers.
And the sales went crazy!
I started selling cigarettes at a 40% surplus, still buying them at the kiosk.
This was my first lesson in sales: You need to provide value, and the value is not always in the primary function of your product. My customers had a problem: it was hard for them to find a parking spot to go buy cigarettes at a kiosk. And here I was, solving this problem for them for a 40% profit.
One day, a passenger in one car asked: "How much do you have?". I had a 10-pack with me. He wanted to buy all of it. I was already anticipating a big profit!
I leaned over to the guy... and he grabbed me by the nose with one hand and took the box with the other.
One important thing I didn’t mention. It was the summer of 1992… in Moscow, Russia. Just a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia back then was quite a poor country. There were food shortages all over the country.
A car in 1992 Moscow was a kind of a luxury. There were some people who still had old cars from the Soviet era. There were very few rich people who could afford to buy a new car. And then there were gangsters.
What I didn’t realize was that a significant portion of my audience at the traffic light were them, gangsters.
And here I was, in the middle of the street, grabbed by the nose by a laughing gangster. It hurt quite a lot, by the way. And the guy was also holding my (rather expensive) box of cigarettes. The traffic light was about to turn green, and the car was about to start moving.
That was my second lesson. Although the guy let my nose go and even gave me back my cigarettes, I learned to carefully choose who I’m doing business with.
I stopped selling books and cigarettes and turned to IT.