My friend Matt is a dude. Not the kind of dude who tucks his jeans into his boots or wears a straw hat to a horse show in the middle of February. Matt is the kind of dude you might find sitting on a Southern California beach, soaking wet and covered in sand with a surfboard at his side; or maybe in line for the chair lift at one of Utah’s great ski resorts, wearing a classic tuque with the newest flavor of snowboard strapped to his feet.
If a toy has been made that glides, rolls, skims, jumps, peddles, paddles or slides, Matt has owned at least two.
And Matt is generous. In the almost two decades we have known each other, I have been dragged behind his boat, ridden his motorcycles, and borrowed his snow shoes a dozen times or more. For several years, Matt even kept a beautiful wooden canoe and two paddles not so subtly hidden in the main stairwell at his office so that anyone who wanted to could enjoy a paddle around the small decorative pond just outside the cafeteria.
In short, Matt is one fun guy to hang out with.
But don’t think Matt is the classic slacker. He isn’t. He is a well-educated, highly-skilled engineer and businessman who has made a fine living in the software industry. This is where the RV comes in.
In 1997, Matt and I were both working for a small software company when it was purchased by a much larger company headquartered in Japan. As part of the acquisition, the executives at our company arranged for a certain amount of money from the purchase to be set aside for the employees. Each employee got a certain amount of this “start happy” money based on tenure, position and current salary. Because Matt had been at the company for several years and was an integral member of the management team, he started quite a bit happier than most of us. With his windfall cash, Matt decided to top off his toy collection with a piece of equipment he had wanted for some time: a motor home.
After a few weeks of investigation and research, Matt and his wife got up on a beautiful Saturday morning and drove to the RV dealership just a few miles up the interstate from where they lived, fully intending to buy a motor home; a very nice motor home; a very expensive motor home; with cash.
They were in every way a salesman’s dream that day, with one exception: they didn’t look the part.
I can picture what they must have looked like that morning. Matt was probably wearing leather sandals and some faded khaki cargo shorts, topped off with a souvenir t-shirt from a recent mountain bike rally, road race, or one of the local micro-breweries; his not long but longish dark, wavy hair and scruffy beard making him look even younger than he was. His wife certainly matched him in attire as they both walked onto the RV dealership lot with a certain casual, “just looking around” demeanor.
For two hours they walked in and out of RVs, trying to decide exactly which one they liked best, while one of the salesmen occasionally trotted by and asked “How ya doin’?” or “Ya doin’ alright?” Not once did the salesman ask them what they were looking for or if he might be of assistance. Not once did he acknowledge that they just might be two people who would, in fact, buy an RV. He was too busy with customers who, by his assessment, were more likely to be buying. In fact, in the two hours they were at the dealership, no one even bothered to introduce themselves or ask them their names.
So Matt and his wife did exactly what most of us at some point in our lives have wished we had done, but didn’t. They got in their car, drove 30 miles to the next nearest RV dealership and bought their new motor home. When he got home that evening, Matt called the inattentive salesman from the first dealership and told him exactly what he had done and why he did it.
As someone who makes a living as a salesperson, I can tell you that the salesman who got that call was sick for days thinking about what he missed through his poor judgment and inattention.
Since the day he recounted it to me, I have turned Matt’s experience into a life motto. In both my professional and personal life. I try to carefully examine the manner in which I judge people based on their outward appearance or demeanor.
Have I missed making a new friend because someone didn’t fit into my rigid definition of friend?
Have I mistreated a stranger because they were too different from me?
Have I lost a business opportunity by assuming that the person on the other end of an email or phone call just wasn’t the kind of customer I was looking for?
When I catch myself making these kinds of decisions, I stop and remember my friend Matt at the RV dealership on that bright Saturday morning . . .
. . . and I remind myself that you just never know who’s going to buy an RV.
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