Anyway, I've already talked to a number of people that were there and got the low down. I like to be at these events to do the write up on them in On The Edge, but I'll need to get Bonnie to do it for me this year.
Right now I'm taking a little time off with my family, but I'll still be posting tomorrow. After that I'll be off grid.
“The Strongest Dad in the World”
by Rick Reilly
Sports Illustrated, June 20 2005I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots.
But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.
Eighty-five times he’s pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he’s not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars–all in the same day.
Dick’s also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?
And what has Rick done for his father? Not much–except save his life.
This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.“He’ll be a vegetable the rest of his life;” Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. “Put him in an Institution.”
But the Hoyt's weren’t buying it. They noticed the way Rick’s eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the Engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. “No way,” Dick says he was told. “There’s nothing going on in his brain.”
“Tell him a joke,” Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a Lot was going on in his brain. Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? “Go Bruins!” And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, “Dad, I want to do that.”
Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described “porker” who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. “Then it was me who was handicapped,” Dick says. “I was sore for two weeks.”
That day changed Rick’s life. “Dad,” he typed, “when we were running, It felt like I wasn’t disabled anymore!”
And that sentence changed Dick’s life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly Shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.
“No way,” Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren’t quite a single runner, and they weren’t quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway, then they found a way to get into the race officially: In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year.
Then somebody said, “Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?”
How’s a guy who never learned to swim and hadn’t ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried.
Now they’ve done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii. It must be a buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don’t you think?
Hey, Dick, why not see how you’d do on your own? “No way,” he says. Dick does it purely for “the awesome feeling” he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.
This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992–only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don’t keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.
“No question about it,” Rick types. “My dad is the Father of the Century.”
And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. “If you hadn’t been in such great shape,” one doctor told him, “you probably would’ve died 15 years ago.” So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other’s life.
Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father’s Day.
That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy.
“The thing I’d most like,” Rick types, “is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once.”
A lot has been said about persistence, but is it possible to quantify how much persistence you need?
Let me share with you some interesting stats I came across recently. They prove conclusively that your sales should rock if you don’t stop before making at least 5 calls on a customer.
According to Sales & Marketing Executives Club of Los Angeles, 81% of professional salespeople will close on the 5th customer call. Here’s the full breakdown:
2 % close on the 1st call
3 % close on the 2nd call
4 % close on the 3rd call
10 % close on the 4th call
81 % close on the 5th call
Next up, data from the Dartnell Corporation which reveals that 90% of all sales people stop trying to make a sale before the 5th customer call. Here’s the full rundown:
48 % quit after the 1st call
24 % quit after the 2nd call
12 % quit after the 3rd call
6 % quit after the 4th call
10 % quit after the 5th call
What does this all mean? It means that over 80% of sales are being made by 10% of the salespeople in the world. And if you don’t stop before the 5th customer call, chances are good you will be the #1 salesperson in your firm...maybe even #1 in your market.
So, whatever you do, don’t stop!
Jim and Tisha between flights.
Jim introducing George Harris to my friend Jacky. He is a shear manufacturer in China. George imports and excellent line of shears from Korea called Lucky Hare.
Jim and Tisha with my supplier from Taiwan. He has some cool new products I'll be looking at for Wolff to carry, so keep an eye out for some announcements in the future.
We put in a full day at the show yesterday, but this morning we're going to have some fun. We chartered an early morning plane to take us out to the Grand Canyon and we're going to jump on some ATV's. So we'll be flying over those mountains you see in the distance and we'll be back this afternoon for a meeting.
You'll find this box in the right hand side on the site.
In this graph. I'm checking prices from Charlotte, NC to Los Angeles, CA.
As you scroll up and down the boxes you'll see the different prices light up.
Sorry for the long pause in posts! With all the writing I do I really needed a rest, so I decided to take a month hiatus from blogging so I could recharge my batteries. I've had my nose in a number of books I've read in the past, I've been searching new blogs for fresh content, and I've listened to a number of my favorite books-on-tape during this time. I occasionally do this to keep myself on track. Two of my favorites tape series I just finished listening to are Sell Your Way to the Top, by Zig Ziglar and Selling the Wheel, by Jeff Cox. Both are excellent studies on sales and if you can find them at you local library, I'd suggest you pick them up and listen to them yourself.
With that said, I'd like to ask how long it has been since you've recharged your batteries? As business people, we so often get wrapped up in working that we forget that we need to revisit what we've learned in the past to see if it is still working for us now. If not, we need to set some new goals, learn some new selling techniques, or get some more sharpening training.
One of the things I hear most when I do a show like the one that just took place in Kansas City is, "We love coming to these shows because I not only learn from the seminars, I learn from all the other sharpeners as well." The other nice thing about shows like this, is many of the sharpeners turn them into little mini-vacations and bring their family with them. It's a great way to learn and relax, and the trip can be written off as a bonus. If you're thinking about come to the next show, it's in Anaheim, CA October 17-19. Call Wolff at 800-888-3832 for more info.
