All I had to do was hint that I might run for president in my June column and, you guessed it, there was an enormous groundswell of support. So far, I have $123.86 in my "Mañana Man for President" campaign fund. This is enough for a bus ticket to Manhattan where I will be making speeches on various high-traffic corners to capture all of New York state's electoral votes. I'm counting on this for a domino effect throughout the other 49 states.
Enough of that. I have a better money-making scheme.
It's the "Mañana Man Merger Diet!" I have lost 62 pounds since August of 2003. I weighed 259 when I started and now I weigh 197. See the graphic artist's recreation of my Before and After profile on this page. I forgot to take the Before picture when I started dieting so there's not much point in an After picture. The artist has it roughly correct.
Senior women, strangers, are approaching me in the grocery store and flirting by asking suggestive questions like, "Where will I find the asparagus?" I know what they are up to and I'm not falling for their obvious infatuations. My bride of 42 years, Attila the Nun—a crazy liberal Democrat—is considering abandoning her hotsy totsy aversion to grocery shopping to accompany me to protect her turf—that's me, Mr. Stud Muffin, from the wily retirement home ladies.
I turned 62 on June 30th, can bench press more than my weight and every day people tell me, "Harris, you don't look a day over 59." My newfound beauty just kills my buddy, Dave the Printer. He is 66, dumb enough to own a printing company and insanely jealous of my bronze sculpted body. He has no column anywhere; he probably can't write a complete sentence, so he has no way to fight back except with his "hate" phone calls.
Well, anyway, my new diet plan is an amalgamation of all the diets I tried while losing the 62 pounds. It's a combo of the South Beach Diet, the Atkins Diet, Weight Watchers, the grapefruit diet, the under 1,000 calorie diet and the Liverwurst and Raw Egg Yolk diet.
If you want to sign up for my program, just send me $3,000 in cash (I don't have a Website and I don't take checks or credit cards.)
I have this new svelte body and inordinate old man strength, so I work outside tending my gardens more than ever before. As a result my perennial and vegetable gardens are flourishing and weed-free.
In my gardens, I am surrounded by beauty and the ambience inspires poetic metaphors. Here are a couple that apply to print salespeople.
Guy With a Green Thumb
I have discovered, after many years of mediocre gardening, that if you love and regularly care for your plants and weed enough, water enough, fertilize enough and use enough chicken and horse manure, you will enjoy magnificent and bountiful flowers and vegetables. I learned this from tending to my clients for the more than 40 years that I have been a salesman.
Here's another metaphor that occurred to me recently. My seven- year-old grandson, Matt, was swimming in our pool and complaining that he was being buzzed by all the bees, hornets and wasps attracted to my garden that surrounds the pool.
I went to the Home Depot and bought not one, but two, of the Cadillac of all Buzz Bug traps. The traps were beautifully packaged in well-designed and well-printed folding cartons. Included were miniature folded, four-color instruction pamphlets with text set in readable 10pt. type. I hung the decorative (almost beautiful) traps on the light poles on either end of the deck overlooking the pool, telling myself, "These babies will wipe out an entire flying/stinging bug population and they don't look bad. I bet the trap engineers designed them so the bugs will find them sexy."
Forty eight hours later, Matt came to me and reported, "Granddad, we haven't caught any bees. The traps are empty."
I went to the outdoor trash can and retrieved the trap instructions that I hadn't bothered to read for my extermination training. There it was: Step three. I was supposed to pour a cup full of sugar-enhanced apple juice laced with raw meat in the trap. I prepared this concoction and about three hours later Matt reported excitedly that the traps were full of pesky bees, hornets and wasps.
Now, I know that 99 percent of you readers get this analogy, so excuse me while I explain it to the world's worst print salesperson, Marvelle Stump, and a few of the dummies he hangs with.
You see, you may be beautiful and well spoken. But if you don't have any sales training and a compelling reason for people to buy from you, you ain't gonna have any customers. If all you do is hang out in the office looking pretty, fail to train yourself on basic selling skills, and try to develop some personal and competitive advantages, then you will have an empty trap, er, I mean an empty bag full of customers. Clients won't come and stay just because you're lookin' good.
I'm sorry. Even though I have this new young body, I still have an old man brain and we tend be more philosophical.
Off the Links
Finally, I wrote about my retirement from golf many years ago in my February column. This column caused many of you to write, e-mail and call. One letter stood out. It was from Roy Matthews at Monarch Printers in Charlotte, NC.
Roy writes, "Mr. DeWese: According to your article in the February Printing Impressions, you have had some trouble with the game of golf. Having lost a bunch of balls and then borrowed and lost a bunch more, all in the same round, you need help. Not so much help in playing, but help in overcoming the bad relations you're bound to have suffered from wasting so many of your friends' golf balls.
"Let me tell you about how I handled the same kind of situation before I hung up my clubs several years ago. At that infamous (to me) water hole, I always got really nervous. I'd usually pull out an old ball because I was absolutely certain it would wind up in the water. This particular day, I deposited several old balls plus several good balls in the water. Some even almost made it across. Obviously, when I was left with no more balls of any kind, I turned to my golfing buddy and asked him to let me use one of his. He was a pretty good golfer and didn't have any old balls, so he reluctantly pulled out one of his good ones.
"I promptly deposited that one in the water. Knowing full well that I would get the very next one across the water, I asked my friend for another ball. He pulled another one out of his bag and I promptly sent that one to be with the others. As I turned to him again, he already had another ball at the ready, but with a pained look on his face. I don't know why he brought this up, but he said, 'Roy. This will be three of my balls you've used. You know I buy nothing but the best balls. Do you have any idea how much those things cost?'
"To which I promptly replied, 'Tom, if you can't afford this game, you shouldn't even be out here."
I love the way Roy thinks. He believes that quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten.
I've got to go pump some iron and do 100 crunches while you guys and gals get out there and sell something!
—Harris DeWese
About the Author
Harris DeWese is the author of Now Get Out There and Sell Something, available through NAPL or PIA. He is chairman and CEO at Compass Capital Partners and is an author of the annual "Compass Report," the definitive source of information regarding printing industry M&A activity. DeWese has completed more than 100 printing company transactions and is viewed as the preeminent deal maker in the printing industry. He specializes in investment banking, mergers and acquisitions, sales, marketing, planning and management services to printing companies. He can be reached via e-mail at DeWeseH@ComCapLtd.com.