Monthly Archives: November 2009

This MLOG has two purposes.  First,. since we are not going to lay down tracks for my debut album I’ll Be Your Emperor Penguin until we have a great big cash advance from a major studio (and  helicopter), this MLOG will establish prior art for the title track below.  Thus, should Prince, Metallica, or The Hanson Brothers release a similar song, they will owe us millions.

We have now established a date, in a public venue, and clearly this is original.   That, my friends, sums up the concept of prior art!

James Hetfield eat your heart out.

I’ll Be Your Emperor Penguin

Chorus is  Dsus2, Gsus4, D (if you see fit)

Refrains are Gsus2, D, A7….repeat

___________________________________________

Gsus2

Unemployment hasn’t killed me,

Gsus2

But your thigh highs thrilled me

D

And your (expletive deleted) blew me straight through the wall.

Gsus2

The Ramen was easy

Gsus2

And your buttocks were squeezy

D

And now we’re in the middle of fall

A7

450 a week ain’t nothing to sneeze at.

Gsus2

Because it’s better than 449.

A7

And when we have movie night, for the three hundredth time,

Gsus2

I’ll still scream to the world that you’re mine.

Dsus2

I don’t want to be your lion, baby

Gsus4

Cause I ain’t got much of a roar.

Dsus2

And I don’t want to be your tomcat, honey

Gsus4

Cause people will call me a whore.

Dsus2

I can’t really be your cuddly bear

Gsus4

Cause I never want to share my honey.

Dsus2

But I’ll be your emperor penguin….

Gsus4                                                   Dsus2

….and you can bring home all of the money.

Your daddy looks for extraterrestrials

And picks fights with basketball refs

And if you promise not to recruit me,

For asta kalapa,

I’ll stay right here in the nest.

Don’t want squid or krill

Raw herring or crustaceans

Or anything smelly, my dear.

Just make me that pot roast

Give me three Foster’s Lagers

And I’ll hang right here with my beer

I don’t want to be your lion, honey

Cause I ain’t got much of a roar.

And I don’t want to be your tomcat, baby

Cause people will call me a whore.

I can’t really be your cuddly bear

Cause I never want to share my honey.

But I’ll be your emporer penguin….

….and you can bring home all of the money.

You can’t trust me with plumbing, electrical connections

Or folding the laundry the right way

But I’m a mean cat herder, a marmoset juggler
And I’ll kiss your stupid face all day

If you bring home the cash,

I’ll grab your neck in my beak

And we can have nekked Saturday

All week………….

I don’t want to be your lion, honey

Cause I ain’t got much of a roar.

And I don’t want to be your tomcat, baby

Cause people will call me a whore.

I can’t really be your cuddly bear

Cause I never want to share my honey.

But I’ll be your emperor penguin….

….and you can bring home all of the money.

(Editors Note:  I would, indeed, stay home in the nest should anyone care to make me think, feel and laugh like a hyena AND bring home all the money.  Am very self actualized that way.)

 

 

 

Best Experienced With:          Hoodoo Gurus;              1,000 Miles Away

 

(Please right click on the link below to open up the suggested background tunage for this evening’s missive.  Then, please say the name of the band fourteen times aloud….rapidly)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDlavnA1ck8

 

 

 

 

Twas the night before Thanksgiving

And all through The Attic,

Permeated the odor of Stella Artois

And the sound of raw static.

Ceeeeeeeatie with pink headphones

And me with a Kangol

Were looking for Bernie Madoff

Who surely we’d strangle…………………

 

 

 

 

 

Hmmmmmm. Far too trite.  We used to mock newspaper columnists that did “holiday” specials as original as oxygen transfer in capillaries.   Going to stop that one right there, even though we took some great shots yesterday as illustrations (see immediately above.  Going to retain the right to strangle Mr. Madoff.  Looking forward to seeing Mr. Madoff in hell.  Have some fun ideas on how he and I will spend eternity. 

 

 

 

Writing on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day have been my favorites for the past four years.  On Thanksgiving Day we always have Cornucopia of The Ridiculous and on Christmas Day we have Santa and The Savior’s Non Sequitors.   If you are new to the Mind of Mully, please make certain you drink as many of your grandmother’s slushy whiskey punch drinks as humanly possible tommorrow morning and then climb on up here for some fun during the Detroit game.

 

 

 

“Istanbul was Constantinople.  Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople.  Been a long time gone, Constantinople.  Now it’s a Turkish delight on a moonlit night.”

 

 

 

The Rule of Rattay.  You will read nothing in this incarnation of The Mind of Mully that I would not feel comfortable saying out loud to the entire Rattay family at the Thanksgiving dinner table after asking John to “pass the peas” for the seventeenth time.  Were I at the Rattay Thanksgiving table tomorrow, here is the joke I would tell.   72% of the Rattay family lives in Arizona.

 

 

 

A couple from Phoenix, Arizona is on vacation in La Jolla, California.  They are fighting like cats and dogs about the correct pronunciation of the seaside town they are visiting and decide to settle the argument by stopping at a local fast food establishment.  The couple walks in, each convinced they are correct and say to the pimply faced seventeen year old cashier:  “excuse us, how do we pronounce where we are”.  The cashier looks at them and very deliberately says:  “Burrrrrrrrrgerrrrrrrr Kingggggg”.

 

 

 

The first time I heard this song you are listening to was while driving home late on a Friday evening to Fairfield, Ohio from a surgical evaluation at TJ Samson Hospital in Glasgow, KY.  1991.  If you broke the rules and did not cue up the music listed up at the top of the page?     Leave.    If I came into your house and you had a “no shoe” rule because you chose stark white carpeting (what were you thinking ?), I’d remove my shoes.  If you want to play up here with the rest of us in The Attic, you cue up that music.  Get yourself some headphones if you read at work.  We have extra Skullcandy headphones up here in The Attic and will loan them out as needed. 

 

 

 

Please always cue up the music.

 

 

 

Now the rest of us, the people that follow precise directions precisely, will continue discussing the lyrical stylings of the Hoodoo Gurus and why this song might be quite personal for those of you that choose to carry the bag or desire to carry the bag down the line.   This is one of the finest sales songs ever and a perfect tune for a long drive home on a Friday night!

 

 

 

Those of you that have found that person with whom you chose to share that “last first kiss” and also sell well year after year, our collective hats are off to you for managing that balance between home and work.  Carrying the bag and being a great partner and parent is an art and a science.  A decision made daily as the alarm clock goes off and a strategy executed hourly, regardless of the curveballs thrown.  I could no more do what you do on a daily basis than I could dunk on a ten foot rim against King James, patron saint of The Land of Cleve.

 

 

 

Have seen many of you do this balancing act exceptionally well.  This next four days is especially for you.  Have a wonderful time with that “last first kiss” person and the others in your life that allow you to find depth at low tide. 

 

 

 

All of you that carry the bag!  We are most thankful for you on this the most caloric of all weekends.  The rest of us in every company in every market space are overhead.  Management, operations, R&D, finance, ad infinitum…..we do not generate revenue.  Sales teams are the only teams that generate revenue and for you, we are most thankful.  Your individual efforts put the food on our tables on Thanksgiving.

 

 

Thanks for allowing the “no’s” to slide off of your Teflon exteriors.  Thanks for getting up every morning at dawn knowing that it’s a new day and believing that someone, somewhere is going to buy from you.  Thanks for walking into a place where no one knows you to cold call.  Thanks for staying up late to do copious follow up.  Thanks for being strong enough and malleable enough to deal with days that always deconstruct at 9:42 a.m.  Thanks for asking questions.  Thanks for not just yapping and yapping and yapping.  Thanks for having courage and discipline.   Thanks for driving revenue and allowing each of us that does not have “sales” on our business cards to have jobs.

 

 

 

We will always be thankful for the sales people because you are the most important people in any organization in any market space.   You.     Alone.    Drive.   Revenue.  Growth.

 

 

 

 

Thanks to all of you that carry the bag, from all of us that do not carry the bag.  Thanks for paying for our jobs.  You are unique.  You deserve our praise.

 

 

 

 You rock

 

 

 

Going to spend the rest of the evening here in The Attic getting this stocking hung with care and preparing for the writing of the Cornucopia of the Ridiculous.  Thanks for popping up here tonight.  See you soon.

 

 

 

Best Experienced With:          Rocky Horror Picture Show;       Floor Show

 

(Please right click on the link below to cue up the suggested background music for today’s treatise.  Let’s all meet this Saturday for the midnight showing of Rock Horror in Denver?   That’s the geographical center of the country and we can all stay at Matt’s!)

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5b5iBevnvpA&feature=PlayList&p=63516726B4CE1F9F&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just in time for Take Over The Native American’s Country, Feed Them then Kill Them and Take Their Stuff week, The Mind of Mully offers up what many of you have been waiting for for over four years.  Today we offer up pink head phones, platitudes, and platypi.

 

 

 

Shall we begin?

 

 

 

Platitudes

How did you find your wife or your husband?  How did you find your best career adventure?  How did you meet your best friends?  The things that give you double goose bumps and depth at low tide………..how did you find them?   Did you use your GPS device or did The Random take the wheel and smash you into a concrete barrier to make certain you didn’t miss what was in front of your face while you were in that face down, oblivious to the world Blackberry/I Phone pose.  Our co-pilot here in The Attic is The Random and we worship the gifts bestowed upon mankind by The Random.       The Random abides, just as The Dude does.

 

 

 

 

Was in Vegas with the ThaIrish ex-wife back in April, 2002 and declined the GPS option at Hertz as they asked us to choose cars.  Chose the white Mustang 5 liter convertible and blew out of McCarran International at 123 mph with a neutral drop on our way to the Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon.  Can you say “pin the speedometer”?  When the Mustang hit 99 MPH, both bags of tasty fried Bugles flew out.  That was our neutral drop tip to the man that checked my ID at the Hertz gate.  Bugles are tasty!  Neutral drops in convertibles are far more satisfying than sedans because you can hear the DROP better.  

 

 

 

 

If we had a GPS device, after the majesty of the Hoover Dam we may have headed the correct direction and made it to the south rim of the Grand Canyon.  There, we would have competed with thousands of white trash tourists for a glance at a great big hole in the ground.  We would have eaten fried dough and chugged Fresca while unfortunate looking children wearing stained “I’m With Stupid” tee shirts bellowed “IWANNAGOHOME” at their unfortunate looking parents.   The Random intervened and we got lost.

 

 

 

 

Penny and I pointed the convertible Mustang 5 liter in the wrong direction, cranked up Poison on the radio and crooned about how roses periodically prick your fingers.  An hour later we stopped to ask directions and get an ice cream cone.  My ice cream cone had butterscotch coating and chocolate sprinkles!  The ice cream shop was the fund raising part of a large cat sanctuary so we spent the next two hours with two other couples behind the ice cream shop getting to know three lions, a leopard, two ocelots and the most beautiful black jaguar I have ever seen.  The large cats were in large, open air compartments for the day and we were allowed to get within three feet of them.  Most beautiful animals I have ever seen and the most amazing animal experience either Penny or I will ever have. 

 

 

 

 

The proprietors of the big cat sanctuary pointed us towards the Hualapai Indian reservation; a little known and seldom visited part of the Grand Canyon.  Forty minutes later Penny and I were standing on the west rim of the Grand Canyon, alone, screaming silly things out into the abyss and laughing like hyenas at the echo.  Later that evening, we drove to the Graceland Wedding Chapel and took a picture on the bridge to mess with our families.  That was the best unplanned day in the history of unplanned days.  I love The Random and The Random loves all of humanity.

 

 

 

 

For most of us, our best experiences happen by sheer coincidence.   They happen by getting lost.    For a single day before 2009 ends, please put away your GPS device and get lost.  Ask for directions at a gas station and get utterly, hopelessly lost for a day or two.  The Random and I promise you will find something magical and mystical…………designed and destined just for you.  As the Goo Goo Dolls opined, “life is more than who you are”.  Life is about getting lost and finding what you are supposed to find through the journey’s confusion and disorder. 

 

 

 

Your Attic assignment for the next six weeks is the preceding paragraph.  Please let us all know what magical and mystical thing The Random crashes you into and how it changes your stars.  If you are in medical surgical sales, feel free to use this as an invitation to randomly cold call in every department wherever those big blue “H” signs point you.   Your pipeline can never be big enough and face to face is the only way to prospect here in The Attic. 

 

 

 

We will all wait up here for your stories on our donated carpet squares with baited breath, Pilsner beer, and tasty Hostess snack cakes.

 

 

 

The Pink Headphones

Close friends know the Pink Headphone Offense.  There is always a pair of bright pink headphones on my head when I fly because my friend list has been full for quite some time.   I don’t want to hear your life story simply because Delta Airlines randomly assigned us adjoining seats.  Moreover, the pink headphones are unique, differentiated and they carry whatever message others choose to assign to them.  The pink headphones abide.

 

 

 

 

Your market space rewards you for a unique message, as well as differentiating features and benefits.   The pink headphone company, Skullcandy, is a fantastic example of uniqueness being rewarded in their market space.  Look outside of your market spaces for examples of uniqueness to pull into your market space.  By doing this, you avoid inbreeding and the certain death that comes through natural selection when market participants only copy what their “competitors” are doing.  Be unique. 

 

 

 

 

Founded in 2003, Skullcandy has only 56 employees:  they had revenue of $86M in 2008.  That was not a typo:  they really did $1.5M in revenue per employee in 2008 and will eclipse that figure in 2009.  If you are a marketer, you will recognize Skullcandy and their product offering as a complementor.   Skullcandy is riding the iPod wave as a complementor and riding it well.  In a scant six years they have become the second most popular headphone in the world.  I have been a net promoter of my Skullcandy pink headphones since I fell in love with them two years ago at Boston’s Logan airport.

 

 

 

 

Marketing friends!  What have you done lately to make your company or offering as unique as the pink headphones?  What market spaces outside of yours have you closely examined to import uniqueness to yours?  What have you done to get your customers to be net promoters of your company and its offerings to other potential customers?  What are you going to do this week to set yourself apart and be memorable?

 

 

 

 

Market spaces and investors value uniqueness and differentiation.  The Random assigns uniqueness and differentiation to those brave enough to set aside their GPS devices and get lost.  Did your most remarkable and memorable life experiences happen when you got lost?  Put down that iPhone and look up………

 

 

Go get lost before the end of the year.  That is our ask this evening. 

 

 

 

Go get lost.

 

 

 

The Mind of Mully

 

Don’t dream it

Be it…………..

Don’t dream it

Be it…………..

 

 

God bless Lilly St. Cyr, indeed.

 

 

 

Two sets of Skull Candy pink headphones because we always have  Plan B here in The Attic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Platypi

Dang it.  Promised you platipi and forgot to include the platypus!  Here you go.  As always, we under promise and over deliver at The Mind of Mully.  Thanks for stopping by for a little while; it was great to see you!  Now go get lost and, as always, mind the Velociraptors as you make your way down the ladder!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 A couple folks asked whether the Cincinnati to Steubenville was 100% real with no embellishment.  It was, as is the experience above.  See?

The Mustang and the ThaIrish ex at the Hoover Dam

 

 

Ice cream at the large cat sanctuary….no cameras were allowed out back.

 

West rim of the Grand Canyon…Hualapai Indian Reservation.  Note the large crowds and all the fences.

 

“Hello.  Graceland Chapel?  Please get the fake flowers ready.  We’ll be there in three hours.  Badges?  We don’t need no stinking badges”

 

 

 

Mom, Dad, Moira, Patti, and Melinda…….you have to admit it was a solid prank!

 

 

 

 

 

Best Experienced With:          Rolling Stones;    Gimme Shelter

(Please right click on the link beloe to cue up the suggested background music for this evening’s treatise in a new window)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVor2Xm8qg0

 

 

 

 

 

The first day of my first surgical sales career sucked.

 

 

 

 

Spent the five months up until that first day of my surgical career working as a waiter at Benningan’s at the 275/4  merge in Fairfield, Ohio.  Had chosen to be a surgical sales person and fifty-five hiring managers chose to not hire a twenty-six year old with no surgical sales experience as a surgical sales person.  Cowards.  That fifty-sixth interview turned into a “yes” and I happily joined a mighty mighty German subsidiary surgical start up the following week.

 

 

 

My first territory was small.  I had Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, and parts of Tennessee and Michigan.  Fortunately, with such geography, I inherited a massive installed product base.  There was exactly one (1) unit of what we sold in those six states.  Even more fortunate, that unit was sold through a distributor and had a different company name inscribed on it.   And they hated my company and that one unit.

 

 

Got my offer letter on the Monday before Thanksgiving:  the effective start date was the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday.   When you are twenty-five, working for tips at Bennigan’s, you don’t give two weeks notice.  You steal as much food as humanly possible during the lunch shift and run out the back door of the kitchen laughing like a hyena and thanking God above that the fifty-sixth company had worse taste in surgical sales people than Eva Braun had in men.

 

 

 

The day before Thanksgivings, my sales manager Art called to say there was a floor stand surgical light on trial at Ohio Valley Hospital in Steubenville, Ohio.  The light was in the labor and delivery unit and had been there for seven months.  Art wanted me to pick it up the day after Thanksgiving and if I could sell it, the commission dollars were all mine.  This was a solid proposition for a young man who had purchased his first “real” car the previous day and whom had been grubbing for 9% tips from the five o’clock Bennigan’s blue hair crowd seventy-two hours before that.  Those commission dollars were mine, friends.  Mine.

 

 

 

 

The day after Thanksgiving, at 8:00 a.m., I left Cincinnati for Steubenville.  Rapidly realizing I had no earthly idea where Steubenville, Ohio was, I stopped at a Shell gas station and purchased a map.  The map looked fantastic in my 1987 Pontiac Grand Prix and, with visions of commission dollars dancing in my head, I set off for Steubenville, Ohio…….wherever that may be.  Turned out to be far, far away.

 

 

 

Six hours and 239 miles later, I pulled up outside Ohio Valley Hospital, parked the car and confidently walked into the Labor and Delivery unit in my blue pinstripe JC Penny suit.  My other JC Penny suit, the brown one, was at the dry cleaners.  The nurses at the front desk had no idea what Berchtold was and they did not know about any surgical light evaluation.  They told me I would have to come back on Monday because it was a holiday and the head nurse was off for the day.  The head nurse would also not take our call.

 

 

 

Foiled!  Clearly this turn of events would not contribute to the envisioned commission dollars!  Surely we could not have a great information exchange and discuss the purchasing paper trail if the trial light was lost, no one knew who we were, and the decision maker would not take our call.   Had to drive from Cincinnati to Saint Mary’s Hospital in Madison, WI on Sunday evening to meet my new manager and learn how to do a surgical evaluation.  Insisting that my Star Trek transporter had battery issues, I convinced the charge nurse to call the Director of L&D at home so that we could find my floor stand 450 light.  She again chose not to answer.  Three hours later we found that 450 floor stand surgical light in a linen closet down a dark hallway.  The floor stand 450 was covered in dust, negating my ability to ask that critical question:

 

 

 

“What was it about my product that you loved the best?”

 

 

 

 

My new Grand Prix had an interior roughly the size of a double bed.  This floor stand 450 light had a 60 pound lead horseshoe base, a five foot high vertical post a four feet long spring extension arm, and a 24” surgical lighthead at the end.  Having no tools and no idea how to take the floor stand surgical light apart, I used the charge desk phone to call Art in Chicago.  Art walked me through how to take this unit apart, I borrowed some tools from the maintenance department and two hours later the light was disassembled, sticking out of various windows in the Grand Prix.  Floor stand 450 surgical lights are not small surgical lights.

 

 

 

I know what you are thinking.  How did my $73.00 JC Penny blue pinstripe suit look by this time.  Was it dirty?  Did the trousers still hold their creases?  Was my tie still pulled all the way up and the top button still buttoned?  Was I all sweaty and disheveled?  Did I still look good?  Come on.  We do not answer rhetorical questions in The Attic.  Of course I still looked fantastic.  When I go out on the field to play, I wear the right uniform, with socks pulled up and shirt tucked in.  We are, proudly, a mile wide and three quarters of an inch deep here in The Attic.

 

 

 

Twenty minutes into the trip south on Route 7, it started to snow.  Heavily.  Fortunately, it seldom snows in eastern and southern Ohio so there were no road crews out with sand or salt.  Plus it was a holiday weekend and even if they knew how to remove snow from the roads and highways, no one would have answered the phone.  This was 1989 and only Bill Gates and the Rockefellers  had cell phones.

 

 

The drive home took ten hours in the snowstorm.  The sun was coming up as the little Grand Prix made its way up the hill to my little apartment in Fairfield, Ohio.  My stolen Bennigan’s “exit food” was long gone, my flight attendant girlfriend was on a four day trip, and the I had a two hundred pound floor surgical light sticking out every window of the Grand Prix like the errant pieces of alfalfa from the two pieces at the end of a shrimp sushi roll.  Plus, I lived on the third floor and the stairs at my apartment were outside, covered in snow and ice.

 

 

The first day of my first surgical sales career sucked.

 

 

 

Driving on that postcard photo bridge this evening from Cincinnati into Covington was listening to the song you have as background music right now with a big, silly grin on my face thinking back to that drive from Steubenville, Ohio to Cincinnati, Ohio.  If you asked me to one thing about that experience, you know what I would have changed?  Go ahead.  Just one single thing.  What would that one single thing be?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nothing.  That first twenty-four hours I had in surgical sales is the essence of sales.  Made four trips back to Steubenville over the next three months because they liked me and they were one of one leads I inherited in the territory.  They bought that 450 floor stand light for $5,000 and I made a $300 commission. 

 

 

 

 

Over the next two and a half years, before I started leading a sales team, Ohio Valley Hospital bought four sets of operating room lights from me and an additional eleven surgical and exam lights in other areas of the hospital.  The Chief of Surgery had me to his house three times and every subsequent 239 mile trip to Steubenville was far easier than the first one. 

 

 

 

Sales is not glamorous.  Medical surgical sales is no different than any other sales job, nor is it any more sophisticated than selling Hostess snack cakes or urinal cakes.  To be successful in any of those three market spaces you simply need a strong work ethic, a Teflon outer coating, and the ability to laugh like a hyena when the wheels come off.  The wheels always come off.

 

 

 

 

This MLOG is dedicated to all of those that have had a Cincinnati to Steubenville day.  If your Cincinnati to Steubenville day was today, I promise you that twenty years from now you will look back, laugh like a hyena, and be glad that you chose to stay in sales or mentor and lead others that chose to sell.

 

 

 

 

You sales professionals make the world go round.  Thanks for making the world go round!  Thanks for getting up again and doing it all over again the day after your Cincinnati to Steubenville days.  You make us all very proud here in The Attic.

 

 

 

 

You  sell because your genetics love that Pavlovian response.     Bravo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Mind Of Mully

 

“Put on psy-war ops and make it loud

This is Romeo Foxtrot

Shall we dance?”

It’s just a shorter way home………..