For All You Time Wasters --DeWese

MANY, MANY years ago, when we had no chores, when we weren’t in church, or when we weren’t building barrels or making wagon wheels, we would play tic tac toe or connect the dots by the light of the one bulb in our ceiling. Sometimes, we would play hangman. You know the game. You pick a word like “heifer,” which is spelled with six letters. Then, you make six blanks on the paper and draw a hangman’s platform. The other person guesses a letter and, if he misses, you draw one element of the hanging scene. If you finish the scene with a stick man hanging from a noose before your opponent spells the word, you win.

My Pa would show up and pontificate from his soap box, “How can you waste your time with that ‘damn tom foolery?’ You can never get this time back. A minute saved is a minute earned. Now, git out there and feed the chickens.”

Pa would light in to me about being a “laggard,” That name “Laggard the Louse” stuck for a long time, until the mid-1980s, while I was writing for this very magazine. A snooty editor called me the “Mañana Man,” referring to the fact that I was 11 days late with my column. She assumed that I ‘no habla español,’ so I wouldn’t be insulted. Little did she know that I had taken Spanish 1 three times while I was procrastinating my way through college. Unfortunately, I never passed the course, but I did learn to order food, drink and the meaning of Mañana.

Tune Out the Bad

I came by Mañana Man honestly. In my younger days, I perfected making sales calls while totally unprepared and sometimes hung over. Luckily, the good Lord blessed me with spontaneity, good questioning skills and superb listening skills. As I have said so many times that some of you may want to throw up: “I listened my way into more sales than I ever talked my way into.”

But, this column is not about me.

It’s about you and your need to tune out all the bad news you are hearing about the economy, and your boss repeatedly yelling at you for “sales, sales, sales.”

You need to obliterate your worry about your house being underwater (Marvelle, that means you owe more than the house is worth) and being three months past due on your mortgage. You’ve got to wipe out your memory of the repo man taking the Corvette, your 21-foot fishing boat and the RV.

You need to forget about your best friend running off with your wife (which wasn’t so bad), but he also took your pickup—and unfortunately your dog was asleep in the back. I know how you miss that dog.

We’ve all just been flooded with bad news lately. I’ve got some prescriptions to ease the pain, but I’m not talking about Percocet or Jack Daniels. I’m talking about relying on the Great Time Wasters.

I’m gonna give you the “Mañana Man’s Great Time Waster Hall of Fame.” Here are some things you can do to look busy sitting at your desk in the sales department of your printing company.

I’m not talking about tic tac toe or connect the dots, or my affinity for checkers or Chinese checkers. Those wasters are time worn—passé. We live in a digital World Wide Web world, so I’m going to list stuff you can do on your desktop and/or laptop.

I’m talking first about Facebook as a great time waster. Go ahead, log on to www.facebook.com and register if you haven’t already. You can install, er upload, your photo, actually lots of photos if you want, which takes a lot of time. You will be mesmerized for hours and hours, and soon, you’ll have people who want to “friend” you. You’ll have to formally and electronically accept them as friends.

Then, you can write on their walls with news about yourself. I’ve heard of people with hundreds of friends who learned the advantages of killing time by “friending” as many people as possible. It makes you feel good about yourself to say, “I’ve got 347 friends.”

And, you know what? Two or three of them may actually buy some printing or know someone who buys printing. Wait ’til your boss hears that this activity is actually prospecting.

Facebook is a “social network.”

The newest and hottest “social network” is called Twitter. They call it a “social messaging utility,” or a place for micro blogs. This is the one that all of the politicians and other famous people prefer, and so will you.

I’ll wait a minute while you log on to www.twitter.com and register, if you haven’t already. Like Facebook, Twitter is free and, once you are logged in, you can type www.twitter.com/barackobama and read what the President is doing. Wow! I haven’t checked, but I’ll bet Republicans and Democrats alike are tweeting, or is it twittering?

Twitter provides you with a soap box to get all of your opinions off your chest. You can provide your Twitter and your Facebook addresses to all of your customers and prospects, so they can really get to know you. They will learn all of your opinions and political persuasions. Plus, they will see what you stand for.

Twitter and Facebook should consume about four to six hours of your day.

Don’t forget lunch. That should kill another 60 to 90 minutes.

Now, you need to relax with some online games.

Best Move: Don’t Play

There are games on the Internet where you can play against other people in the United States, or even from foreign lands. Try backgammon, chess or Internet poker. It’s good, healthy competition. The hours will fly by, and you will never once think about all of the bad economic news.

Or, if you are a loner, an anti- social introvert, try Solitaire, Mahjong, Spider or Minesweeper. If you space out all of these games strategically, you can waste the whole day and never once have a bad thought!

Also, don’t forget to Google yourself a few times every day. You never can tell when Google reports that you did something, and you should be the first to know.

Did ya notice that I didn’t recommend bridge or chess? I never learned how to play these difficult games, and they’re too obvious to play in the office unless you play the digital versions on your PC. Wasting time on your computer is safer because, if your boss shows up, you can minimize your screen to quickly reveal a list of prospects.

Before you know it, our current bad times will pass, and the orders will start flowing in again. Don’t worry; your competitors’ salespeople are wasting their time while you’ve made lots of new friends on the Internet.

Now, see how much I’ve helped you? Remember to make up excuses for not making any calls or reasons for your poor sales results. Being a salesperson, you’re good at making up reasons for your poor performance. For example, you can say, “We’re in a recession. Haven’t you heard?”

Just keep cashing those checks for your draw, and prepare a strong argument if the boss threatens to reduce the draw. Or, even worse, if he threatens to fire you, remind him that print salespeople are hard to find.

Now, for the rest of you...the 20 percent of print salespeople who sell 80 percent of the printing sold anywhere, I know that, even in these bad times, you will work twice as hard and smart. And instead of wasting time, you will get out there and sell something! PI

—Harris DeWese

About the Author
Harris DeWese is the author of “Now Get Out There and Sell Something” and “The Mañana Man, Books II and III,” available through the PI Bookstore at www.piworld.com/bookstore. He is chairman and CEO of Compass Capital Partners and is also an author of the annual “Compass Report,” the definitive source of information regarding printing industry M&A activity. DeWese has completed 141 printing company transactions and is viewed as the industry’s preeminent deal maker. He can be reached via e-mail at HDeWese@CompassCapLtd.com.