The Secret To Success in Business -in writing.
For the past thirty years or so, I have been in business for myself.
Overall, I have had, thank God, a pretty successful run.
I have been able to book some very good long term contracts with some of the biggest media companies in the world.
I did this not with ads on Facebook or posting endlessly on Instagram or dancing and gyrating on TikTok.
I did this by writing letters.
I got this idea from my ‘rabbi’ in the business world, the sadly recently deceased Carl Spielvogel. Carl was a self made business genius who starting with nothing and went on to build the largest ad agency in the world.
I met him when I was working with The Voice of America. He was on their board and I would present to the board once a month. Carl became both my friend and my mentor. He gave me some excellent advice on how to build my own business. The best advice he ever gave me was “only talk to the CEO. Anything else is a waste of time. If you can convince the CEO then you are done. If you can’t then you are also done.” This bit of advice was, in retrospect, half the key to my success.
The other half, is how to get in front of the CEO.
I found that writing a letter is the best way.
And I mean really writing. Not emails. Writing. And mailing with a stamp in an envelope.
Years ago, my wife Lisa bought me an old typewriter, an Underwood Number 5 (see above). Mine was built in 1912, the same year as the Titanic. Mine is still afloat.
CEOs are often hard to get hold of. Most of them don’t post their email addresses. Most of them are not on Facebook, strangely enough. Even if they are on LinkedIn, most of them don’t offer their emails. This is understandable. But all of them can be found by writing to their head corporate office. Those addresses are easy to find.
Now to the typewriter part.
As it turns out, based on my many years of experience, CEOs will, strangely enough, not just read your typewritten letter, but even answer it. And rather quickly. I once typed a letter out to Ted Turner when he was running CNN. The letter was short and to the point. It started by saying “you are making television all wrong.” As with any film or novel, you need to grab the reader from the very open.
The whole letter was three paragraphs long. The last line read, “If you give me 10 minutes, I will give you the world, or whatever part of it you don’t own already,”
Three days after I mailed it, my phone rang.
It was Turner.
“You want your 10 minutes, you got it. You be in my office at 9 AM tomorrow morning,” and hung up.
The next morning, there I was and there he was. He held out his arm, hit his watch and said, “Go!”
Ten minutes later I was out the door on my way to Atlanta.
I have found that the typewritten mailed letter works wonders. I recently spent weeks trying to send an idea to the CEO of a major global media company. Emails were ignored. But a written letter? Remarkably, I got a response in a few days and a deal in a few weeks.
It works. In a digital world, the written word takes on an almost magical power because it is now so very rare.
The other secret to working in this way?
Wite out.
