Anywhere is walking distance, if you’ve got the time.
–Steven Wright Harvey “Swim With the Sharks” Mackay is the Pavarotti, the Sinatra of business book writers. And at the same time he’s a Horatio Alger for these generations, surely the last generations who’ll use the expression “Horatio Alger.” I recently spent a morning with Mackay–we were scheduled for an hour but talked for over three–and left feeling I understood what it takes to sing on the Big Stage.
Mackay has a new national bestseller, “Pushing the Envelope” (Ballantine Books, $25). As usual, it is crisp, clear, clever. But now there is a new, more philosophical note, of the Wise Uncle who will sit you down and tell a story that lets you see what is what.
And that’s just what Mackay did for me. I met him at his winter home outside Phoenix, on the back side of Camelback Mountain, looking out on an area that had to have been named by a salesman: Paradise Valley. (To give you an idea of just how affluent this suburb is, if Glen Campbell had sung about this place instead of Phoenix, it would have gone: “By the time I get to Paradise Valley, a palimony suit will be waiting.”)
In his new book, Mackay asks a rhetorical question about his career: “How lucky can one guy get?” I asked Mackay about courting luck. He replied: “Don’t be boring. Don’t be predictable.” Luck is surprise, and predictability is the nemesis of both. But if you’re smart, personable and persistent, is the rest mere luck?
Mackay said, “If you want to talk about luck, I have to go back to the four years I lived with my father, just the two of us, from when I was 21 to 25. I was lucky to have had him shape my life.” But, as Mackay then pointed out, he’d had that time alone with his father because his mother died of cancer. And so lurks the dark side of luck, the tragedy that he and his father lifted each other out of. As Mackay might put it, You learn to either give up or get up.
Mackay on his father: “He volunteered for everything you can volunteer for. He insisted that I devote one-quarter of my life to charities. I ended up on all the fundraising committees. I heard a lot of no’s–that’s where I learned how to be a salesman.”
After landing his first sales job, he announced to his father that he intended to make double the income of the other reps. His father responded with the simple math that every salesperson resists: “If you want to make twice as much money, you have to make twice as many sales calls.”
So Mackay trained himself to get by on five hours of sleep a night. And he never again had lunch with the boys–he was out tracking down the customers who ate at their desks. And he learned which clients worked on Saturdays by working them himself. On Sundays he would get the telephone and his Rolodex and keep his network up-to-date and growing–he called it “Spin to Win.”
But it wasn’t simply a matter of putting in more hours. Mackay made a game of squeezing more calls into each hour. For instance, he got to know the doormen of the downtown Minneapolis hotels, occasionally coming through with Twins tickets for them. Why? When he called on downtown companies, he could leave his car at one of the hotels, saving him a few minutes of garage hassles.
And he worked hard on himself, too. Still does. He has an idea coach and a speaking coach. He gets $35,000 to $50,000 a speech, but still has a speaking coach.
Gene Fowler once wrote, “What is success? It is a toy balloon among children armed with pins.” Hard work isn’t enough–a mere given in this economy. Same with the luck that follows refusing to be ordinary. It takes not just hard work and creativity, but working hard on being creative and creatively working hard. Most people spend time; the Harvey Mackays make time.
