Plan B
“Turn around where possible,” said the lady on the satnav. “Turn around where possible…”
She had been saying this for the last five miles as we crawled westward after being diverted off the A14. Where we were going, I had no idea. I was supposed to be going to Tamworth in Staffordshire for a training with Chris Williams and the ETA was slowly ticking forwards to a point where now it was dangerously close to the starting time for the workshop.
Quite why we were in the middle of the countryside (me and the refrigeration lorry in front of me and everyone else who had spent the last 40 minutes crawling towards the exit) I had no idea.
One way and another it was making a nonsense of Plan A.
Plan A, I had borrowed from Christine Wise on the morning conference call. Whenever Christine is driving anywhere she builds an extra half hour onto the journey and then pulls into every service station and hands out an armful of Independences. I had them stacked in the boot – together with my usual 21 micro cards and 75 piggy cards. I wasn’t too sure whether I could shift the piggy cards but I was determined to do the rest – after all,what else was I going to do today if I was spending half of it in the car and the other half shut in a room with a dozen other distributors?
It wasn’t even as if the refrigeration lorry had a mobile number on the back for a text – and I’d already done all the calls I had listed for the day.
So what (as Tony Robbins would say) was the best thing about this situation? Well , that became clear when I did manage to arrive in Tamworth 15 minutes early after all – but only because I’d used up all the extra time in getting there.
Dashing into a pub for a sandwich I was rescued by the landlady who looked at my Make Money/Save Money badge and said: “What’s all that about, then” So I told her.
As I paused in mid-flow for her to serve another customer, my phone rang. It was my sister who is a Customer Gathering Association and always says that one day she’ll become a full-blown distributor.
Ha! An opportunity…
“Hang on a minute, while I just order my lunch,” I told her, and put the phone on the bar. Sis then got a demonstration of how easy it is to talk to people and how the barmaid took my little notebook and carefully wrote down her name, her mobile number and her email address.
But by 5.30 in the afternoon that was the sum total of my prospecting activity for the day. So when it came to driving home, I had some slack to take up.
If ever you should drive the route from Tamworth to Woodbridge, you will be astonished by the number of Little Chefs there are. I had no idea. There must have been a dozen and I stopped at every one. I shifted all micro cards and all the Independences and I said my piece to two people. Neither of them were interested and my total number of presentations for the day came to just three.
But for Plan B, that’s not so bad. And besides, I tell myself, tomorrow is another day…