Tesar-Reynes

Last week, my partner Bob and I flew into New York to meet face-to-face with a company that had really impressed us. We wanted introduce them to some of our clients and were driven to their headquarters to see a multi-media presentation on their capabilities.

Here we were in their headquarters and the presentation got wonky and did not execute. Instead of ordering in the techs or crying “poor me,” the presenter had an alternative backup presentation on a thumb drive that he plugged in and it went without a hitch.

Yesterday I was in another presentation where the presenter came over the day before and ran it through on his PC. The next day, the PC conked out and he had a backup on a thumb drive. He tried to run it through a Mac, but all the artwork had magically disappeared.

Moral of the story: No matter what, have multiple contingency plans for the big presentation.

You know, I wonder if that first company orchestrated a faux failure and used it to impress us on their resourcefulness. If they did, it worked.