I had a friend whose father, a salesman and ad copy writer, alternately chipper and dour, died about ten years ago at the age of ninety.  His name was Al and for the last few years of his life he was pretty much dour.  File that away.

I went to a three pm meeting with a business consultant named David at the New York City Small Business Administration.  This was the first step, according to the website, in setting up a relationship with NYC Small Business Solutions.  The purpose of my visit, as I wrote in my on-line appointment confirmation, was to get help prioritizing the many tasks ahead of me: marketing, recruiting, fundraising, negotiating city government contracts, among other things, and to find out exactly what services were offered.  The website said there was help available, expert advice in all these areas, a pool of pre-screened recruits, meeting rooms there in which we could interview candidates.   A host of classes and business solutions to every challenge faced by every kind of small business and start-up were touted by the website.

At 3:20 David came out, greeted me, we shook hands and I followed him back to his desk at the other end of a large office in the financial district.  He had me fill out the form nobody had handed me during my 25 minute wait, was sheepish after I did, told me he had no idea if anybody even read these.  I didn’t stop to think that this form was close to what I had already filled out on-line.  I noticed his computer screen was blank, with a box in the middle for him to log-in.  

He read all the information I’d written on the form, confirmed that he was reading everything correctly.  He’d read it back fine.   If I’d left then, I would have been slightly ahead of the game.  But determination turned out to be my undoing.  He liked the idea of my program, though he had no inclination to watch the 30 second pitch I had cued up for him on my iPad.

“You have to have a pitch,” he agreed, as I noticed the palsy in both of his hands, the way his lip also twitched.  “You need to be able to give your pitch and be ready to give it over and over again,” he said.  “Very rarely will anyone respond the first time.  When you run an ad in the paper, usually you’ll get no responses until about the sixth time it appears,” he said, speaking from experience.   He’d been in sales, he told me.  

I told him that sales was a talent, and he agreed.   I admitted that sales was my weak suit, a talent I unfortunately did not possess, and he nodded sadly and knowingly. I told him a bit more about the program, talked up how it worked exactly as designed, and delivered all kinds of good things to students, but that I needed an excellent sales person.  Eventually he suggested I needed to hire a salesman, an excellent one, but I’d have to pay him well, or perhaps offer a 10% commission on each sale.  A commission was a good way to get a salesman off his ass, he said, make sure he was out there working, and it also allows you to pay him a bit less, since he’ll make it up in commissions, which don’t really come out of your pocket, since you wouldn’t have the sale without his work anyway.

He logged on to his computer walked me through the website, showed me the listing of classes I could sign up for, for free.   Building my own website, there was a course for that, I should probably sign up for that, every business should have a website these days.  He was impressed that I already had a website.  I told him the problem was getting eyeballs to look at the website, and he nodded solemnly, agreed there is an art and a whole world of specialized skills involved in a successful social media campaign.  I told him about the money I’d thrown away on a kid who claimed to be a social media expert, but was not.   He nodded sadly and knowingly.   I restated my dilemma for him and asked him about the pool of pre-screened recruits, and he called across the office “Gina, we help people get employees, don’t we?”  Gina told him they did, and my hunch, based on what the website had stated, was confirmed.

He then expressed his confusion as to why I’d chosen to form a non-profit. His manner indicated that I’d more than likely made a fatal mistake.  I explained that I’d formed an educational business for a public good and believed the tax deductible status would make it easier to raise money from donors and get grants from outfits devoted to the nonprofit sector.  I suggested, as I looked at his sad, knowing expression, that the jury was still out as to how good a decision I’d made.

Soon after that it dawned on me what had happened.  They had somehow reanimated Al, my friend’s mostly dour former salesman dad, who had died a decade or more ago.  They reanimated him, cleaned him up, put him in a shirt and tie and called him David.   “David” sat across from me, smiling uncomfortably, as anyone would smile having been dead for more than ten years and suddenly shoved behind a help desk at a city agency.  I thanked him warmly for his time, shook his hand heartily and headed out into the cold, grey drizzle.  

For a moment, realizing how close I was to the East River, I thought of dashing over there and throwing myself and the company iPad in.  I decided against it, got something to eat, came home, wrote this, and now I’m going to put my elegant cadaver rebozo back on and see who I can get to chat with me at this shindig coming up in a couple of days.