You think your commute is bad? Try crossing the Irish Sea on the cheap and getting stuck 343 miles from your next big account win.
My firm recently had an opportunity to secure a $100 million-plus timberland mandate from an investor based in London. Thinking we may be able to kill a few birds with one stone, my colleagues and I bundled the meeting into a larger fundraising tour that included Australia and Western Europe.

We were all pretty excited about the London meeting, which had been scheduled for a Friday, but spending several weeks flying around gets pretty expensive. So, we decided to save a few bucks booking a discount carrier to Heathrow Airport, meet with the inv estor and then head home.

After visiting clients in Dublin on a sunny Thursday afternoon, we eagerly made our way to the airport, ready—you could say—for our “close up.” We soon found out why discount carriers are so cheap: moments after boarding, the pilot announced the plane had a flat tire.

 

A few minutes after the announcement, one of the trucks you often see pulling planes came barreling across the tarmac. I thought, with a response time like this, we’d have plenty of time to fix the tire and get into the air.

Then something happened. The pilot came on a second time and told us that, while the technicians were able to change the tire, they couldn’t manage to unhitch the truck from the plane.

Here we were, 30 minutes away from London, maybe an hour away from securing this mandate and we couldn’t do anything.

I was experiencing something close to road rage, but the Irish passengers launched into a barrage of expletives so colorful they could only be attributed to their famous “gift-of-gab.” It was in the midst of this verbal melee that I decided I had to pick up the phone and try to salvage the meeting.

The prospective client, thankfully, understood we were dealing with forces beyond our control and allowed us to reschedule the meeting. Unfortunately, the next opening in the schedule wasn’t for three weeks.

Our grand tour cost us another transatlantic flight but it gave us an opening too: we told the prospective client about the whole affair in one of those “a-funny-thing-happened-on-the-way-to-the-meeting” stories and it really broke the ice; so much so that we ended up winning the mandate.

Next time, though, we decided to try to schedule more important meetings for the middle of the week—using a large, commercial carrier.

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