Dateline: late 90s & mid-aughts. The pic is Ricky Williams. Ricky was a running back, one of the best college backs ever. Won the Heisman trophy. Was unstoppable. He also signed the worst contract in NFL history. The gist: he agreed to play for the minimum salary for 7 years. At least he received a signing bonus. But the rub is: he agreed to receive the majority of the money all rookies normally receive only if he met difficult performance targets. Begs the question: why?
This was not just pointless, it was ridiculous. Most players have incentives, always after the big bucks are locked in first. Actual contract text:
Oh and: Ricky agreed to, wait for it, have the rapper 'Master P' act as his agent. Zero contract experience, zero sports agent experience, zero legal experience. Maybe he was a good rapper. Whatever that looks like, other than an oxymoron. Let's focus.
Twice in my business life as a salesman, I made a similar mistake. I back loaded my dealios & created a fraction of the revenue I could have. The first, late 90s, found myself as the architect of a custom customer feedback system for a major HVAC company. The bloke that comes to your house, fixes your furnace & AC? You know that guy. The service guy. Anyhoots, he gives you a 1-page postage paid survey on his service, the company, whatnot. Each page has codes like a checkbook (remember those?) to create reports by dealer, city, region, etc. Normal stuff. I designed & sold variations of this for many years, but this one was the biggest. Or should have been. Let's focus.
The gist is me & the team agreed to have the dealers buy the boxes of coded surveys themselves. Corp HQ, my clients, ponied up $10k or something but this was a major national program. Worth way into 6 figures. And should have been, with hundreds of eligible dealers. But: the program remained optional to the dealers. Encouraged, but not required.
Ergo, yours truly had to 'sell' the dealers on this idea. Me, in person, at dealer events. I pitched the program at several stops in Florida, driving around the state in summer. Did that consecutive summers actually. Florida is my #1 least favorite state in the USA but that's for another time. I also caught a ride with another guy pitching his wares at dealer events across Pennsylvania. Once in Salt Lake City. They would give me 5 or 10 minutes to pitch the program I designed, answer q's, etc. It helped, we had dealers in the program but the revenue never took off.
Oh and: a sales rep in my co in Tulsa had me pitch the program idea to his prospect, another HVAC co there. Took some exec out to lunch, chatted over. He didn't get it, or wasn't interested. My sales guy should have vetted that before me flying there. But what I most recall about my only ever trip to Tulsa, was that I flew there on Labor Day. It's sweltering. And the sales guy, older guy, cracked his tooth crown. So he picks me up and he's calling all the dentists asking for emergency services. We went to some urgent care place. Then we visited the major uni there, giant fraternity house where his son was living, for something or other. What a fucking stupid trip to Tulsa. Weird sales guy, no interest from his prospect who he didn't qualify, uni visit, Labor Day in broiling Tulsa. Anyhoots.
My other missed opp was for a local agency supplier whose client was the Department of Defense. They ran the annual employee survey for them. Tens of thousands of surveys. Actually, over 100k eligible survey takers, factoring in military, contractors, it's a big audience. I had been pitching my (soft)wares to them for a couple months so they knew me. They called me in a panic on a Wed or Thurs. So many survey takers were taking their survey that their server crashed completely. They had to take it down. In hindsight this supplier was indeed as fucked up as their local reputation was (I had friends who did time there). To not be prepared for web traffic is inexcusable. Anyhoots they called me to see if my company could re-create their survey & fast. They were panicking. They had no choice. I had them over the barrel. Talked over w/my boss, talked to our Bulgarian programming department, who agreed to work through the weekend to take it on, do the testing, all that. It was an overly complicated survey like many are.
My mistake was believing that tens of thousands would take the survey. Ergo I priced accordingly, $1 per survey. My bigger mistake was only charging $5k for the programming & testing. Panic job, over the weekend, etc. I should have charged $100k up front. Get your fixed pricing well covered, don't leave up to the chance of variable pricing. What were they going to do, say no?
So what happened? The Bulgarian team worked all weekend & had it ready to go live Monday morning. We launched, surveys poured in, & it went swimmingly. However, only 40,000 people took the survey. Ergo, my invoice to them was $45k. We kicked arse for them, rush job, saved them from being fired or sued, and only pocketed $45k.
They were hugely grateful to me & my company. We bailed them out of major pickle.
How much did they buy from me again? Zero. Nada. Nothing.