After a particularly successful trawling of their financial client list, IBM suggested that I hosted the next flight which was scheduled to go to their European Marketing centre in Amsterdam, primarily in order to give their clients a ‘first hand’ look at our software and support services.
As I hadn’t been to Amsterdam since a stag night years before, I thought it would be a hoot so I made a few calls, booked a flight to London and got some details from IBM about ‘rules and regulations’.
I turned up at Heathrow with a sheaf of papers giving me the lowdown on each client and made contact with ground services who directed me to the Executive Jet Centre. Once there, the luxury started – well luxury for the clients, not for me it has to be said. We were whisked by limos to a Learjet sitting at the end of the runway, welcomed aboard by some gay stewards, seated and provided with caviar canapés and champagne, even before we’d taken off.
Thereafter it was a shortish flight to Rotterdam. Ignoring IBM’s suggestion to get some private taxis to take the group, which numbered about ten in total and included two ladies from a UK pharmacy company, to Amsterdam, I’d pre-arranged two stretch limos which were waiting as the plane taxied to a halt. God – were the clients impressed!
Again, ignoring IBM’s suggestion about hotels, I’d booked us all into an amazing hotel, halfway between Amsterdam and The Hague, called the Kurhuas, an old opera house standing on the beach in a seaside resort called Scheveningen ( http://www.kurhaus.nl/).
Thirty minutes after making sure each client had settled into their penthouse suites overlooking the North Sea, I agreed that we should meet at a fabulous Indonesian restaurant beside the hotel. No need for the stretch limos – the restaurant was a one minute walk away.
One amazing meal and what seemed like dozens of bottles of wine later, the limos were waiting outside to whisk the group off to The Mayfair (http://www.mayfair.nl/), a club I knew in The Hague. It was at this point that I felt I needed to inform the two ladies in the group that the ‘club’ was a ‘gentleman’s club’ and it might not be appropriate for them as it tended to show ‘naughty’ movies on a large screen. ‘No problem’, they said. If they deemed it inappropriate, they would get a limo back to the Kurhaus. The other clients couldn’t wait, particularly a couple of ‘wide boys’ from a major US bank who had made it known in Heathrow that they expected ‘the works’ and a rather naive oil company accountant who was like a child being taken to a sweet shop.
Once in the club, I made sure the manager knew I was in charge and settled down for a bit of client watching. It wasn’t long before there was a bit of a commotion.
The two ‘pharmacy’ ladies had seated themselves quite near the stage holding the cinema screen and were lapping up the movies which were being shown when suddenly, and without any announcement, the curtains closed and then opened again. The screen had disappeared but in its place were a naked couple bonking their brains out on the stage. I looked at the ladies, quite sure they’d be heading straight out to the limos but they amazed me by moving even closer to the stage and twisting their necks to make sure they could see every gruesome entry and re-entry! I felt I needed to apologise for the incorrect information I’d given them earlier but when I started to speak to them, I was pushed away – they wanted to concentrate on what was happening on stage!
I was returning to my seat further back in the club when the manager approached me and said he was having some trouble with a couple of my clients – the Americans. It appears that they wanted to ‘go upstairs’ with some of the girls who were hostesses but as I said I wanted to control everything during the night, including the champagne which was £200 a bottle, the manager felt it was only right to inform me as they were getting a bit boisterous.
Just as he was telling me of the problem, Chuck, the senior of the two bankers, grabbed me and said, ‘Nigel – I want to polish my cane. Fix it.’ I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about until the manager made a sign pointing upstairs whereupon I realised Chuck had decide he wanted more than a few drinks and a live floor show. ‘OK Chuck’, I said. ‘Go for it.’
Twenty minutes later, Chuck was back down in the bar telling his colleague Jim, just how ‘polished’ his cane was, whereupon Jim decided he wanted his cane polished as well. Off he went and thirty minutes later he reappeared, quite flushed but with a huge smile on his face.
A second couple appeared on stage and felt a bit hemmed in as the ‘pharmacy ladies’ had moved their seats even closer, whereupon Chuck decided that he needed his cane polished again. Once more he disappeared, this time for just less than an hour – what stamina!
About 3am, when the floor show had finished and the hostesses had gone home to bed, the manager asked me into his office. ‘Mr Smarther-Blair, here is your bill.’. I looked at it and then looked at it again – it was for over £3,000! IBM had given me a budget of £1,000 to include hotels, limos and all ‘entertainment’. But to his credit, the manager had re-titled the ‘polish my cane’ expenses as ‘tours of Amsterdam’!
The night was at an end. We had scheduled a 9am start with IBM the following morning and that was when the big sell would start. I bundled everybody into the two limos but noticed that Chuck and Jim had ‘grabbed’ the two ‘pharmacy ladies’ and had insisted that they travel in their limo. I thought I’d better go into that vehicle as well.
As the limo in front went off back to Scheveningen, our limo headed onto the motorway and looked as if it was heading to Amsterdam – which it was. ‘We’ve told the driver you’ll give him £100 if he takes us to Amsterdam for the evening’, said Chuck.
And so we hit Amsterdam at 4am where Chuck and Jim demanded breakfast and another live floor show – in that order. Several drinks later and encouraged by the ‘pharmacy ladies’ we eventually headed back to the Kurhaus, but not content with going straight back to their suites, the boys from the US broke into a bar, managed to get themselves a couple of bottles of champagne, then broke into the kitchen and got themselves some smoked salmon and brown bread and announced that they were having a party in their room.
‘But you’re in a suite – all you needed to do was phone down to room service and they would have delivered it’, I protested. ‘Ah Nigel but that’s no fun’, was the reply!
The Americans and the ladies disappeared off to Chuck’s suite and I made a hasty retreat to my room. It was 6am! I was up in front of IBM and these ‘clients’, in precisely two hours trying to sell them our software. I’d never make it.
Amazingly, at 8.55am, everybody appeared in the luxurious IBM centre, resplendent with its Italian leather furniture and marble desks. The ‘pharmacy ladies’ were, tellingly, in the same clothes as the day before, as were Jim and Chuck. Looking at their faces, the phrase, ‘the lights are on but no one’s at home’, came to mind. The other clients were not far behind in terms of inebriation. I could feel an absolute disaster approaching – watched by my new business partner, IBM!
The IBM host stood up and welcomed his guests to the Centre. Four of them were asleep, faces down on the desk. Two others were sitting with their heads in their hands and a couple of others were trying to look sober but were not doing a very good job of it.
I was at the back making a ‘cut throat’ sign to the IBM host begging him to give up and leave the room but he steadfastly refused to do so, going through his full thirty minute preamble, ending by saying that he hoped ‘the day would be successful and that IBM and Nigel hoped we would be doing business together.’ ‘Some hope’, I thought.
After the IBM host finally finished, I stood up, rather unsteadily, it has to be said, and was just about to start my sales spiel when Chuck lifted his head off the desk and said,’ Nigel – I’m willing to hear what you have to say but if it takes more than ten seconds, you’ve lost the sale.’
‘Ladies and gentlemen’, I said, ‘I welcome you to IBM’s Centre and hope you had a great time last night. That’s it. Enjoy the day.’ And with that I sat down.
The IBM host, Jeremy as I recall, was astonished. But he was even more astonished when Chuck again lifted his head off the desk and said, ‘Nigel – you’ve got the sale. Now can I go back to sleep.’
And that was it. I got rid of Jeremy, the clients slept until the stretch limos turned up at 2pm to take them back to Rotterdam airport, and I got IBM and myself a rather large and lucrative sale.
But then I was summoned to IBM to discuss the expenses of the trip which had totalled over £10,000 when the normal allowance was £1,000 – but that’ another story.
