It is good to know something about your customers before you commit a lot of resources to preparing an initial quote. This is especially true when you are selling a private individual a system that may cost as much as one million dollars American. Plus, we’re nosy. Thank God for Google and the internet!
However, many of our recent leads have no web presence at all. None. Zero. As little as my wife, except you’d think some multi-multi-millionare venture capitalist or owner of a very large business would be EASY to find. Nope. No interviews in Business Week. No newspaper articles. No legal dealings. No nothing.
This is strange. I’m used to finding what they paid for their lots. One customer has a historic home with its own website and she keeps the folks who run the site updated about the restoration. Another customer built his own site chronicling the building of the house.
How, in this day and age, does somebody with more than two nickles to rub together manage so much privacy that I can’t track him down? Has it become chic to do this?
Seriously, he is exactly the kind of person you are talking about, and I think when you said “Plus, we’re nosy,” you hit exactly why he keeps all information about his business and personal financial holdings secret. He does not want strangers to know information about him that is none of their business. He donates well over a million a year to charity and the only name you’ll ever see for him is Anonymous. His house is in the top 5 of most expensive houses in my large city and you’ll never find that out because the deed is assigned to a trust that does not show his name. He is definitely one of the richest men in the state – in several states - but he never, ever, makes the annual “350 richest” list because he makes it his business to NOT make that list.
Why does he do this? So that he doesn’t have to deal with an endless line of salesmen, accountants, financial planners, real-estate agents, estate planners, gold-diggers, con artists, etc. His company has a Web site that merely says, “For info, call xxx-xxxx.” People who call have to submit a written request as to what type of information they are looking for and why. We do this to weed out the 98% of people who fall into the above list.
Is it chic, I don’t know. But I think a lot more people should take a lot more care as to what information they allow to be out there for all to see.
My co-worker and I are thinking of starting a business that removes all references to people from the net. And your boss sounds like just the sort of person who would approach us about becoming one of our current company’s clients. He isn’t planning to build a house soon, is he?
Kniz: Which are you calling rich and which nuevo rich?
In that which may seem to be a hijack but isn’t, Kniz: I think that social phenomena are but barely influenced by the initial conditions; that the basic behavior of a species is a fixed thing–subject to fluxuations but not to chaos. Do you have any reason to believe that the “Butterfly effect” applies to sociological models?
Methinks you still have the wrong idea - the more proper spelling of the concept somebody was after is “nouveau riche” - indicating the “newly rich”, not the “not rich”, which is the direction you seem to be thinking of.
The phrase is usually used when pointing out instances where the NR are given to vulgar display and ostentation.
