The Worst Salesman In The World, Ever

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The Worst Salesman In The World, Ever
Posted by CoolCarGuy on Monday, March 23, 2009, 22:03 | 26 views
Tagged with: Bernie Madoff, Cool Car Guy, John Boyd, Steven Spielberg
This news item was posted in Business, Money.
It’s been all over the news about corporate fraudster Bernie Madoff and his financial Ponzi scheme that took investors for billions of dollars. The victims included people like Steven Spielberg and other Hollywood elites as part of his client list. Earlier today, it was reported that investigators have found this joker has $1 billion in stolen assets that they are going to seize.

Unfortunately, we all know how good the government and lawyers are at stealing money that they “find”, so it’s doubtful the victims will ever get their hands on any of their money. Time will tell of course, but if I were a betting man I would say their money is gone.

My question is, “How in the world, could you possibly screw up with a client list like this guy had of people willing to give you billions of dollars of their money to invest?” I mean, you have to be the worst salesman in the world, ever!

Here’s what I’m getting at. Everyone knows that the toughest part of any business is prospecting and building a client base. It takes time to build people’s trust to want to do business with you, which is why so many people fail in business. Most people run out of cash before they can drive revenues and cannot build their business fast enough to keep up with the ongoing expenses. Enter the genius Bernie Madoff, who was worth millions from his business ventures and according to his website, “He has been chairman of the board of directors of the NASDAQ Stock Market as well as a member of the board of governors of the NASD and a member of numerous NASD committees”. This is a guy, who you would think based on his reputation and experience would have a clue. Apparently, he could have starred in the movie Clueless.

Think about it for a minute. He had an elite group of Jewish investors give him billions of their dollars to invest. Bernie was also Jewish and appeared to be someone they could trust. Now, don’t make a leap that because they were Jewish has anything to do with it other than a class of people. Bernie could have been Bernie Kennedy and had a huge following of Irish investors or some other people group. It doesn’t matter. However, if he were Italian, then Madoff would be wearing cement shoes. The point is that this guy had a group of people who trusted him with billions of their dollars. They were being told by Bernie that they were getting great returns on their investments because of his reputation, with reports being sent to them on a regular basis. Only to find out too late that he never invested their money!

On March 12, 2009, Madoff pled guilty to 11 felonies, including securities fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, perjury and making false filings with the SEC. The plea came in response to a criminal complaint filed two days earlier, which stated Madoff had defrauded his clients of almost $65 billion. The complaint outlined the largest Ponzi scheme in history, as well as the largest investor fraud committed by a single person. Despite the scale of the fraud, Madoff insists that he was solely responsible for the Ponzi scheme. - source: Wikipedia

How stupid can you get? Why didn’t he invest their money? It makes no sense. Imagine that someone were to give me money to buy a car for them and I never purchased the car. How could that possibly ever make sense? Actually, we had a guy do that here in Castle Rock at Castle Pines Auto Sport, but he was another knucklehead.

If I told my eleven year old son, “There is something called the Stock Market and you can invest in companies in the Stock Market and there are people who are experts at doing this. These people make their living investing people’s money. Now that you know this, if I could get a select group of people to give you millions or even billions of their dollars, do you think you could figure out what to do with their money?” I can tell you without a doubt that his answer would be “Sure.” Let’s continue this conversation for a minute. “What would you do?” “I would go find the best investment people in the world and hire them to manage the money for the people who gave me their money to invest.”

You’ve seen the GEICO ads, “So easy a Caveman can do it?”. Well, Bernie’s deal was so easy that an 11 year old could do it! How could he not figure out that all he had to do was put his client’s money to work, which is what they hired him to do, by tracking down the best and the brightest financial firms in the world? He had access to all of them and he just needed to make sure that he didn’t lose his client’s initial investment and he would have been set for life. How could this guy be such a great salesman to raise billions for his own private investment firm and not understand something so simple?

It’s absolutely mind boggling if you think about it. Bernie could have been a hero, but instead he’s going down in history as a fool. In my book, he holds the title as “The Worst Salesman In The World, Ever.”

The moral of the story is that greed will always get the best of you. If you deliver on what you promise, nobody can ever say that you didn’t do what you said you would do. It’s a pretty simple formula for success. My grandfather Mac McAndrews used to say, “Your name travels further than your feet and all you have in the end is your reputation.” I guess he was right. He also used to say, “Why teach people the easy way, when it’s so easy for them to learn the hard way.” I guess he was right on that one too.

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