Persistence and Kindness in Business

From Reader's Digest (UK):


"Thompson gets great results, despite his lack of people skills."

This started a couple years ago. I mailed about 10 cartoons to a small publication. I got an email back from the editor. He loved the cartoons, but didn't have the budget line to pay to publish the cartoons

This is, like I just said, a small company. Regardless, they have budgets for salaries, employee health care, utilities, rent, etc. If a small company wants to buy some cartoons for their newsletters or presentations, that's great. A lot of 'em don't have the available money in their media budget. Not good. I can't afford to give cartoons away.

Anyway, there's more to my story ...

So, every once in a while I'd send this fellow a note and a couple of cartoons. He would always kick back a nice email to me about them.

I figured he would never buy, but it was always a pleasant surprise to hear how much he appreciated them. Yeah, I'm a sucker for praise!

Now, it's about three years later. This year he has the budget line for cartoons and it'll be a new regular gig. It's not going to be a big paying client, like Harvard Business Review. But I look forward to working with him.

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This has been an encore presentation of the Mike Lynch Cartoons blog. The above appeared in its original form on March 28, 2006, back when this blog first started over at MySpace.