"We're going to issue passes," I said. "And we're going to number them. How many people do you think you'll have?"
"Well, if it's just a transit strike, not a Long Island Railroad strike, we'll have about 50 people," he said. "How often do you plan to run the shuttle?"
Suddenly, it's a shuttle. "About every half-hour," I said. "They'll come up to our place. We'll have coffee and doughnuts for them, at no charge."
"What if there's a Long Island Railroad strike as well?" he asked.
"We'll have a carpool service," I said, thinking fast. "We'll have pickup points on Long Island, one on the North Shore, one on the South Shore, and a couple in Queens."
"Sounds good," Sam said. "Do you want a deposit?"
"Yeah, of course," I said, "and I'll need a week's worth, because we have to set up this whole system. You're the first person I came to, because you're our best customer. I have only so much capacity. If you want to do this, I'll need the deposit right now."
"OK," he said. "What if the strike doesn't happen?"
"The deposit is nonrefundable," I said.
"OK," he said. I left with a check for $10,000.
When I got back to my office, I told everybody what had happened, and we all had a good laugh. Then we went to work calling our other customers, making laminated strike passes, and figuring out how we were going to accommodate all the people who wanted to take advantage of our new service. The truth was, we had only four vehicles, and we had to get our own people to work as well. "How can we possibly do this?" my employees asked as more and more customers signed up.
"I have no idea," I said, "but we'd better come up with something."
We decided to call everyone we knew who worked in Manhattan and owned a car. "Here's the deal," we said. "We're going to pay you to drive into the city, plus we'll cover your parking, gas, tolls, everything. You're going to have to drive anyway. With us, you can make money doing it. You just have to agree to take some other people with you."
We managed to put together a network of about 40 drivers -- friends, friends of friends, relatives, friends of relatives, relatives of friends, you name it -- and were ready when the strike began on April 1. Coordinating the operation proved to be the biggest challenge. During the strike, some of the drivers got sick, while others ran into conflicts and couldn't make it. The needs of our customers were constantly changing as well. I wound up sleeping at the office along with two of my employees to handle the calls that came in from customers all night long and to find replacements for the dropout drivers.
In the end, the transit strike lasted almost two full workweeks. The Long Island Railroad workers went out as well, but only for a day. Still, the city was in chaos. There weren't nearly enough cabs to accommodate the thousands of people looking for rides. We did our best to adapt. Among other things, we came up with a new system for the messengers who didn't depend on public transportation. Far from declining, our messenger and delivery business boomed during the strike. So did our new car service. As word spread about what we were doing, more and more people contacted us. Commuters arriving on the Long Island Railroad would come across the street to our office and ask for a lift downtown. We'd tell them, "Unless you're a customer, we can't help you." We landed a lot of new accounts that way.
Just as important, our ties with our existing customers became closer. Before the strike, for example, we'd had only a small portion of the delivery business that Sam's firm did, and we'd had no contact with the senior people. During the strike, we saw them every day, and they became our friends, as did the executives at other accounts. They came to our office for coffee and doughnuts. Our people would serve them and then drive them downtown. A lot of them increased the amount of business they did with us. At the end of the strike, our monthly sales were more than twice what they'd been at the beginning.
By then, of course, we were ready for it to be over. Although we'd done well financially, the 11 days of the strike had been utterly exhausting. Aside from the additional cash and the new sales, I took away from the episode one of the most important lessons I've learned in business: When in doubt, go to your customers. They will tell you what they want and lead you to solutions you'd never come up with on your own. Indeed, just about every successful new initiative I've taken in business since then has come from listening to customers. For that, I'm eternally indebted to Sam Revson.
My investors were another story. As time went on, they kept ratcheting up their demands. I had to buy cars for two of them and hire a chauffeur for another. They also insisted on auditing my books every quarter, presumably to find out whether I was stealing from them. Eventually, I got fed up and brought matters to a head. We agreed to go our separate ways. I raised the money to buy them out by, once again, going to a customer -- my largest one, Citibank. I offered our contacts there a five-year contract with no price increases, on condition that they pay the first year's fees up front. To protect the bank in case I wasn't able to deliver for some reason, I bought a so-called payment and performance bond, in effect an insurance policy on the deal.
But that happened long after the first year. I think it was right before we made the Inc. 500 for the first time. Or maybe it was afterward. To tell the truth, I'm not sure. Like I said, 30 years is a long time.
