Barnes arrives. He's a friendly fellow with the plainspoken demeanor one might expect of a construction manager. He is wearing a suit. Deal immediately gets him chatting about the 2012 London Olympics, but it's not exactly small talk: The topic is what's being built for the event, and that line of conversation quickly, and not coincidentally, leads Barnes to describe some of Mace's projects.
"Salespeople usually start out by laying out goals, setting up agendas, figuring out how much time they have. I try to keep things relaxed -- let's just talk. But I don't need to know if he's married, and I don't want to seem like I'm trying to be his best friend. You want to get to the point where they feel emotionally committed to a partnership. But that's a process, and you have to let them feel they're controlling it. My role in the beginning of the meeting is to say just enough to get them talking, and once they start talking, I shut up."
It's barely five minutes into the meeting before Barnes is enthusiastically monologuing about a new manufacturing facility Mace recently built for Rolls-Royce. Deal listens for a long time before finally piping up with a comment. "It sounds like you want to leverage your expertise with building facilities into something more than just buildings," he says. Barnes responds enthusiastically, explaining that Mace is considering ways to generate its own power instead of depending on the electric company. "You're looking to provide better security?" Deal asks. That sparks even more enthusiasm from Barnes, given that security in the world of data centers is largely about employing banks of diesel generators and as many as thousands of linked car batteries to keep the juice flowing and the computers cool during a power failure or brownout, avoiding a catastrophic loss of data. These backup capabilities cost millions of dollars, even though they might be used just 15 minutes a year, or not at all.
"I once called up a copier company and was put through to a salesperson. I started to tell him how my copier had died, and before I could say anything else he said he wanted to send me a packet of information and set up a meeting to talk about their models. I told him he just lost a sale. I had been ready to tell him about my problems, and all he wanted to do was move me through a set sales process. People want to tell you about what they care about. All you have to do is give them a way to do it."
"Let me tell you what we're about," says Deal. Even though the meeting began 45 minutes ago, it's the first time he's mentioned his company. He starts by dropping the names of several U.K. companies and government agencies with which Hyperion has relationships, and he ticks off some of Hyperion's executives, board members and advisers, including a retired captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve and the chairman of the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. Then he provides a brief rundown of how the costs of the electricity produced by his tiny, emission-free power plant stack up favorably against those of wind and solar power -- and don't do badly against even big nuclear and coal.
"Most sales guys like to put off getting into price. But people are very sensitive to value, so I get pricing right out there up front."
Deal gives a quick sketch of how his nuclear plant works: A room-size reactor is buried underground, where the uranium fuel heats up metal, which in turn heats up water sent to a conventional electricity-generating steam turbine above-ground. "The specifics are boring," says Deal. "I'll send you a white paper with all this technical junk in it." This will be Deal's excuse for follow-up contact.
"The top question you'll get from your customers," he continues, "will be about safety and security." And that just happens to be Hyperion's strong point. He goes on to describe how the more conventionally designed mini nuke offerings from other competitors resemble "big teakettles," in which boiling water around the nuclear core provides cooling and heat transfer, with a "real potential for failure." (No turbine water runs through Hyperion's metal-filled reactor.) No nuclear power vendor wants to explicitly invoke the specter of a nuclear catastrophe, but Deal has doubtless said enough to help Barnes recall the sorts of radioactive steam plumes associated with the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents -- accidents that haunt the industry. "Our reactor is more like a battery," Deal says. Bad guys can't get at the sealed core, he says, and even if they could, they wouldn't be able to do anything with the molten, non-weapons-grade mess. "We're not quite as efficient as the others," he admits. "But who cares? We're about safety and security, and we make our price point."
"Sooner or later the customer will figure out what your weak point is, and for us, it's efficiency. I'm not going to wait for him to ask. I bring it up preemptively and get it out of the way."
Deal continues to pound on safety. The reactor is sealed at the factory and shipped to the customer's site for burying. It runs for seven to 10 years, without requiring refueling or tampering with. Other reactors need human intervention, and that's where accidents tend to occur, Deal observes. After the Hyperion unit is spent, customers can swap in a new reactor "cartridge," simply leave it buried, or let Hyperion dig it up and take it away for recycling.
