ONE
Learning New Steps on a Different Floor
The most common career advice American children hear from their parents is You can be anything you want to be, inevitably followed by, if you try hard enough.
Don’t take it literally. Nobody should. Eventually we all encounter limits on our dreams. One of the most popular sayings used on Shark Tank is “A goal without a timeline is just a dream.” Some limits are imposed on us by physical qualities. Example: never tell a sumo wrestler he can become a jockey. Others are situational, or as simple as geography; it’s difficult to become a world-class skier unless you live near snow. And some are self-imposed, when we don’t try hard enough to make our dreams come true.
The path we all follow toward success, no matter how we define it, is never as easy as Just try hard enough. It never was. Things are not and have never been that simple. Yet one of the biggest obstacles we all encounter in this journey is easily defined and, despite all we may believe, something we can all learn to handle.
It’s selling. Selling your services or product. Selling your dreams to others. And even selling yourself to yourself, which for some people can be the hardest job of all.
You believe you can be anything you want to be? Good luck. But win or lose at that game, the skill you need more than any other is understanding the basics of selling, and appreciating all the ways you will benefit from it.
All through life.
* * *
No matter what you want to achieve or who you want to become, the ability to sell anything—including yourself—is one of the most rewarding talents to acquire in life. Why? Because it is universal. It is difficult to imagine any aspect of life that would not benefit from knowing and practicing the skills of making a sale.
It’s easy to see the importance of sales either when standing behind a retail counter or pitching a billion-dollar sale of aircraft to the Pentagon. But it’s more than that. Sales jobs are pervasive in almost every kind of work you can name. You cannot be an effective CEO if you can’t sell your company not just to customers and shareholders but to your staff as well—those you currently employ and those you hope to employ. It’s also hard to be a great engineer if you can’t sell your project to investors for funding. And trust me—it’s impossible to make a successful pitch to the Sharks if you can’t first sell yourself to us.
Selling is not just an essential part of business; it’s also essential in personal relationships, all the way back to teenage years. You need to sell yourself on a date, and sell your parents on the idea of giving you the keys to the car. Eventually you are selling your abilities as an employee when you have your first job interview—and every job interview after that.
So selling is the basis of any relationship, personal and business. Don’t believe me? Watch any episode of Shark Tank and think about the sales job that is happening—or too often not happening. When someone who hopes to persuade us to hand them $100,000 can’t come up with the information we need on sales figures or market size or competitive situation, it’s a deal-breaker in most situations. Many of them get slammed for not being prepared, no matter how promising their idea may be. In other cases, however, we Sharks may actually help them along, suggesting the things we need to know, trying to move toward a deal.
What’s the difference? Why do we knock some and encourage others?
The difference is sales ability. The ones whose failings we overlook engaged us immediately in their business concept, and their promise that we will make money from it. The others did not. So we look for ways to work with those who succeed in selling us and to get the others out of the studio ASAP.
Sales are the beginning of everything that business strives to achieve. Not the end—the beginning. This makes it far more critical to a successful career than many people recognize. It’s also been suggested that the world consists of “natural-born salespeople” and everyone else—that good sales ability is as genetic as the color of your hair. Which is a bunch of nonsense, and I can prove it.
Much of my success in business is the result of selling gifted people on the idea of investing their future with me and my company, and selling prospective clients on the benefits they will enjoy by giving us their business. Does this mean I was a “natural-born salesman”? No, it does not. I was not a unicorn, either; both are equally fictitious.
I learned to become good at sales. So can you. And the first step is to get over your fear of failure and rejections.
Which brings me to dancing.
* * *
By age fifty, I had achieved many things in life that I could not have dreamed of as a youngster. I had built a number of companies from little more than an idea into major success stories and restructured a Silicon Valley firm to avoid bankruptcy. I was expanding my current technology-based business into a worldwide entity. Along the way I also managed to run marathons, write two bestselling books, become certified as a scuba diver, play in celebrity golf tournaments, and race million-dollar cars around racetracks at speeds approaching two hundred miles an hour, winning my share of first-place trophies.
But I had never danced. Never even gave it a thought.
Oh, I had shuffled around a floor a few times with a partner, but it wasn’t really dancing. I didn’t know the difference between a cha-cha and a Chihuahua, and the idea of wearing an eye-catching costume while performing a waltz or a tango was as alien to me as singing with the Metropolitan Opera. I could strap myself in a Ferrari and dive off the Great Barrier Reef, but if someone suggested I learn to dance at the professional level on live television in front of fifteen million viewers, I would have waited for the punch line. They couldn’t be serious. Me learn to dance? In costume? On live network TV?
Actually, the idea appealed to me. Who wouldn’t want to glide across the floor with a partner, making smooth moves to the music and looking great? The truth is, I was deathly afraid. I actually danced with my daughter at her graduation ceremonies, a father-and-daughter dance. I lumbered across the floor trying to look cool and keep from tripping over my feet. When the music ended I could hardly wait to get off the floor and sit with the other fathers who had been as frightened as me at dancing in public.
So when the producers of Dancing with the Stars invited me to participate in season 20 of the show, what did I do? I agreed. Immediately. Actually, I thought they were joking. I figured somewhere along the way they would come to their senses, and I would get the call telling me they had changed their mind. With nothing to lose I said, “Sure, why not?” But the call never came, and when I realized they were serious about it, I grew petrified. Yet, for a number of reasons, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. I realized if I could sell the idea of me as a dancer first to myself, then to my professional partner and the judges, and finally to the viewers watching every step I took, it would be in many ways the ultimate sales job. And I needed that kind of achievement at the time.
In fact, like so many things in life, my decision was all about timing.
The invitation arrived while I was dealing with the end of my twenty-four-year marriage. I had been separated for some time, but I was still suffering almost overwhelming pain and a sense of loss. No matter how you portray it, divorce represents failure on the part of two people. Where children are involved, it brings pain, trauma, guilt, and grief.
I wasn’t accustomed to this kind of suffering. Hey, I was the immigrant kid who became a wealthy businessman and international TV personality, almost entirely on my own. Sure, I’d had setbacks, but I had always overcome them with a positive attitude and stubborn determination. I didn’t just take pride in my success in business; I also reveled in it. Nothing was going to get me down, because there was nothing in my life that I believed I couldn’t handle.
Well, I was wrong. The failure of my marriage proved to be more than a setback. I was not prepared for the emotional landslide that overwhelmed me with pain and hopelessness. I grew depressed and felt both lost and powerless. Everything I had done, everything I had achieved in my life, appeared worthless to me. Despite challenges within my marriage, family life had represented all that I had worked for and much that defined me.
Advice began arriving from a number of sources. With it came condolences, suggestions, and warnings. Of all the warnings, one from a friend who had been divorced a few years earlier knocked me deeper into despair. “Robert,” he told me when I explained how much I was missing my children, “I haven’t talked to my kids in more than two years.”
It took me a very long time to deal with that. When I knew I would not be able to handle the reality on my own, I turned to a priest who was also a family friend. He listened to me with understanding and sympathy before saying, “Robert, we heal ourselves when we heal others.” I had a long history with religion and God. Born into a Catholic family, I had been an altar boy for many years, but over time I had drifted away from the Church. It wasn’t that I no longer believed; it was just that I had lost many of the lessons that were once integral and basic in my life.
I could launch the healing process, I was told, by volunteering to help those in dire need of assistance. Their gratitude would validate my existence as well as their own. It made sense to me. If I could help others, maybe I could also help myself.
“Where,” I asked, “could I make this happen?”
The answer was “Seattle.”
Two days later I was serving food to homeless people whose only possessions were the clothes on their back and whose dreams were limited to having a safe, comfortable place to sleep at night. We soon found our respective roles: I was the volunteer, and they were the teachers. Soon I had no time to feel sorry for myself and carry the burden of guilt around. I was too busy helping others, but not too busy to hear their stories. At the mission I was told, “Open your heart and listen to the stories of these people because eventually their stories will become part of your story.”
I began to listen, and what I heard was both wonderful and incredible. I began to change—to heal—when I stopped seeing the environment around me and saw only the people.
The people I assisted and lived among at the Union Gospel Mission in Seattle taught me about love, about hope, and about understanding the needs of others. They also taught me much about myself. It was a powerful lesson, and I promised someday to tell our story—theirs, about everyone’s need for care and compassion; and mine, about the way I was changed and the gratitude I will always owe to them. I’m including the full story later in this book not simply to fulfill that promise, but also to share the wisdom with you. It did not repair me, but it began to heal me. I had done many wonderful and exciting things in my life, but I will never forget the comment of a man who had spent much of his life assisting people in desperate need. “I have never seen anything in life as fascinating,” he told me, “as another human being.”
* * *
When my journey in Seattle ended, I returned home to plunge back into managing and expanding my business. I was better, but I was in no way fully healed. I wanted to continue the healing by finding ways to restore the satisfaction with my life that I had once enjoyed. In the beginning it was difficult, because I thought I had no new horizons to explore and no new worlds to conquer. I had used that technique in the past whenever my life needed a boost. Need something to do besides work? I’ll train to run a marathon. Looking for another world to conquer? I’ll sharpen my golf game and aim to win a tournament or two.
This kind of thing usually worked, although it also complicated my life a good deal. When my marriage ended, I took another route. This time I chose to simplify my life in various ways. Among other things, I believed, it would leave me free to focus on rebuilding my relationship with my children. So I abandoned plans to run more marathon races, put my golf clubs in long-term storage, and sold some of my exotic cars. These were big steps for me, but they were easier to achieve than I expected.
I still planned to expand my business, and instead of being easier this proved tougher—not because of something I had done wrong in the past, but because of something I had managed to do very well.
During my absence in Seattle, my company continued to succeed on a day-to-day basis, thanks to the team of exceptional people I had hired over the years. They carried out the duties that once had been mine to deal with alone.
I have to admit that I accepted this particular reality with mixed emotions. Being so selective in choosing members of my management team had paid off handsomely—so handsomely, in fact, that I discovered I was no longer quite as essential to the company as I once believed. This discovery wasn’t quite as comfortable as the one that proved I was a pretty good judge of talent when it came to hiring key people. If getting over my personal pain relied on reassuring myself I was both essential and irreplaceable, it apparently wouldn’t be to my own company.
I was still running things, and we still had impressive goals to reach as a company. But it was more clear than ever that we would achieve our goals not just by me, Robert Herjavec, charging up the hill alone like Teddy Roosevelt, expecting everyone to follow me, but as a talented, committed team sharing the same objectives in a positive working environment. I was forced to admit that all the goals I had set for the company would be reached by the team working together far more than by me alone.
When it came to dealing with the painful aftereffects of my marriage collapse, I felt like a victim of my own success. I was proud of my team, and proud of myself for selecting and inspiring them over the years. The team’s success, however, wasn’t going to soothe my wounds nearly as well as I hoped. Something was missing. I needed a personal goal as well as a business objective. I needed an “I can do that!” challenge like the ones I had tackled throughout my life in the past. I needed to measure my determination and willpower in a situation totally alien to me. I needed something to encourage me to stretch my belief in myself. But at my age, where would I find one?
Which is when Dancing with the Stars called.
* * *
I was already familiar with Dancing with the Stars. The show had been a favorite of my mother’s, and I remembered her delight when we would sit down to watch it together. Mother died a few years earlier, and I still missed her. Whenever I thought of Dancing with the Stars, I would recall the glow on her face as she watched dancers compete in brief, exotic costumes that probably shocked her—although she never let it on to me—even while she smiled and nodded to the rhythm of the music. It was a favorite show of hers during the years she battled cancer, one of the few things that took her mind off the disease that ended her life. Mother would watch Dancing with the Stars, then turn and say to me, “Do you think you might be on this show one day?” At the time, it seemed as impossible as so many other things in my life.
We watched the show together for different reasons. Mother loved the beauty of the dancing; I savored the tough go-for-broke competition. Twice each year, the show held a series of ten competitions pairing teams of gifted dancing professionals and inexperienced celebrities against each other. The tension was always terrific. Dancing with the Stars aired live, which meant the dancers could count on no retakes, no edits, no second chances. If they fell and landed on their tush, the whole world saw it in the comfort of their living room and had a giggle at their expense. During these competitions the dancers could shimmy, they could sway, they could boogie, and for certain they could stumble. But they couldn’t hide.
That’s why, with memories of my mother’s love for the show, and my need to prove myself in a totally different milieu competing in a totally different activity, there was no way I would turn down the opportunity. Aside from the fact that I had nothing to lose, I felt that somehow it might bring me closer to my memories of my mother.
Only after I said yes did I discover so much about the show that I had never known before. For example, I learned that each couple—the cool and experienced pros, and the stumbling and perspiring celebrities—did more than follow their dance steps. They were expected to create everything about the dance to be performed every week. Each couple chose the dance step; selected the appropriate music; created the setting and story line; picked the costumes and props to wear; and, after a solid week of rehearsing, appeared at the studio ready to strut their stuff. Or not. That was the original idea, anyway. In reality, the professional dancers made all the decisions and the hapless celebrities simply prayed they could learn the routine and perform it when the moment came to do it live in front of all those millions of viewers.
Pressure? It hadn’t even started.
* * *
I began by reviewing what I knew about dancing seriously and not shuffling around the floor like I and all the other embarrassed fathers had done at our daughters’ graduation dance.
It wasn’t much.
I had some idea of what a waltz involved. It was danced in three-quarter time, whatever that was. And I had heard of a fox-trot, which I assumed was danced at the same speed of a fox moving through a forest or across a meadow. (I now know this isn’t true; it’s coined for a guy named Harry Fox who danced it in vaudeville a hundred years ago, or so the story goes.) Beyond this, I didn’t know a samba from a sombrero.
It didn’t matter to the producers. I was given three weeks to learn our first dance with the partner assigned to me by the show’s producers. Not so bad, I thought. Three weeks should be enough time for me to learn almost anything, including a dance that took only one minute and twelve seconds to perform. A minute and twelve seconds? That would flash by in a few blinks of an eye—or so I thought. Then I discovered how long a minute and twelve seconds seem when dancing in front of about eight hundred people in the audience and fifteen million viewers at home. I also learned that after the first episode of the show, I would be given a week—one week!—to learn four totally different new dances.
I was familiar with the scoring system, thanks to those evenings spent with Mother in front of the television set. Judges seated alongside the dance floor rated each couple from 1 to 10. Their scores were blended with grades from members of the television audience, who voted via telephone or the Internet. Each week, the couple at the bottom of the score chart was dropped from competition. The news arrived without warning to the losing couple live in front of the audience.
To some dancers, it was a total surprise. “Bring a packed bag with you to every show,” I was advised, “because if you’re dropped, you head right to the airport.” I accepted that fact. But standing there with your packed bags in a room down the hall from a ballroom, waiting to hear if you’ll be around for at least another week, is an emotionally grinding experience.
So in the midst of my personal trauma, I was risking personal failure and public humiliation. Okay, my mother had loved the show, but even that hadn’t been enough on its own to persuade me to accept the invitation. It took two more things.
Number one: I saw the dance competition as a means of testing myself beyond the decision-making aspect of running my business.
Number two: Much of the challenge reminded me of all the ways I had applied selling skills to other aspects of my life. My goal was first to dance reasonably well, and next to sell my skills to the world. One was new and scary to me. The other was something I already knew how to do well.
Really well.
* * *
The idea of a similarity between selling and dancing may appear confusing. Dance competitions mean learning new steps, being prepared for unexpected events, and, in this case, getting ready to hit the road if you don’t succeed.
Hmmm … sounds a lot like being a salesperson to me.
The thing that inspires people to tackle a career in sales or, even more risky, to launch a new business as an entrepreneur is the same one that drives dancers to compete in events such as Dancing with the Stars—because it’s fun when you do it right; profitable when you do it exceptionally well; and exciting, either on its own or in competition with others.
Despite all the odds against me, all the new skills I knew I would have to acquire, and all the risk I was taking that might have led to an even more painful battering of my ego, I could hardly wait to get started.
Because I was a step and a skip ahead of all the other amateurs in the dance competition:
I knew how to sell.
And, as we’ll see, I could perhaps sell myself as a dancer.
Copyright © 2016 by Robert Herjavec
