The Dinner Deal

The year was 2000 and we hadn't slipped into a primordial ooze or been blown to smithereens by the Millennium Bug. I was 27, a new father, and starting to make an impact as a sales guy for Intel Corporation. Still, it was early November and I was shy of my annual target, but my pipeline was pretty good. I had hoped.

To help matters Intel's Head of Sales & Marketing had offered the European sales team (and their customers) a deal. For any of the new range of server products and "NetStructure" equipment they could get a 50% discount off list price, but only for large deals and only the first 5 deals.

It was informally called Dave's Dinner Deal, I think because he decided to do this after a dinner with some of the senior guys.

Now you may know Intel as a monster in the field of microprocessors, but in this area we were tiny. And we were working hard to push these new products into the fast growing Internet Service Provider space. My likely deal was with ShopCreator who were going to build out, due to serious expansion of their service. Alas, the project was delayed and it would not close in 2000. So, what to do?

I had to dig, deep. Through the year I had met numerous fast growing companies and explained our products, I quickly ran through them again and remembered that Fasthosts in Gloucester had had some early interest. I managed to see them in November, meeting their young founder Andrew Michael. His domain name business was exploding and I explained our proposition again and the very special terms. Our timing could not have been better. They had secured a serious line of credit and wanted to expand. I brought out the big guns. Bringing numerous people from our senior team together to meet them and discuss our future roadmaps and the relationship we wanted to build.

We all moved quickly and we eventually penned a contract for networking devices and 100s of 1U servers, those little pizza box size servers that they could rent to their customers or sell in their shared server range. To make my money and fulfil the deal I needed to get the boxes shipped and delivered that month, of course there were problems but in the end, with vast support from various parts of the organisation, and on the last work day of 2000, the boxes shipped to Gloucester. I persuaded my brother Frank to come down with me and we helped the Fasthosts team unload them. My target was blown away and lots of good stuff happened after that.

I reflect on this for a few reasons.

1. I loved doing it, it was good deal for them and we got an important new client that we could reference that went on to be incredibly successful. It took so much team work to get it done in that short time, and I got to meet people from most of our divisions.

2. We were young. I was 27, but Andrew Michael was 18 but he still grew and exited a massive business. Experience is important but ideas and execution always trump that.

3. I kept going until the end and it paid off. Yes, I was lucky with the timing and Fasthosts happened to be my client but it could easily have not occurred if I hadn't been so passionate. I don't remember how much money I made (it was good) but I'll never forget the satisfaction of loading those servers into the Datacentre.

Good times.

S.

(@simonmc)