Thursday, June 21, 2007

LA Super Marathon

I'm coming up for air! It has been one long week. One of my compatriots in Albuquerque, Craig, made a decision that he wanted to include financing placement into our business service offerings. Because of all my work promoting our LA office, I have developed a wide base of contacts of non-bank financing sources that are not found at all in New Mexico. The purpose of this trip was to meet as many of these sources as possible. Therefore, I organized an ambitious schedule of meetings.

Flying in on Monday night, Craig was already there having spent the week in LA and he picked me up at the airport. We got started on Tuesday with my networking group which started at 7 AM and finished 7 meetings later followed by dinner at my partner Frank's house. Scheduling meetings in LA is always a challenge because of the distances and the travel times. I was particularly proud of myself because I had 5 of the 7 meetings in a radius of the 3 miles, a masterpiece of geographic time management.

Wednesday set a new all time record for most meetings ever accomplished in one day, 8. Actually we were only going to have 7 but Craig had agreed to a follow up meeting from the networking group on Tue at 7 AM. We already had an 8 AM breakfast scheduled but the distance was such that we were able to at least make an appearance at the first meeting before getting to the second. I was really dragging by the time we were getting to meetings 6 and 7. The last meeting was a dinner with a couple of investment bankers that lasted two hours with a couple of bottles of wine (I had a very nice baccaloa dish (Italian Salt Cod) braised with milk and onions on polenta that was very yummy). Our investment bankers brought the wine which was two bottles of Syrah, one from Santa Barbara (the better) and one from Monterey. We were done by about 8:30 so we managed to make it less than a 14 hour day.

On Thursday we cut back to a half day, only 4 meetings but the first was another networking group in Pasadena which requires getting on the road no latter than 5:45 to be there by 7 AM. By this time I was really dragging. Fortunately our last meeting at 2 PM was with someone I know well so the fact that I was almost falling asleep didn't offend him too much.

But it was a very, very productive trip. Craig is pumped about prospects and we have a number of funding prospects for a few difficult deals that we brought with us as test. On top of that, we are starting to get very close to the first draft of my new book. I met with the ghost writer and we were able to get some breakthroughs on the marketing hooks and title (Thanks JB!).

I'm in the Burbank Airport waiting to catch the flight home. The weather looks fine so I hope everything goes well because this is the last flight of the day and if we miss our connection it's being stranded in Phoenix for the night.

Next week is a combination trip to Atlanta/Chicago which means I get to see Motherrocker, John the Armenian, and the Dukes not to mentioned get abused by partner Lakeview, a combination always to be looked forward to.

5 comments:

alexis said...

wow dad, keep up the hard work! You make us all look like slackers. Remember to balance all that stress and airport food with sleep, hiking, and garden veggies. We want to read your blog for many years to come!

stef said...

Holy cow dad! When you come to visit you will not have to do anything but relax.

Lakeview Coffee Joe said...

No wonder you sounded barely awake when I talked to you on the phone in the middle of the day. Holy crap.

Anonymous said...

Eight meetings in a row! That is more than my little slacker brain can even contemplate without going into automatic shutdown. I applaud you, de-I, and beg the Fates to never let such a thing happen to me.

Michael Podolny said...

Well remember Alexis, I had my own slacker days and I'm making up for them now. And Styling, it's all my own choice. Sometimes what seems what we want in one part of our life changes dramatically at another.