Their Flow is Your Cash Flow – Forecasting 50

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And that is, we had Jeff Hoffman there, co-founder of Priceline. And Jeff was sharing that he was at the airport once, waiting in line, and he was waiting in line to get his ticket, and by the time he got up to the actual ticket counter to get the ticket to board his boarding pass, it was about an hour just to get the ticket. And he watched as the lady simply hit a button.

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She says, what is your last name, sir? Hoffman. She hit a button and handed him his boarding pass. And he says, excuse me, did you just hit one button and hand me my boarding pass? And she says, yes.

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And he goes, well, why did I wait in line for an hour? She says, well, you need a boarding pass to get on. And then she explained, you know, you got to take this through security. He’s like, listen, I travel all the time.

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I know why I need a boarding pass. She goes, he goes, why did I wait an hour to get it? Well, that’s how we do it, sir. So he holds up his boarding pass, and he turns to all the people in line, and he says, if I could get you guys a boarding pass, everybody in this line, if I could get you a boarding pass in the next few minutes, would any of you give me $5? And people go, yeah.

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And the people in the back go, I’ll give you 10, I’ll give you 20. And he goes, I’ll be back. And he didn’t mean literally, he meant figuratively.

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He had an idea. Now, if anybody has ever traveled in an airport where you’ve walked up to one of those kiosks to get your boarding pass, that was founded by one Jeffrey Hoffman from Priceline. Just a brilliant story.

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And then Brian Smith was speaking, the founder of Ugg Boots. I don’t know if anybody ever had a pair of Ugg Boots, but he was telling us the incredible stories of how that business was up and down, up and down, up and down. But one time, he had his manufacturer, after all these years, got a better offer from an up-and-coming competitor to build Ugg Boots for, you know, less expensively or whatever.

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And all of a sudden, the manufacturer calls and tells Brian, hey, Brian, we’re not going to make your run this year. And Brian is just dumbfounded. He said, well, well, I guess we’re done.

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And as the story plays out, none of his retailers, like the Kinney Shoes, Tom McCann, none of the big, big, big retailers would take the competitor’s shoes and put them on the shelf. They would only represent Ugg Boots. Now, listen to the name of the competitor.

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It was Thug Boots. I’m not making this up. I saw the ad in the magazine, T-H-U-G-G.

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But Brian Smith had built such loyalty with the retail stores for years, with great customer service, that the end retailer, even though it was the same product, and it said Thug on the back with the previous Ugg logo with the T-H stamped on it, it was obviously the Ugg Boots. But the retailers, nobody would put them in the store. It was just a great, great story of customer service, loyalty, different things like that.

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So I wanted to do a quick 10 minutes on just understanding the fact that in business today, I think we need something a little bit extra, a little bit special, as opposed to business pre-internet.