Tag: Mark Stith

Two Poodled

To build a successful business you have to do good work at a fair price.  And you have to do what you say you’re going to do, keep your word. 

Mark Stith, roofer par excellence
Mark Stith, roofer par excellence

That’s the way my son, Mark, runs his company, Roofcrafters.

But to get a signed contract, Mark told me, it helps a lot if the customer plain old likes you.  So you try to make a good impression, he said.  You look customers in the eye. You speak courteously .  And, if you get an opportunity, you two poodle them.

Two poodle?  Yea, it’s a new expression — you heard it here first.

Mark went to a woman’s house to give her an estimate and she met him at the door carrying two poodles.

Two poodles!
Two poodles!

“I see you have two poodles,” Mark said to her.

That’s really all he had to say.

She told him all about her sweet poodles.  He listened attentively.  And then she hired him to re-roof her house.

Coming Friday: Cotton Mouth

Squelched

Hearts is my favorite card game but I play Rook every once in a while, usually at a family reunion or, in this case, at Snowbird.  And, truth be told, when my niece, Pam Stith, is my partner we usually win.

I don’t like playing with the 2’s, 3’s, and 4’s, but my son, Mark, and his friend, Conan Shearer, wanted to play with all the cards so Pam and I said OK, make yourselves happy.  Those cards don’t matter a whole lot anyway; when you play Rook nothing much matters but the Rook itself. 

Pam is a really good player and if we got the Rook as many times as they did, anywhere close to as many times, we’d win, regardless of how many cards we played with. Of that I was pretty certain.

Conan, L, and Mark Stith: they were dealt the Rook 7 out of 8 hands.
Conan Shearer, L, and Mark Stith: Rook magnets.

But we didn’t get the Rook at all. They got it all three hands and won the game with over 500 points to our whatever.

So, I said, OK, let’s take out the 2’s, 3’s, and 4’s and play again. And we did.

This time they got the Rook four of the five hands it took them to reach 500, and won again.

That’s when Conan said to me, as politely as can be, “Would you like to take out some more cards?”

Postscript: Shearer graduated from UNC and then earned an MBA and Master of Science in Information Management from Arizona  State University. He is now an executive at Exxon.  Whether he still gets the Rook seven out of eight hands is unknown.

Coming Monday:  Something Like?

The view from the top of Mark's tower.
The view from the top of Mark’s tower last week.

NOTE: Went to Snowbird again last week [Nov. 1-5], 11 of us, friends and family. Pitched some shoes, played some Hearts –but no Rook– and ate like royalty.