few years there...
few years there were only three or four people, including myself. We were
delivering news for public companies that was very visible, under scrutiny. If
you screwed up, either by being late or by getting the wrong information, you
were in big trouble. We had a couple of things that scared me to death.
I think the one that was probably scariest, that definitely could have put us
out of business, happened in ’94 or ’95. A very large pharmaceutical company
had decided to go with us. We had everything underway, and they were going to
announce this new service on their annual report. Everything is fine except that
I get a call one afternoon saying, “Ron, we’ve got a really serious problem. The
annual report has come out and it’s got the wrong 800 number on it!”
They were frantic. There were two issues: one, they had printed over a million
annual reports loaded on pallets at the facility, and two, they had a legal
requirement to distribute the reports 30 days before the annual meeting. The
reports and the proxies had to be in the shareholders’ hands at least 30 days
Ron Gruner 439
before the annual meeting, so they were really under the gun. As I recall, they
had 5 or 6 days to get those reports in the mail; otherwise they had to reset the
annual meeting, and it would have been a huge disaster. It would have clearly
put us out of business instantly—even though we had told them the right number
and we could prove it by showing them the fax we sent them.
So I called the 800 number and it was going to somebody’s pager. Back in
those days, you couldn’t leave a voicemail. It just said, “Please leave a number
to call.” So we did that. Nobody ever called back. Because we had a good relationship
with AT&T, we identified who owned the 800 number. It was a paging
company down in Dallas, Texas.
We called the paging company and without revealing what the situation was
specifically, we said, “We have a situation here where we got a number mixed
up and your customer will be getting a lot of phone calls he doesn’t want to get.
We’d like to make it right by him and by you.” The company wouldn’t give us
the time of day. They said, “No. Because of privacy issues, we won’t contact him
and you certainly cannot contact him. All you can do is leave a message.” So we
tried and tried, and worked it up the ladder. They wouldn’t budge. They were
just intractable. This consumed about 2 days. Then Josiah Cushing, one of the
college grads I had hired, during our staff meeting said, “Ron, why don’t you try
| ← which at the | hiring a private → |