On today’s show I’m going to share what I learned in my meeting with the Mayor. This was a quick trip down to Lake Charles Louisiana for the sole purpose of having lunch with Mayor Nic Hunter and the City Administrator. Three other team members came to the meeting from Dallas and Houston. We had two bankers travel several hours from Baton Rouge and New Orleans. This one hour lunch meeting involved a lot of travel for a lot of people.
Much as we have been making do over the past two years with zoom meetings, we have also experienced incredible delays with city officials taking a long time to respond to simple queries. It has become clear to me that the act of jumping on a plane to meet someone face to face has the human effect of elevating you in importance.
When they know that you traveled an entire day for the sole purpose of meeting with them, they will meet with you. You will become elevated in their priority. The Mayor needed to go to the State legislature to argue for additional money for storm recovery. The would have impacted our meeting. But because he knew we were all traveling from out of town to meet with him, he re-arranged his schedule and turned an afternoon meeting into a lunch meeting. We became a priority to him.
For those of you who know me, you know that I have a technology background. I am an early adopter of new technologies and am an advocate of technologies. I regularly spend half of my day or more in zoom meetings. I’m here to tell you that traveling to meet people face to face will be the new super power in 2022 and beyond.
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Host: Victor Menasce
email: podcast@victorjm.com
