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Minus Signs — And Professionalism
My Uncle Bill was a professional car salesman, specializing in large orders for governments and big companies, selling 5 to 100 vehicles at a time. He won several awards for being the best fleet sales person in Edmonton. Uncle Bill had a lot of good attributes for sales, so it wasn’t hard to see why he was successful. But I asked him one day for his reasons for his success, and the answer surprised me: “Serial numbers!” he said.
Uncle Bill explained to me that his customers wanted accurate records of the assets they purchased. If a vehicle serial number was not recorded properly, the company could seem to own an asset it had no record of. And this would force the accountants into an expensive search to find the source of this error and fix it, often taking hours and even days.
So Uncle Bill devised a system where he would keep track of serial numbers as the vehicles moved from the factory to the car dealership to the customer’s parking lot. He would visually inspect each vehicle’s serial number — digit- by-digit — at least five times and at least five times again in the paperwork. This had to have been very tedious work, especially for the really big orders. But, in this way, each vehicle’s serial number always matched each vehicle’s paperwork when it was delivered. The customers knew that Uncle Bill’s vigilance would save them money years down the road, and…
