Maybe not sharp, but suddenly almost rich. Within two months we had stepped up urban distribution and gotten rid of the rural service. The airlines agreed to let us double their prices. Then they started introducing me to the competing sales managers whose airlines were not yet my accounts, and business doubled again.

Raising the prices when I changed the distribution schedule and getting the sales managers to bring in their industry colleagues wasn’t an original idea. Timetable had done the same thing with the railroads thirty years before. I read about it in those worthless musty books the first night I bought the company.

I probably learned more from those books than in all my classes at Harvard. How to make a public company grow and how, if you don’t keep up with the times and ignore the market, you can sink so low a boy barely out of school can buy you for five grand. Some of these lessons I wouldn’t get to use till I was running my own public company decades later. Most, though, were applicable right away. Those books contained the history of an entire industry. All of their innovations and failures, all their great ideas and ridiculous notions were there for the reading. The corporate minutes from day one.

The most interesting thing I learned from taking over Timetable, though, was the tremendous value of hard-core clients. Most people looking at Timetable’s business would have said, “What a disaster. Almost everyone’s quit. This business is finished.”

I saw the opposite. “What a great business. They’ve had these airline clients for thirty years, and no matter how bad the service is, they won’t quit. You could probably break into the president’s office, pee on the rug, and they’d just keep paying the bills. Imagine what you could make off these guys if you really serviced them!”

Business books nowadays all tell you: If you want to succeed and get or keep clients, you gotta be the best. You gotta anticipate their every need. You gotta stay close to them and spare no expense keeping them happy.

Bullshit. You heard me. Bullshit. I know this is the part of the book that is going to get quoted and taken out of context to portray me and IDT as a bunch of corporate ogres who mistreat our clients, but somebody needs to tell the truth. Not every client needs you to give him your heart, liver, and kidneys. In fact, if you spend all your money delivering unnecessarily high levels of service to every account, you will be broke and will deliver service to no one.