Professionals exude success, and that was all the outside world saw, if it noticed Ramsey Beirne at all. Beirne would direct that a cold call open with, “Hi, we’re Ramsey Beirne, the leading retained executive search firm in high technology.”
His colleagues thought this was a bit much.
“Well, Dave, couldn’t one argue that—”
“We are. Go.”
If said to a client with sufficient force, it would not be questioned. And if a prospect laughed at the audacity of this little firm in Ossining and said, “So, let me ask you a question—how can you guys call yourself the leading firm?” Beirne and his colleagues would reply, “We brought in the COO of Central Point. We built the whole management team.” The prospect probably had never heard of Central Point Software, either, but Central Point must have been an important client for Ramsey Beirne to lay claim to it in the way that it did.
If, when dialing for dollars, Seiler lucked upon a company in Boston that was about to launch a search and would be willing to hear a pitch from Ramsey Beirne at a breakfast meeting the next morning at 8:30, then Beirne would call back and ask that it be moved to 7:30, just to show that his blood was Type A—and he and Chuck Ramsey would set off for Boston by car at 2:30 A.M.
Once liberated from the telephone and actually in the door, Dave Beirne could really go to work, selling by not selling. No backslapping bonhomie, no inane chitchat, no annoying repetition of your first name, no clumsy paraphrasing of what you’d just told him. “I have nothing to sell you today—let’s take that off the table and just talk,” he would say. “My goal is to earn the right to have a relationship with you, and I know it’s my responsibility to earn the right.”
He’d vacuum up information about the candidate’s command of the business, but also about intellect, ethics, leadership, energy. Beirne likened it to digging into someone’s soul, then showing the person a portrait. He had removed anything uncouth in his appearance that would provide an excuse for him to be turned away. There wasn’t a hint of New Yawk in his voice, and you would never see him when his hair wasn’t freshly cut, gelled, combed, and parted, when his white dress shirts did not consist more of starch than cotton.
Once he got in, he could get individuals who were ten, twenty, thirty years his senior to open up. His voice was measured and controlled; his sentences were well composed—they never began, then aborted and restarted; his manner was free of tics that would betray impatience.
Most important, he didn’t display the know-it-all arrogance seen in many who have coasted through the most selective colleges, nor was he handicapped by a parvenu’s tendency to try to bluster his way to status parity by talking incessantly.
He instead used his smarts in the employ of listening. His prospective clients and candidates discovered he was a paragon of the quick study, who when asked to restate what he’d been told got it right, absolutely right, and followed with questions that showed strategic instincts about how to make the business or career grow. Respect, trust, and confiding followed.
Stross, Randall E.. eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work (Kindle Locations 319-338). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.