The Mayflower Madam on How to Reinvent Yourself
Sydney Biddle Barrows’ ‘Uncensored Sales Strategies’ with Dan KennedySydney Biddle Barrows, otherwise known as the Mayflower Madam, found herself moonlighting as a phone girl at an escort service to supplement her unemployment check after having been fired for refusing to participate in a kickback scheme.
It may have been the world’s oldest profession, but it certainly was not being run very professionally, and less than a year later Sydney decided to open up her own agency. It was relatively small but very upscale. Cachet prospered for 5½ years until New York’s finest closed it down, only to later publicly concede that it was the most honest and professionally run business of its kind ever operated in New York City.
Her first book, Mayflower Madam, went right to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List. Fortune Magazine named it one of the ten best business books of the year, and business schools across the country including Harvard used it in their curriculum. Her fourth book, Uncensored Sales Strategies, co-authored with the legendary marketing guru Dan Kennedy, was published in January 2009.
Today, Sydney Biddle Barrows is a recognized authority on the customer experience. She consults with entrepreneurs, business people and professional practices to re-imagine the way they interact with their customers in order to create meaningful and memorable experiences that add value to what they do or sell. Thanks for being with us, Sydney.
Sydney Biddle Barrows: You’re more than welcome, Jordan.
Jordan McAuley: I’m sure the first question on everybody’s mind is how did a nice girl – and I’ve met you, you are very nice – grow up to become a madam?
Sydney Biddle Barrows: Well, it’s not like it was a career path that I chose early in life. No one grows up hoping to become a madam, and it certainly isn’t a career path that my parents picked out for me, as you can imagine.
What happened was, I started out in retail in the executive training program at a store called Abraham and Strauss, which no longer exists, but at the time was the jewel in the crown of the former Federated Department Stores Group. Then I went on to May Co. corporate. They owned Lord and Taylor, and they’ve also been swallowed up by Macy’s. Then I went to a resident buying office where, as you mentioned, I got fired because I refused to participate in a kickback scheme.
So there I am standing on the unemployment line, which goes to show you how long ago this was because now you can do it online, you don’t have to go down there. I met up with a gal who I got along with and we started hanging out together. One day I went down to her apartment in Greenwich Village. I walked in the door, and there she is unpacking a brand new stereo. Well, I knew she didn’t have any money. I mean, certainly no more than I did. Of course I wanted to know where she got it.
I kept asking her questions. She was being very evasive and at one point I even said, “well, gee, did it fall off the back of a truck?” I mean, you know, can I get one too? And finally, she said, Sydney, do you swear you won’t tell anybody? I said, “I swear.” She said, “I answer the phones for an escort service.” And I said, “oh, what’s an escort service?” I didn’t have a clue.
She told me what it was and of course I was horrified, but fascinated and asked all the same kinds of questions that anybody would ask. I was the only person that really knew what she was doing, so I heard a lot about it over the next couple of months, and then one day she calls me up and said, “Sydney, one of the girls in the office is leaving, would you be interested in a job?”
All of a sudden I had cold feet. I was afraid of the police; I was afraid of the mafia. It’s one thing to say, “I’d love to do that.” It’s another thing for someone to call you up and actually say that you can. But I figured it wouldn’t hurt to go over there for the interview, particularly since it was paying $50.00 a night off the books and unemployment was only $150.00 a week. It was a lot of money back then.
I went over there and met this guy Eddy who was a bit of a sleezeball, but he’d been in business for about 20 years, and nothing had ever happened to him. I met a number of the girls who were every bit as nice as my girlfriend had told me. Obviously no one was holding a gun to their heads. So I thought, gee, it’s just answering a phone, how bad could this be? Sure, I’ll give it a try.
Well, as you mentioned, it may have been the world’s oldest profession but it wasn’t being run very professionally. My girlfriend and I were constantly Monday-morning quarterbacking. “Why doesn’t he do it this way? He should do it that way. If it was me, I would do yada yada yada.” One day we just looked at each other and we said, “you know, we’re at least as smart as he is, we’re definitely nicer than he is, why don’t we start our own escort service?” And so we did. I literally fell into it. That’s exactly how it happened.
Jordan McAuley: For people reading this, you can read everything that Sydney did to make that agency so successful in her book, ‘Mayflower Madam.’ I think you can still get it on Amazon, can’t you? Or is it still out of print?
Sydney Biddle Barrows: You can get a used copy. It’s out of print. When I get a free minute, what I’d really like to do because I’ve got the rights back is add what’s happened in the last X-number of years, and publish it myself. But that’s a little bit down the road.
Jordan McAuley You really should. It’s a really good read.
Sydney Biddle Barrows: Thank you.
Jordan McAuley: Everybody who didn’t get a chance to read it when it first came out would really enjoy it. It was on the New York Times Bestseller List and Fortune Magazine named it one of the ten best business books of the year.
Sydney Biddle Barrows: Let me tell you how that happened, which is very interesting. I wrote that book with a guy named William Novak who wrote Iacocca. I mean, he didn’t write it, he co-authored it with Lee Iacocca. He also wrote for Nancy Reagan, Magic Johnson, Oliver North, all kinds of really famous people. We weren’t really sure what people would want to read about, so we asked everyone we knew, “If you were to buy this book, what would you hope to find inside?” Everybody said, “Tell us how it worked.”
What really interested people was knowing how the business itself actually operated because there’s never been a book, either before or since, that really talks about how the escort business works. That’s why it ended up being, totally unintentionally, a business book. Business schools including Harvard used it in their curriculum. We did not set out to write that kind of a book – we have no idea that that’s what we had done.
Jordan McAuley: Do you think looking back, and maybe this was part of your plan, that writing a book helped you reinvent yourself and separate you from that business?
Sydney Biddle Barrows: There was insane media attention, which was really ridiculous. The New York Post and New York Daily News had a field day with it. In the end, I paid a $5,000.00 fine and that was it. Well, the fine may have only been $5,000.00 but the legal bills ran well into the six figures. To be honest with you, I needed the money to pay those bills, so I wrote that book to pay my lawyer. That’s really why I wrote it. I never saw a dime either — trust me.
Jordan McAuley: Thanks for being honest. I want to talk about how you reinvented yourself into doing what you do now which is helping businesses improve their customer experience. I’ve read both of your books and they’re very helpful but in different in a way. Do you think writing a book is a good way to reinvent yourself?
Sydney Biddle Barrows: It depends. If you’re writing about what it is that you did, unless you can get it on the bestseller list, and unless you can draw attention to it somehow, it’s really only going to keep you where you were. The reason that it worked for me is because it did do so well and it got a lot of people’s attention.
Business groups, especially the Young Presidents’ Organization, started calling me and asking if I would come and do a talk in front of their membership. At first I thought why would people who make millions and millions of dollars a year in these big companies hire someone like me to tell them how to do business? It seemed a little odd to me. But they were paying good money so I thought, “If this is what they want to hear, I certainly know the story.” So I went and did these talks.
Members of the audience would come up to me and ask if I did consulting. I didn’t know what consulting was anymore than I knew what an escort service was when I first heard about it, but I could tell they were going to pay me money to do it. So I started asking questions: “What is it that you’re hoping I can help you with? What sort of what challenges is your business facing?” I really had no idea what it was they wanted or hoped that I could do for them. After talking to a couple of these people, they told me what they wanted and I thought to myself, I can do that.
I’m sure that all of your readers can appreciate what I’m about to say. The first two or three talks I did, I was shaking in my boots. I was convinced they were going to find out that I was this terrible fraud. But it ended up being really easy because — you probably know this –- everybody’s got a gift. For instance, technology is not my gift, but I do have a gift for going into a business and looking around and seeing the incongruencies, the inconsistencies, the little things that are wrong.
I can see a typo on a page a mile away. Don’t ask me how or why, I just have that gift. I do the same thing when I go into businesses. I can see what it is that’s not right. They say this is who they want their clientele to be, they claim this is the business that they’re really in, and yet they are doing all these things that are totally inconsistent with the image they claim they’re trying to project. I have a gift for picking out those little things. I didn’t realize it at the time, but what I was really doing was experience design. I didn’t hear that term until a number of years later. I call myself a CEO –- a Chief Experience Officer.
Jordan McAuley: What are some things that you took from your previous business and applied to your new business?
Sydney Biddle Barrows Let’s start out with my first job. I was an assistant buyer in the bath shop at Abraham and Strauss, and one day my buyer took me into the market because we needed more shower curtains. So there we are sitting in the shower curtain showroom and this guy’s showing us this stuff and I’ve got to tell you, Jordan, this stuff was ugly. I mean, we are talking deadly hideous. And yet here is Mary, my boss, scribbling orders for this stuff. I couldn’t believe it. So I said, “What are you doing? This stuff is hideous. I wouldn’t put this in my bathroom on a bet and neither would you.”
She looked at me and said, “Sydney, you are not our customer. Our customer likes these kinds of shower curtains and in fact, they come to our store because they know that we sell shower curtains just like these. We’ve got to give them what they want to buy, not what we would buy.” So many business owners make a huge mistake. They get into the business that they want to be in and they don’t pay attention to what the customer really wants. I would say that is probably the number one thing I learned.
The second thing I learned from the escort service is that people do not necessarily buy — or pay you money for what you think it is that you’re selling. That’s knowing — you know this phrase –- what business are you really in? I imagine that most of your readers, if I asked them what business you think I was really in, I bet almost 100 percent of them would say, “Oh, Sydney, come on, it was the sex business.” But it was not the sex business. I was really in the fantasy business and the trust business.
The fantasy part of it was my clients wanted the most beautiful, the most elegant, the most charming, charismatic sexy girl in New York City to walk through their door. This fantasy girl had nothing on her agenda other than to please him for the entire time she was there. She would listen to his stories, she’d laugh at his jokes, she’d admire whatever he wanted her to admire. A lot of times it was escapades or his, business wins or whatever. Sometimes, if it was a residential client they’d show the girls all the things they had bought with all the money they’d made and they wanted her to admire that.
They basically wanted her to be charming company so they could forget about whatever else it was that was on their minds previously. Then when it came down to what we used to euphemistically call the nitty gritty, she would please him in whatever way he wanted and we permitted, which wasn’t a whole hell of a lot because we were pretty straight in that regard. So that was the fantasy. Then there’s the trust part of the business.
For those of you who don’t know anything about escort services, and I’m sure that’s everybody in your audience, the escort service business is dishonest beyond belief. All they care about is getting your money in their pocket tonight. They will basically tell you anything they need to in order to make that happen. For instance, if you tell the phone girl that you want someone who is tall with beautiful legs, they’ll swear she’s 5-foot-10 and has gorgeous legs. If he tells her he wants someone who’s got blond hair, they’ll swear she has blond hair. If he wants someone there in half an hour, they promise that she’ll be there in half an hour.
They’re basically promising anything to get him to book that call. An hour and a half later, a petite redhead knocks on the door and of course he’s not a very happy camper about this because he’s expecting a tall blond and you know what? That’s really very unfair to her because she had no idea she’s supposed to be tall, she has no idea she’s supposed to be blond, and she has no idea that she’s an hour late because of course they don’t tell her any of this stuff. But he ends up keeping her anyway because it is getting late and he knows he’s not going to have any better luck anywhere else. That’s what they’re counting on. They routinely lie.
We absolutely did not do that. In fact, we even had a guarantee that if the young lady, when she got there, did not look exactly the way we described her, all they had to do was give her $20.00 and send her home. No hard feelings. We’d send you somebody else. That was our guarantee. You don’t have to guarantee what it is you do, by the way. But to get back to the original thing, I was really in the fantasy business and the trust business, not the sex business because believe me, if that’s all they wanted they could have gotten it for a hell of a lot less in a lot of other places.
Jordan McAuley: For people who are listening who may be wondering, Sydney really did treat these girls like gold. One of the things you did was if she showed and the man gypped her out of the money, you would pay her anyways and they knew that.
Sydney Biddle Barrows: Oh, yeah. First of all, we were the only people practically in the history of this business who ever got the money afterwards. I just felt it was very tacky to walk in with your hand out and say, “Hi, my name is Suzi, give me the money.” That doesn’t get things started out on very good footing. And you should excuse the expression, but in 5½ years, we never once got stiffed.
When the young lady was there –- say she’d been there for three hours and he started acting in a way that made her uncomfortable. Let’s say he had a little too much to drink. Her orders were that she was to get up and leave and not listen to him when he says, “I’m not going to pay you if you get up and leave” because it didn’t matter. I would pay her for the amount of time that she had been there because I did not want any of my young ladies to ever be in a situation that made them uncomfortable and made them feel bad. It almost never happened, but it was nice for them to know that they had that option if they ever wanted or needed to leave.
Jordan McAuley: That’s something I really enjoyed learning about in the book.
Sydney Biddle Barrows: Loyalty is very important. If people feel you’re there for them, if you’ve got their back, if you have their best interests at heart, they’ll walk over hot coals for you. They really will. And they’ll enjoy doing it because they appreciate that you’re good to them. They want to give back to you. It’s a very wonderful synergy.
Jordan McAuley: You mentioned the business that you’re really in, the business of fantasy and trust. But you were also in the business of creating an experience. Talk a little about that because that’s what a lot of people like Dan Kennedy say is going to fuel the new economy — selling experiences.
Sydney Biddle Barrows: Yeah. For us there were two main experiences depending on the client. There were some clients who wanted the most beautiful, the most gorgeous – I went through the whole thing before –- call girl to walk in their door. They really got off on the fact that they were so successful they could afford the most expensive call girl in New York. They also liked knowing they knew the number of the place where the most beautiful girls were. Then there was the other clientele who even though they knew they were paying for it, they didn’t want to feel that it was a commercial transaction. So the experience we provided for those clients was not doing anything that made them feel – reminded them, actually – that this was a commercial transaction.
For instance, when it came time to talk about the money, we would say to them, “How would you like to take care of this this evening?” Not, “How would you like to pay?” When the young lady was there and she was ready to leave she would call on the phone, say, “I’m ready to leave” and I would say, “Okay, you should have $800.00 cash or you should have an $800.00 check or whatever it was. She would never talk to him about the money, ever. They were totally divorced from the money. She handed the phone to him and I would say, “Okay, she should have $800.00 cash” or whatever it was.
We also always referred to them as young ladies because we wanted the clients to think of them as young ladies and to know that we thought of them as young ladies. So there was some psychological sales choreography going on there. When the young lady got there, we made sure that she reinforced this lady/gentleman dynamic by she’d either have a suit jacket on or she’d have a coat or maybe she’d have both.
What she’d do when she got there was she would stand in front of him and turn around a bit and start to slip her coat or her jacket off her shoulders, which would cause him to instinctively reach out and help her with it. That’s something a gentleman does for a lady. So everything we did, we tried to keep as much of a feeling of it being a commercial transaction out of it as we could because that was the fantasy they wanted.
Jordan McAuley: Something that I really took away from your book is what you call the mental movie and trying to match the mental movie in somebody’s mind. Can you explain what that is and how you create one?
Sydney Biddle Barrows: Yeah. A mental movie is basically all of the input a client gets from the second that you appear on their radar screen, following any transaction you have. Really what it is is people have an expectation or a hope or both of what doing business with you is going to be like. For instance, my clients, their expectation and their hope was that they had found a very, very upscale elite business as opposed to the other nonsense that was going on out there.
So every single step of the way, from the second they saw our ad, which looked like it had been engraved at Tiffany’s –- it was very, very elegant, lots of white space, two heavy borders around it, just our name, Cachet, our phone number and the hours that we were open – that’s all that was on the ad. Then when they called, they got a young lady on the phone.
Our phone girls were all aspiring actresses because I was very, very particular with what the phone girls said to the clients. I had a script that I had said a gazillion and one times myself and I wanted them to say it –- everything exactly the way I said it –- and that’s what actresses are great for. They’re used to repeating the same lines over and over and over and making them sound like they’re new. So they were perfect for this.
That was the next part of the mental movie. You saw this beautiful ad. It signaled an upscale, refined operation. You got somebody on the phone who was very polite and had a beautiful speaking voice. Then the young lady herself would arrive, and as I said, she was a pretty girl. She was beautifully dressed, she knew how to behave herself and conduct herself. She wasn’t a gum-chewing broad from Brooklyn. Then when the evening was over, she walked out looking as pretty as she did when she walked in. The financial transaction part of it was done very diplomatically, so the whole thing from start to finish was congruent with what they were hoping and expecting a very upscale business to be. That was the mental movie that they had.
What’s important for your readers to know is that you’ve got to find out what the mental movie is your clients are hoping to find and then you have to give it to them. You can also manipulate them a bit and have them hope, want and expect some of the things that you want to deliver as well as long as that it’s something they want. But the most important thing I want to emphasize is that everything has to be congruent. Everything has to maintain and support whatever the story of your business is. That’s vitally important.
Jordan McAuley: Right. And you want to attract people who have a mental movie that you’re able to match.
Sydney Biddle Barrows: Right. Like for instance I’m sure you’ve heard Dan Kennedy tell the story about this guy named Charlie Martin who is a cosmetic dentist. His average case is like $80,000.00. Obviously these are people with really messed up teeth. But when you walk into his office, it’s marble and it’s got oriental rugs and he’s got a grand piano. You walk in there and you say to yourself, “Oh, boy, this guy is not going to be cheap.” So when he quotes you $80,000.00, it’s not a complete and total surprise.
If you want into an “eh”-looking, average dentist office and all of a sudden he tells you he wants $80,000.00, he might technically be just as good as Dr. Martin, but the atmosphere you’re in, the movie in your mind when you walk into that guy’s office is not going to be the same. It’s going to be incongruent having him ask for that kind of money because of your surroundings. The mental movie that you’ve gotten so far doesn’t support that.
Jordan McAuley: Right. The other big thing I got out of your book was when you talk about a “broken bridge” or “broken windows.”
Sydney Biddle Barrows: A broken bridge, yeah. Broken Windows is the book that Michael Levine wrote. I remember when you were one of my Sales Design members it was one of the things on the reading list.
Jordan McAuley: Right. You talk a lot about having simple things like misspellings on your website. That’s the customer experience that they’re seeing — misspellings, For us, they’re going to wonder what else is not accurate in our database. Just because they see one word misspelled, they’re going to think all these other things could be wrong also.
Sydney Biddle Barrows: They’re going think these people aren’t paying attention. Oh, you’re absolutely correct. It’s the little things like that that nail you. Going into a bathroom and having, depending on the business, paper towels. But let’s say paper towels in the kind of business you have are okay, but do you really want Grade Z Costco paper towels? No, you want nice paper towels. For instance, do you think that you would ever see Barack Obama or Queen Elizabeth sign a big treaty with a Bic pen? No. Think about it. It’s totally incongruent. That’s not the image that they want to project or that they should be projecting.
People listening have to think about the kind of gloves you wear, the kind of shoes you wear, when you pull your mirror out of your handbag, you know, what kind of a mirror is it. If you have a very upscale image, you don’t want to be pulling out some nasty little piece of plastic with Duane Reed written all over it. It’s very important. Little things like that, people don’t necessarily notice what they are, but they know something’s wrong.
Jordan McAuley: Sydney – I should have mentioned this earlier – has tons of examples like this in her new book which is Uncensored Sales Strategies that she co-authored with Dan Kennedy. Even though Mayflower Madam is out of print and may be hard to find, Uncensored Sales Strategies is on Amazon and most of these things that she’s talking about are in that book.
Sydney Biddle Barrows: Yeah, if you’re looking for the stories like you hear me telling, in Uncensored Sales Strategies, every chapter has examples of what I’m talking about and all the examples are call girl stories. Escort service stories. That’s my USP, my Unique Selling Proposition. There’s no one else out there who sells great call girl stories like I do.
Jordan McAuley: Right. You’re probably not going to find another book about improving your business using lessons learned from escort services. It is really important to take things from other industries. I did this myself with my site. You take things from other industries completely unrelated and that’s what’s really going to give you the edge and improve your business.
Sydney Biddle Barrows: Yeah, just look around and see what other successful people are doing. Let me give you an example. I was in a service business and yet I took something from a product business. Those girls out there, you know all about the gift-with-purchase thing. For you guys who don’t know, once or twice a year, different cosmetics companies in the department stores if you go in there and you buy X-amount dollars worth of stuff, you get this cute little bag — and they’re always a little different — and you get all these goodies inside. It’s called gift-with-purchase.
I was thinking to myself, you know, the first Christmas, what can I do to show these clients how much I appreciate them? And I thought, gift-with-purchase. I didn’t want to give them something if they weren’t going to give me some business in return. That was the purchase part. When any of our really, really good clients would call anywhere between I think it was Thanksgiving and the end of January, the young lady would swing by the office and pick up a bottle of chilled Dom Perignon. We went out and bought two cases of it. At the time, Dom Perignon was the most expensive, the most elite, the best non-vintage champagne available.
What this signaled to the client was, oh my goodness, these people must think I’m really pretty special because they’re giving me a bottle of the most expensive top drawer champagne. Not only are they spending this money on me, but they obviously think I’m important. It also upped our transaction size because no one swills Dom Perignon in one sitting, so if he was a two-hour client, she’d be there for three hours; if was a four-hour client, she’d be there for five hours. We upped our transaction size which is exactly one of the reasons that the cosmetics companies do it.
Not that we ever touted ourselves as they most expensive or the most fabulous, but it was pretty clear from everything we did that we were. Giving away they most expensive, the most fabulous champagne reinforced our image, so that one little bottle did so many different things and also created an experience. Here he gets to sit in his hotel room or his home with a beautiful girl drinking champagne and – this is the best part – all my young ladies had to carry a packet of bubble bath in their handbags with them.
I’m sure most of you out there have heard of champagne bubble baths. If you haven’t it does not mean you bathe in champagne, it means you sit in a bath with bubbles and you drink champagne with a companion of your choice. When the young lady would say to say to him, “Would you like to have a champagne bubble bath and we can drink this?” none of these guys had ever had that before, and so what a wonderful experience we gave them that not only did they get a chance to have, but I have $100.00 that says every time they hear the word bubble bath or the word champagne, they remember back all those years ago sitting in a bath tub with a beautiful girl drinking champagne that we had given them. That was an experience that we provided.
Jordan McAuley: I want to go back a little bit to when you were talking about selling trust. Because I know you had some celebrities who were clients and we have a lot of listeners who have celebrities who are clients. There is a fine line between wanting to let everyone know that you do have celebrity clients but also protecting the celebrity’s privacy and having their trust. Can you talk a little bit about that and what you did?
Sydney Biddle Barrows: Yeah. And I actually, only once did I ever do this. There was someone who called who was so famous that I said, “Oh, my god, are you so-and-so?” and there was this silence on the other end of the line. And I said, “You know what, I am so sorry, that was such an incredibly inappropriate question.” Of course the girls were always really excited when they saw somebody very well known, so we had something called the celebrity board. It was actually a big cork board that I went out and bought because girls would come in with articles or pictures about different clients, either sports people or musicians or business people, whatever.
But the young ladies, let’s face it, they didn’t want anyone to know what they did, so they weren’t exactly about to go out blabbing it around, and we certainly weren’t going to say anything because we didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves. I think the way that we conducted ourselves, the caliber of the young ladies, the way we ran the whole general business, made our clients feel as safe as you’re ever going to feel doing something like that.
Jordan McAuley: The term “sales choreography.” Is everything we’ve been talking about sales choreography, or is that something different?
Sydney Biddle Barrows: A lot of what sales choreography is can be physical or psychological. Basically what it does is it influences a client’s perception of you. It influences the client’s perception of your business. It influences whether or not the client buys and very often how much they buy. I hate to use the word “manipulation” because that word has such an ugly connotation in our culture, but that’s really what it is. Let’s take a department store. You go by one of those dummies and it’s got a dress and it’s got jewelry and it’s got a scarf and it’s got a bag. You look at it and say, “Oh, my god, I want it all because they put it together for you.
If you’re in the iPod business, you don’t want to have the iPods in one place, then the little extra-special ear buds in another place. You want them all together so that when the person’s ready to buy that iPod, they think, oh, wow, I guess I do need speakers and I really do need something to carry it around in. That’s physical choreography — influencing them to buy more.
I’ve got a member named Chris Hearn who’s in the commercial mortgage brokerage business. If you were to ever see his office, what’s so interesting is every time he does a deal, he takes a photograph of the property. Then he has a photograph of the client and he puts them in these huge frames. They’re easily 2 feet by 18 inches. They’re beautiful wooden frames, and when you go to his office, they deliberately take you on a tour. Every hallway you walk down from the ceiling all the way down to the floor, they have like four of them stacked up on top of each other.
You just see row after row after row of these frames with all of the deals that this guy has done. By the time they usher you into the room where they’re going to talk about if you’re going to give them your business, you’ve thought to yourself, my god, look at how many people this person’s done business with. I mean, geez, if this many people he’s done business for, he’s been successful. Surely he can be successful for me. That is psychological manipulation. And that’s exactly what sales choreography is.
Jordan McAuley: This is my Barbara Walters question: Sydney, do you miss your old business?
Sydney Biddle Barrows: I have completely moved on. If we get nine lives, I think this is my fifth or sixth so I’ve got a few more to go. But no, I miss it only because it was a lot of fun. It was a challenge, which I liked. And it was very rewarding. I was in the make-people-happy business, you know? You have no idea how grateful these men were that I had the kind of business they could call up and get a nice, well educated, lovely, pretty girl to come over and spend time with them in a way that made them feel safe. They were thrilled.
I can’t tell you how many times they would call and say, I can’t imagine ever doing business with anyone else ever. You guys are great. So that was nice. And then of course it was really nice helping out the young ladies because most of my girls were students. Or they were aspiring models, actresses, dancers, singers, writers, artists, that kind of thing. The analogy I use is, they’re standing on one side of the canyon, a big deep ravine, and on the other side is their college degree, all of their acting lessons, whatever it is they need the money for, and there’s a bridge that goes over that ravine. But you’ve got to pay a toll. Well, where are you going to get the money to pay that toll? That’s what I helped them out with.
They made the choice to come work for me. I certainly didn’t make anybody work for me; that was their choice. What I basically did was I helped them get from where they were to where they wanted to be in their life. Most of them lasted a year or so and when they got to where they wanted to be they left. I couldn’t have wished them more wellness and happiness. As a matter of fact, I’m still in touch with a lot of them because of that. It was a really good feeling. I don’t get that from what I do now. I get other things from what I do, but that was very special.
Jordan McAuley: You have the new book. Again, it’s Uncensored Sales Strategies from Entrepreneur Press. I read a lot of business books and I’ve told you this before, but a lot of business books, especially today, are like a mini-sales letter and there’s really not that much information there except trying to sell you on the person’s consulting. You offer consulting also but your book really does have a lot of stories that are both entertaining and informative. You’re reading stories from an escort agency. It can’t get more entertaining than that.
So they’re very entertaining, but you also learn a lot. You have to really see it to understand, but it’s, also really well designed. It looks really cool and it’s fun to read. Funny story: I was reading it on my roof recently and all of these guys kept looking over. I was like, wow, they are really interested in this book I’m reading. I knew what it was about but they couldn’t see the cover and I kept thinking, what are they looking at? Then I get back to my apartment and see SEX SELLS is written across the very back cover. But it’s really cool because a lot of business books are boring. It’s a really well designed book, I think.
Jordan McAuley: What else are you up to and what can people do to learn more about what you have to offer?
Sydney Biddle Barrows: Not everybody can afford my rather steep consulting fees, so what I did is I’ve come out with a product where I walk you step by step through how you can create your own experience. Module No. 1, for instance, is you can’t create an experience unless you know what the story of your business is. That’s something a lot of people don’t understand. I go through what it is, what the parts are that make up your story, and how you can figure it out. I talk about all the different things I do when I go onsite to do consulting. I walk people through how to do that themselves. It’s just about to be launched so you can’t really buy it yet. If you go to SydneyBarrows.com in another couple of weeks, it will be up there. That’s what I’m doing now.
Jordan McAuley: Sydney, thank you so much for being with me. I see you at these events every once in awhile and I know you’re really busy. Good luck with everything and I will talk to you soon.
Sydney Biddle Barrows: Thank you, Jordan, it’s my pleasure.
Related Posts:
Jordan McAuley
