The Handshake
Nicola Gentile, known in America as Cola, spent half a century in our world and in old age dictated his memoirs. He was a vain man, and historians read him with care. But one of his parables is worth a whole library on selling. He told it to a young listener whom he called “little professor”.
Imagine, Gentile said, that I’ve come unarmed, and you point a pistol at me and order me to kneel. I’ll kneel. But that doesn’t mean you’re a mafioso. It means you’re a cretin with a pistol in your hand. Now imagine we’re both unarmed, and I say: I’m in a difficult position, I’m going to have to ask you to kneel. You ask: why? I explain. And if I’ve managed to convince you and you kneel, then I’m a mafioso. And if you refuse and I have to shoot, that’s no victory. It means I’ve lost.
The historian who retells the parable remarks drily that even in a made-up story Gentile couldn’t do without a pistol. Fair enough. But the old man had the right idea, and in an office it’s doubly right. A deal is when the man says “yes” himself. Anything you’ve squeezed out of him isn’t a deal. It’s an incident.
The Moment It’s All For
A deal is the point where value changes hands. You hand over what you’ve made, he hands over the money, and both walk away thinking they’ve won. Both of them. If one walks away feeling robbed, you’ve got a one-off sale and a permanent enemy.
Before the deal you have a product, plans and hopes. After the deal you have a client. Everything we’ve talked about in the first chapters—what you make, who knows about it—exists for the sake of that one minute. A business without deals is called a hobby. A hobby is a worthy thing, but it doesn’t fill the Family’s funds. Quite the reverse.
And remember: you can’t buy a “yes” with a discount if the man doesn’t believe he’ll get what was promised. People turn down a good offer more often than you think. Not because it’s bad. Because they don’t believe the man making it.
What a Word Is Worth
In the south of Sicily, in the town of Ribera, a local firm owed a landowner eighty-six million lire and went bust. The landowner came to a friendly arrangement with the owners: let them pay back thirty-eight. Meanwhile the firm was bought by a protégé of Carmelo Colletti, a man held in great respect in those parts. The new owner wrote a cheque for twenty-eight million. Colletti undertook to deliver the cheque in person, and advised the creditor, while he was at it, to be satisfied with that sum. The creditor, as the judges later recorded, agreed, because he knew Colletti was an important man of honour whose word was as good as a contract.
I won’t pretend this story is all about trust. When a man with that kind of reputation brings you a cheque personally, something else gets mixed in with the trust. But look at the mechanics. Ten million of difference: that’s the price the creditor paid for not going to court, not hiring lawyers, not waiting for years and not guessing whether there’d be anything to collect at the end. He bought certainty. Colletti’s word stood in for the notary and the bailiff both.
That’s what trust is from a bookkeeper’s point of view: a way of saving on everything people do when they don’t believe each other. On forty-page contracts, on checks, on collateral, on lawyers. The more people trust you, the less every deal costs you, and the less every purchase from you costs the client. It’s money all right. It just doesn’t come into the cash box. It simply never leaves it.
Only with us, trust often rested on fear, and so it cost more than it seemed. Fear gives you a discount today and sends you the bill tomorrow. Trust earned by deeds lasts longer. Its foundation is simple and dull: you’ve done what you promised many times, and people saw it. In forty years I haven’t found any other way. They say there are courses. If I were the courses, I’d take the money up front.
The Man Outside the Bar Patti
Now for the third thing a deal needs: understanding between people. It’s the hardest to describe, but you’ll know it the moment you see it.
For a long time the most prominent mafioso in the city of Agrigento was Peppino Settecasi, whom people called Uncle Peppino. A businessman told a prosecutor how they met. Settecasi turned up at his building site. The foreman introduced the visitor as an obliging man who knew everybody in town and was ready to smooth things out between the firm and the workers. Then the businessman went to open an account at the Banco di Sicilia, and there was Settecasi, who helped speed up the paperwork: his son worked at the bank, it seems. And then came the Almond Blossom Festival. The businessman and his family stood for an hour outside the Bar Patti watching the festival carts go by, and beside them stood Uncle Peppino. And everybody who passed stopped and greeted him respectfully.
Look at what happened here. Settecasi never once offered to sell anything. He became a familiar face, did a couple of small services, showed that they had acquaintances in common, and gave the businessman a whole hour to watch how the town treated him. Gambetta, who recorded this story, names this way of selling protection plainly: courtesies, vague hints and a display of reputation. The offer, when it comes, will fall on prepared ground.
Drop the hints, and what’s left is a craft they teach salesmen in any country. People buy from those they know, those they understand and those who are like them. Before talking business, a man has to understand who you are. Not from what you tell him about yourself, but from what he’s seen with his own eyes.
How the Don Struck a Deal with the Mill
When Don Vincenzo decided to bring oil straight from Sicily, he went to meet the mill owner. I was with him. The first evening they drank coffee and talked about the weather: that year people were afraid of early rains. The second evening, about the owner’s son, who wanted to go to America, and the Don told him how it had been for himself and where on that road people break their necks. Not a word was said about oil. I was young and impatient, and on the way back to the hotel I grumbled: had we come to trade or to pay a social call?
On the third evening the owner brought up the price himself. They agreed in half an hour. The contract fit on one page, and half of the page was signatures. For twenty years after that the oil arrived on time and with the same taste as the first tin, and when a bad harvest came, the owner wrote to us first, before we’d noticed, and offered a discount himself.
The Don explained it to me afterwards. He hadn’t wasted two evenings. He’d been listening. He’d found out what this man was afraid of: being left without a buyer after a bad year. And what he wanted: for his son to get settled. When the time came to talk business, the Don offered not the lowest price but a purchase five years ahead, with a fixed volume even in a poor year. In other words, he sold the mill owner exactly what the man was afraid of losing. The owner would have agreed to a lower price. The Don deliberately didn’t push for it.
The Bottom Line
Don’t press. Every “yes” squeezed out by pressure, by a “today only” discount or by the fear of being left with nothing, you pay for later: in returns, in complaints, in a man who never comes back and tells the neighbour why. A good deal is when both sides leave the room a little richer, not when one of them leaves it a little more alive.
And remember old Gentile’s parable. If you’ve had to pull out a pistol, whatever form it takes in your office—a penalty clause, a threat of court, a “final warning”—you’ve already lost. You just don’t know yet by how much.