Who' the f#$k' Moved My Cheese

I am reminded today of a certain blockbuster publication called

Who Moved My Cheese.  Though I am yet to figure out why that book did as well as it did.

For some innocuous reason, the book was about a couple of odd mice and, as far as I remember, a block of cheese that kept moving. It was supposed to be an inspirational piece with something to do about how and why you should keep moving your targets in life.

But then I was always this bird-brain and even the most evident inspiration was rarely grasped. However, what remained very firmly embedded in my circuitry are the obviously hilarious caricatures of the mice shoving the cheese around.

In a very different context, I feel like my cheese just got moved.

So as a startup, with little credentials as a company behind you, most clients or decision makers at client places find it difficult to take the chance of entrusting their business with you. Hence acquiring a customer involves several rounds of meetings, credibility-building, cajoling, begging and most importantly zeroing in on a potential evangelist in the client organization. You end up travelling for client meetings multiple times to the same client place – often in another city. Uncomfortable bus rides, scourging the city for cheap hotels, living on cheap street food, waiting in the receptions, bargaining with the rickshaws are just a few of the ordeals that you undertake in the process of acquiring a client.

Once you’ve identified your evangelist in the client organization you, like the perfect eager-beaver, work towards building a relationship with him.  You suffer his stories, theories and all his worries with a smiling façade – pretending to be his perfect agony uncle. All of this is done in the hope that one day he’ll help you get the purchase order through and the cheque cleared.

But as I’ve always said – it a cruel world out there! Just when all your efforts invested in building the proverbial relationship with your sponsor were about to bear fruit – your cheese gets moved.

Your evangelist get transferred into another role.

In a very different context, you feel exactly like those odd-looking mice whose cheese not just got moved – but rather rudely got snatched away!