Here is a story where knowledge in UK basketball literally paid dividends. In the late 90s, I was working in sales for a small, boutique IT security firm in Atlanta called SecureIT. My territory consisted of some really boring states like Minnesota, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, etc. One day, I made a cold call to the head IT security guy of an insurance company called Aegon USA. The head of their IT security team was a nice fella with a southern drawl named Bobby Willoughby. Luckily, for me, he shared that he grew up in Kentucky and was a graduate of UK. I let him know that I lived in Henderson for about 5 years and that segued our conversation into UK basketball. We got to talking about the days of Joe B Hall and all the wonderful memories of players like Kyle Macy, Jay Schidler, Dirk Minniefield, Jim Master, Winston Bennett, Sam Bowie, Melvin Turpin, et al. My first conversation with one of the worlds largest insurance companies went on for like an hour. We really hit it off and they ended up buying a couple firewalls from me right away for test purposes. Unbeknownst to me, Aegon USA was close to inking a deal to acquire TransAmerica. And about a year later, Bobby called to tell me they would need about 50 firewalls (almost a million dollar deal). Every Aegon & TransAmerica data center in North America ended up getting a CheckPoint firewall which was purchased thru me...all because I knew a little about Kentucky basketball!:)
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 13:26:49 +0000
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