The Fortieth Steak

The executive you’re courting has already had the steak. Grass-fed, dry-aged, tableside, comped. He could review the béarnaise in his sleep. Somewhere around the fortieth one, a steak stops being a gesture and becomes a meeting with sides.

Meanwhile, one floor down, there’s a director who has never once been taken to lunch. Or at least a lunch of the caliber of an executive.

That’s the tier that builds the shortlist, runs the evaluation, and lives with whatever gets bought. By the time a decision reaches the corner office, it’s mostly already been made. The executive signs what the next tier concluded. We aim our budgets at the signature and ignore the sentence.

Attention isn’t priced by what it costs you to give. It’s priced by how rare it is to the person receiving it. A ribeye at the top is the fortieth ribeye. A stead sandwich one tier down is the first sandwich anyone’s ever bought them, and it gets remembered for a decade.

Courting the top while ignoring the tier that does the work is the same broken instinct as investing in customers before your team. Both spend where the decision appears to happen instead of where it actually forms. Decisions form in the middle. So does loyalty.

I watch it at my own bar. Reps court the owner. My bartenders decide what gets recommended two hundred times a night.

Nobody with a budget wants to hear that the highest-leverage spend might be lunch with someone whose title doesn’t impress anyone. But scarcity is scarcity. Go where your attention is … medium-rare.

Stay Positive & Then There’s The Tip…