A key to doing business: A fun evening every once in a while

A business colleague, Mark Taylor, a senior product manager at Lumos Networks, recently invited me to join him in a fun evening at Camden Yards.

OK, calling it a “fun evening” is understating things a bit. Mark had tickets to a luxury suite at Camden Yards for a Baltimore Orioles baseball game, and for a night, we were kings of baseball.

Unlimited crab cakes, Boog’s Barbecue, adult beverages, desserts – oh, yeah, and a great game, which the O’s won on a walk-off homer in the bottom of the ninth!

Now, I love Mark Taylor and all, and that’s not dependent on whether or not he lets me tag along for a night in a luxury suite at a Major League Baseball game.

But the next time Mark needs something, anything, guess what? He’s got it, whatever he needs, and next time I get a chance at a “fun evening,” I’ll make it a point to invite Mark along, and he can’t make it, for whatever reason, I’ll pay it forward to someone else.

That’s just good business. So much of what we do is about the bottom line, but behind the bottom line, after we make the numbers work out to everyone’s satisfaction, we’re people, and we want to do business with people that we like and want to be around.

Keep that at the forefront of your thinking, and you’ll do OK in business.

– Column by Chris Graham