One of the costliest mistakes in modern business history was made by former Blockbuster Video CEO John Antioco …
In 2000 Blockbuster was riding high, and a struggling little DVD-by-mail rental service called Netflix desperately wanted a meeting to try to sell to the video giant.
Blockbuster finally agreed to the meeting, but showed little respect to the fledgling Netflix by giving owner Reed Hastings less than 12 hours notice to get from California to its Dallas headquarters the following morning.
And after Hastings said that he would sell Netflix for $50 million, the Blockbuster CEO struggled to keep from breaking out in laughter.
No deal was ever made, obviously.
Flash forward to today: Blockbuster is dead and Netflix is the king of streaming services (worth over $250 billion)
I got to hear the story firsthand from Marc Randolph (co-founder of Netflix) who was in the room where it happened, when he was a guest on Natural Born Coaches.
Speaking of offers, I’m passionate about helping coaches construct compelling offers to sell, and I’ll be doing that in a live workshop that I’m doing next week.
It’s called “Creating Powerful Coaching Offers That Sell!” and it’s happening on Tuesday, March 26th … join me by registering here:
