Part 6

The Best Vantage Ground

In closing a contract or settling a dispute it makes considerable difference whether you are in the other fellow's office or in your own.

The man in whose office the transaction takes place has the decided advantage.

If you have a disputed bill, or if you wish to make a contract for material or merchandise use every effort to get the other man in your office. When you go to another office you are on the aggressive, when another man comes to your office you are on the defensive.

It is great diplomacy to get the man you deal with to come to you instead of going to him. In proportion as you are diplomatic you will be able to benefit.

If you meet the other man in a club, hotel or a place outside of your office or the other man's office, then the vantage ground is even and neither has the best of it so far as location is concerned.

Starting from an even vantage ground the advantage shifts greatly one way or the other according to whether you go or the other man comes.

Railroad officials, bankers and great merchants realize the importance of having the vantage ground in their favor.

The merchant, for instance, has private rooms and regular office hours for his buyers, and he lets the manufacturers come to him.

Stop a moment and look over your own experience, and you will recall numerous instances where it has been to your advantage to close a deal in your own office.

There is nothing in what we have written in this series of talks that has less theory in it than this particular chapter.

There is no point we have made more surely proven by experience.

The army that attacks the enemy in the enemy's country has the odds against it, as all wars have proven. Men fight best at home on their own vantage ground.

Whether you are buying or selling try to close the deal in your own place of business.

If you have travelers on the road let it be part of their business and duty to invite and persuade customers to call at your place of business when they are in town.

Ambition

A man without ambition had better content himself with learning a trade. A good mechanic is fairly sure of three dollars a day, and fifty-two weeks' employment in the year.

The mechanic does not have many worries. He does not have notes to meet at the bank. He does not have to face the ingratitude of employes and petty jealousies, for he has no employes working for him.

He lays down his tools when the bell rings and goes home to his family. His ambition is to have a good place to sleep, plenty to eat, money enough to buy clothing for his family and to send his children to school, and extra spending money enough over his fixed charges to allow him to take his family to the circus when it comes to town.

Ambition makes men strive to get ahead. Ambition cultivates taking chances.

Nearly every man is a gambler. Some of you will be shocked at this statement, yet upon careful analysis nearly every move a successful business man makes is a gamble. He is betting that he will take in more money than he lays out on a new plan. The man with ambition is a gambler. The man who learns a trade and does not strive to increase his earnings is not a gambler.

We pride ourselves on our ability to buy cheaply, because the cheaper we can buy the greater our earnings will be and the less our gamble.

Any man with two hands and ordinary health can earn a livelihood, but the ambitious man wants to make a name for himself and to make a success in business, so he works harder than he would do if his problem were only the obtaining of money enough to buy the things necessary for his existence.

The moment a man loses ambition, his progress, so far as business advancement is concerned, ceases.

Nearly every successful business today is successful because the proprietors, in the infancy of the business, were filled with ambition which made them work hard.

We are all familiar with the successful business man who loses his ambition. It is an absolute certainty that as soon as a man loses ambition his business falls off, unless he makes it an object to take care of the ambitious young men in his employ, so that they may keep up the pace of progress he established.

Lawyers

Keep in touch with a lawyer, but don't take his advice on business matters.