Bush

Welcome to the second of our blogs, remembering some of the funny things that have happened to us over the years.

This blog relates to our time running a sales training business.

We make massive use of video to train sales and this course was no exception...

The customer was a gardening franchise and we were training their franchisees.  They did everything you'd expect from a gardening franchise; mowed lawns, pruned hedges, looked after flower beds and, errrr, the other things gardeners do.  Scarification and Aeration, I would imagine.

In actual fact, the franchisees made the sales and employed gardeners to do the bit with mowers, pruners and all that other stuff.

(As an aside, have you ever read the instruction manual for a Hayter petrol driven lawn mower?  No?  Well, it'd pretty funny in its own right.  'To start the mower you must pump the nipple to make sure it's turned on...')

Anyway, we were working with a group of franchisees and were filming the second lot of videos - the one where we prove to the franchisees that they really can sell.  The franchisee doing the selling was a youngish lad, probably about 21, something like that.  I have to say, though, he was a little naive...

His dad had bought him the franchise to help him 'man up'.  I'm not kidding.  Before joining this business the lad had been cabin crew with British Airways... you see where his dad was going?

He was a great chap and actually really good at the selling side of things; his customer service background with BA had really stood him in good stead.

His customer was another franchisee on the course.  A slightly older lady, probably about 55-60 years of age.  She was there with her husband and they were going to run the business together.

Renee was filming.

So, the young guy had measured up the lawn and talked about the flower beds.  Now he looked down to the bottom of the garden, looked back at his customer and said without any hint of self-awareness:

'Now, your bush looks a bit ropey.  Do you want me to trim that for you?'

The camera starts shaking as Renee begins silently laughing and there's pandemonium in the training room.

But, bless her heart, the customer retained her self composure on film and just looked at the lad.  Then she replied:

'No thank you.  My husband does that for me!'

Well, that was it... it took half an hour for the laughter to stop, only to re-start over dinner that evening.

But the thing is, to this day, the young lad does not know what we were all laughing at!