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TRANSCRIPT
My Travels With Abdul by Dave Doroghy
For the five years that I worked on raising the sponsorship dollars for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games I flew from Vancouver to Toronto on an average of twice a month. Most of Canada’s head offices are there so it just made sense.
During that time I formed a great professional relationship with a wonderful man named Abdul who became my trusted driver and reliable companion for all of those trips.
This is our story.
In the sponsorship Sales Department we often joked that Toronto was the center of the
universe. And in our world of wanting to reach key decision makers of large Canadian Corporations it was. Approximately 70 percent of all of the head offices in Canada were located in Toronto. The rest of them would be in Calgary where you have a concentration of about 10 per cent of our nations corporate headquarters and about 10 percent of them are in Montreal. The remaining head offices were scattered throughout the rest of the country. Although most large companies have representation in each region of Canada with branch offices, a decision of the magnitude of sponsoring the 2010 Winter Olympic Games always had to go back to head office, most often in Toronto. So we needed to be in the center of the universe a lot. And I accidentally found a great space ship to take me around to all of our sales and meetings and presentations while we were there.
I went back and forth to Toronto pretty well every two or three weeks for most of my five years at VANOC. Dave Cobb and Andrea Shaw went there even more frequently. It takes four hours to fly there and five to fly back. The jet stream at 35,000 feet causes the delay on the way home. Canada is a big big country. We would often just go for a day, sometimes for two days. On rare occasions we would have to go there twice a week on separate trips. A one-‐hour trip to Calgary was nothing; it felt like driving to work in the morning. We were road warriors, adept in the specialized art of packing light, sleeping on planes and returning your table top trays and seats to the upright position in preparation for landing. On all of my trips just for fun I always carried a DVD copy of the John Candy / Steve Martin movie, Planes Trains and Automobiles in my briefcase to remind me that keeping your sense of humor on business trips is essential to maintaining your overall sanity. Flight delays and cancellations became the bain of our existence. Aside from those three
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Canadian cities other business trips took me to the many of the major cities in the US. Wherever I traveled to, it was always an adventure and a lot more fun interesting and productive than a day in the office sitting in front of your computer sending emails and returning phone calls.
We mainly took the five-‐o-‐clock flight from Vancouver to Toronto; it got you in sometime shortly before 1:00 am. By the time you got to the hotel downtown and checked in it was almost always 2:00 am. I always thought that my routine before going to bed in a hotel was amusing. I would pull out my Blackberry and plug it in to recharge it. Then I would pull out my laptop computer and plug it in to recharge it. Then I would pull out my iPod that I like to listen to the on the road and plug it in to recharge it. Then I would undress, crawl into bed and rest my head on the pillow to recharge it. The shrill sound of the phone ringing with the 6:00 am hotel wake up call always had an added degree of harshness after only four hours of sleep.
Although Toronto was far away from Vancouver once you got there because of the concentration of head offices you could get a lot accomplished. I would set a self-‐imposed minimum goal of completing at least 5 appointments per day. On some ambitious trips I may have been able to schedule 6 or 7 appointments in by having an early breakfast meeting and an after work appointment. And what was I doing in all these meetings? I was prospecting; looking for Olympic Sponsors. Most meetings were with Vice Presidents of Marketing or Directors of Marketing of companies who had agreed to meet with me in person to learn more about becoming a Vancouver 2010 Sponsor. In many instances I would have to meet with them a second or third time before they would agree to receiving our more formal Rights and Benefits presentation. Often if we would be invited back to meet with the company again with someone more senior, I would bring Dave Cobb or Andrea Shaw with me; particularly if the meetings with the prospect company had escalated to the Senior Vice President or President level.
So for Dave, Andrea and I, Toronto became our home away from home.
It’s a huge city, the fifth largest in North America and getting around when you have a tight schedule with important back to back meetings all over the map can be a challenge. And you couldn’t ever be late on a sales call when you were trying to make a good first impression. That was a Cardinal Sin. It made most sense to take cabs to get around Toronto; that allowed you to make calls on your mobile phone between appointments and to review the materials that you were presenting that day. Sometimes when I traveled with Dave Cobb or John Furlong we would hire a limo. It was much more efficient than a cab in that you didn’t have to wait to be picked up after each call and you didn’t have to “schlep” your luggage around with you to every building you went into. You could just store your bags in the limo trunk. But when I was traveling on my own I would always take cabs.
Then I met Abdul. I was about six months into the job and on one of my sales prospecting journeys to Toronto. I had stacked up 7 appointments on this particular trip. Leaving the Hotel Le Germain on Mercer Street in Toronto, which is where we always stayed at 6:45 I flagged a cab on the street in front of the hotel and didn’t pay much attention to the driver. As he dropped me off on time for my appointment in Don Mills, twenty minutes from the hotel, I gave him the $35 fare and he asked me in his thick Afghanistan accent “Sir would you like me to wait for you while you are in there?”. I asked him if he would turn the meter off while he waited. He replied “of course” and to my delight an hour later when I returned from my meeting he was still there in the companies parking lot waiting for me. He drove me to my next appointment and when we got there he asked me if I wanted for him to wait again. We repeated the routine throughout the day with him patiently waiting for me at each stop. At the end of the day after 7
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appointments he dropped me off at the Toronto airport. The total bill came to $218, which is exactly what I would have paid for taking seven different cabs. Abdul was an absolute pleasure to deal with; he was polite knew the city well, and a very interesting and learned man. He was a big burly guy, in his mid fifties, tall and dark with a half bald head. Although his cab was a bit of a beater it was clean. As I paid him I thought I just got the limo service at a bargain basement rate. I knew that the chauffeur costs for John and Dave’s trips were always around $800 a day. As I departed his cab Abdul handed me his business card and told me that the next time I came to Toronto “It would be my sincere pleasure and an honor to serve you again” That’s how a wonderful five year relationship began with Abdul Nuri – reliable driver and philosopher extraordinaire.
Abdul became my regular trusted companion on every trip to Toronto. You learn a lot about someone spending 10 hours a day driving all over a busy city with them. Abdul had come to Canada from Afghanistan and built a wonderful life for himself by working hard and persevering. He was a deep thinking man, who studied Muslim scriptures in the cab while I was in meetings with different chocolate bar and snow tire Marketing Executives. He had stacks of very serious looking thick complex books written in xxFarsixx on the front passenger seat of the cab. Back in Kabhul he was somewhat of a scholar. I first got to meet his family after we finished a call at a bed factory in Scarbourough, just East of Toronto in July of 2005. Abdul lived nearby and so on the way to our next call we stopped by his modest home. He had four young adult kids, one was completing his residency to become a cardiac surgeon, one was going into law school, one was a policeman and another one was also a professional. It impressed me that he raised this wonderful family on a cab drivers salary. He was also a leader in the Afghani community in Toronto. While whisking me between sales calls it was fascinating to learn more about his religious and political views on the current situation in Afghanistan. I had traveled through that region years ago so I was particularly interested in what he had to say. We also shared some great lunches and dinners at some cool little funky Afghanistan restaurants along the way where he was always enthusiastically greeted by the owners. I could tell that Abdul was proud to introduce his friends, who were mostly new Canadians, to someone involved with the Olympics. More often than not my meal was complimentary. The Games seemed to pull everybody together, and even though Afghanistan would not be fielding a team in our Winter Olympics I could sense that all of Abdul’s friends in his tight expat community were big supporters of the event just the same. Abdul became a new friend of mine and I was honored in the Spring of 2008 when he invited me back to Toronto to be a guest at his son’s wedding. That colorful event was a whole other story I will save for another time.
On a professional level when you travel as much as I did it was great to have the one constant of a clean cab and familiar knowledgeable driver on all your trips. Abdul’s wife would always pack a cooler full of bottled water and fresh fruits in the trunk for me. Occasionally if we were early for an appointment and I had caught up on slaying all of the email dragons off of my Blackberry, and returned all of my voice messages, I’d get Abdul to find a quite park somewhere near our next call where I could take a short nap, have a couple of snacks and rejuvenate myself. It would have been a funny site for anyone strolling through the park to see a Sales Executive from the Olympics dressed in a dark blue suit and tie sleeping in the back of a cab while his driver studied the Koran. These rest stops worked wonders for me and sometimes a ten-‐minute nap was all I needed to recharge those batteries worn down from the long flight the night before.
Trip after trip Abdul was always there for me. We were never late for an appointment. Not one. He knew every short cut and side street necessary to get us there on time. He would break the speed limit if we had
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to, pull U-‐turns and do whatever it took to get us there on time. Like a fine tuned machine nothing could stop or delay us, together we were on a mission to raise money so the Olympic Games could go on.
Once when I was in town with Dave and Andrea we all traveled in Abdul’s cab together. Impressed by his service they began using him on their own. Soon after that, word got out at VANOC about Abdul’s limo treatment at a bargain price, and other executives began using him too. Then one of our sponsors hired him regularly; Andrea recommended him to the Vice President of the Royal Bank.
On one of my trips to Toronto in the Spring of 2008 Abdul greeted me in the Hotel Le Gremain Lobby at 6:30 am with a big smile on his face that stretched from ear to ear. He told me “Mr. Doroghy, I have a splendid surprise for you” Then he anxiously grabbed my overnight bag and my briefcase and accompanied me outside to a brand new shiny blue cab he had just purchased the week before. He told me, “Since I met you my business has really increased, and only the best is good enough for people who work for the Olympics, so I bought us this new car!”
I tell the story of Abdul for a few reasons. First of all he really did help us all to maximize our efficiency on those extremely important busy trips to Toronto. At the same time he served as a reminder to me of how the Olympics bring out the best in all of us. Weather it was Abdul’s wife packing snacks for me, his friends giving me free meals, or him making an illegal left turn at Younge and Bloor to save time, or him finding shortcuts to all of our calls, and buying a new chariot for us. Finally Abdul represented to me what this great Country of ours is all about. He came to Canada as an immigrant with nothing. He created a tremendously improved life for his family through hard work; and he had the chance to do it because Canada is the type of country where all of that is possible. My parents fled war torn Europe in the 1940’s and also arrived here with nothing to build a better life for me and my sister. The President of our Organizing Committee was also an Immigrant. In some of our Vancouver 2010 sales presentations John Furlong told the story about his very first experience in Canada after coming from Ireland in XX70XX. He said that upon his arrival at Canada Customs in Edmonton the Immigration Officer processing his citizenship documents said “welcome to Canada, now make it a better place”
By staging the best Winter Olympic Games ever we were making Canada a better place in our own small way. Meeting Abdul in Toronto strengthened my resolve to raise as much money as humanly possible to ensure the Games would make every Canadian, regardless of where they were from, feel included and feel proud.
(c) David Doroghy, 2010-‐2013
Contact: [email protected]