If you really want to keep your finger on the pulse of the Seattle business scene, go get your shoes shined. That’s the advice Todd Dean gave me recently. Dean is president of Keiretsu Forum Seattle/Northwest, the local chapter of the world’s largest angel investor community. He took me to see a couple of the top shoeshiners in town. Even though I don’t really own shoes worthy of a shine, I hope to become a regular customer and soak up their wisdom. You might call them shoeshiners. I call them oracles.
Morgan Perkins runs the family shoeshine business at Nordstrom downtown. Their clientele includes lawyers, judges, investors, business people, and, that morning, the superintendent of Seattle public schools. Perkins has been a fixture at Nordstrom since 1974. Perkins, who is African-American, came up as a railroad porter from Salt Lake City in an era of Jim Crow laws, and he has seen it all. For the past 35 years, while he and his family have shined customers’ shoes, they’ve told him things—about business, jobs, the economy, whatever’s on their mind. (See this profile in the P-I for more on the Perkins family.)
“People want five minutes of peace, they want to relax,” said Morgan’s wife, Patricia, as she meticulously gave new life to my dress shoes.
I asked how their shoeshine business has been doing during the recession. Sunny, the Perkins’ daughter, was working next to us. She said business has actually improved. Instead of buying new shoes, people are keeping their old shoes longer, she said, and they need to be polished. Especially for all those job-seekers out there. (The familiar refrain of doing more with less, among techies and non-techies alike.) Her customer, sitting next to me, was a former Washington Mutual employee who just got a job running security for the Sound Transit light rail system in Seattle.
Mr. Perkins had some sage advice for entrepreneurs and startups. “What I’ve learned in my life is, people do things for people they like,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling cars, shining shoes, or you’re the head of this company. If your initial meeting with that person is not positive—it only takes the speed of light for me to figure out if I’m going to like you. And that’s the whole idea right there.”
As Perkins explains, it’s all about building a sincere relationship with customers. “When a person comes into contact with you, it is your duty to create a situation where that person’s going to like you. And that’s not really hard. We want to like other people,” he said. “When I stand here at the door, it’s a smile, ‘Hello sir, how are you doing today?’ And I got you. I’ve seen it happen so many times, a person comes with her husband, I’ll catch the eye of the wife, and he’s looking down. Wife will look down at his shoes, they look at each other, and here he comes. See what I’m saying?”
“You develop a relationship that way,” Perkins continued. “You have to always recognize another’s presence on the face of the earth, no matter what your station in life is. That’s what I’ve always
