This is a great story about how an Alaskan fishing guide was offered a position at a tech company after spending 10 days in the wilderness with the company’s CEO and his father.
There was fishing, camping, a helicopter ride into the Alaskan wilderness and even an encounter with a grizzly bear. But what I love about this story is how unusual it is and how those 10 days allowed two people to learn about one another.
Character is something you experience, and experience requires time.
Andreas Spiegelhauer is the CEO of Robopack, a Copenhagen-based tech company focused on endpoint management and security within the Microsoft ecosystem. In his LinkedIn bio, Andreas says he is striving to “assemble and enable a team of highly talented people.”
When he traveled from Denmark to Alaska for a 10 day fishing trip, though, he wasn’t there looking for talent. He was there for the experience.
For the next 10 days, Mason Graves served as the guide in which Andreas got to experience him doing his job in an environment where being good at it meant more than knowing where the fish were.
Mason was responsible for taking Andreas and his father into a part of Alaska they didn’t know. They had to trust his knowledge, his preparation and definitely his judgment. They spent their days together and slept in tents at night. And when a grizzly bear wandered a little too close, Andreas got to see how Mason handled himself when things suddenly became a little more serious.
None of this was a job interview.
Mason wasn’t trying to impress a potential employer. In fact, a few days into the trip, when Mason finally asked Andreas what he did for a living and Andreas told him he was the CEO of a tech company, Mason didn’t believe him.
“Mind you, he’s 29 years old,” Mason told me. “Handsome guy from Denmark. And I’m like, ‘You’re not the CEO of a tech company. There’s just no way.'”
Then Came the Bear
Before taking clients into bear country, Mason would ask them a pretty important question.
“What are you gonna do if you see a bear?”
Most people gave the answers you’d probably expect. Grab the bear spray. Run. Get behind the guide.
Andreas had another plan.
“Well, I’ll just punch him in his face.”
Eventually, they actually encountered a grizzly.
Mason knew the bear was feeding and watched as it came closer. Andreas and his father started asking what they should do. Mason told them to be quiet. When the bear finally noticed them, the group made themselves big and the bear took off.
Mason looked over at Andreas.
“You didn’t punch him in his face.”
It’s a funny part of the story, but it’s also part of what makes this entire situation so interesting to me.
You can ask someone in an interview how they handle pressure. You can ask how they communicate with people or what they would do when something doesn’t go according to plan.
And then there’s spending 10 days in the Alaskan wilderness with them.
I don’t know exactly what Andreas saw in Mason during those 10 days that stayed with him. I’d have to ask him. But it’s not difficult to see what the experience gave him the opportunity to observe.
He got to know Mason as a person.
Then the trip ended.
They had a few drinks together back in Talkeetna, said goodbye and went on with their lives.
For roughly two years, they didn’t speak.
“You’re a Salesman at Heart”
Then Mason received an email from Andreas.
He wanted to catch up.
One conversation led to another until Andreas eventually told Mason he thought he could be an asset to his tech company.
There was just one problem.
“Dude, I’m a fishing guy,” Mason remembers telling him.
Andreas’s response says a lot.
“Yeah, but you’re a salesman at heart.”
Mason didn’t have the traditional background you might expect for someone being recruited to help a European technology company establish its sales operation in the United States.
What Andreas did have was his own experience with Mason.
And Mason’s experience as a guide had given him skills that translated surprisingly well.
He told me about guiding fishermen who had been fishing for 40 years when he was only 20. It didn’t matter that they had more years of fishing experience. They were somewhere they had never been before, and they needed to trust Mason to guide them through it.
“You go out and you build relationships with clients while you’re out there,” Mason said. “Things take time. They don’t happen overnight.”
He approaches sales much the same way today.
Taking the Chance
Getting Mason to actually take the job took a little more work.
Andreas stayed after him. Mason joined calls with the company but wasn’t sure he wanted to leave the life he knew for a small tech company he’d never heard of.
His wife ultimately helped him look at the risk differently.
If it didn’t work out, she reminded him, he could always go back to guiding.
Andreas then asked Mason to sit in on 10 product demos so he could see the company and its customers for himself.
It only took two.
“By 9:00am, I said, ‘Yeah, I’d like to work for this company.'”
Mason became one of Robopack’s earliest employees and today leads direct sales in the United States.
There is something I really like about how all of this came together.
Andreas went to Alaska looking for someone to guide him through unfamiliar territory. He spent 10 days getting to know the person doing it, with no job on the line and no reason for Mason to be anything other than himself.
Two years later, when Andreas needed someone to help his company navigate unfamiliar territory in the United States, he remembered his fishing guide.
Toward the end of my conversation with Mason, after hearing him explain how much of his approach to guiding had followed him into sales, I told him it sounded like he was still a guide.
“At heart,” he said.
He just happens to be guiding people somewhere different now.
Developers.Net attends technology conferences across the country, every month, connecting with the people scaling their business while building and implementing emerging technology. To connect with our team at an upcoming conference, email [email protected]
