Girard’s Law of 250

Let me explain to you what I call Girard’s Law of 250. A short time after I got into this business, I went to a funeral home to pay my last respects to the deceased mother of a friend of mine. At Catholic funeral homes, they give out mass cards with the name and picture of the departed. I’ve seen them for years, but I never thought about them till that day. One question came into my head, so I asked the undertaker, “How do you know how many of these to print?” He said, “It’s a matter of experience. You look in the book where people sign their names, and you count, and after a while you see that the average number of people who come is 250”.

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Then one day, my wife and I were at a wedding, and I met the man who owns the catering place where the reception took place. I asked him what the average number of guests at a wedding was, and he told me, “About 250 from the bride’s side and about 250 from the grooms”.

I guess you can figure out what Girard’s Law of 250 is, but I’ll tell you anyway: Everyone knows 250 people in his or her life that they can influence with their opinions and experiences – 250! This means that if I see 50 people in a week, and only two of them are unhappy with the way I treated them, at the end of the year there will be about 26,000 people influenced by just those two a week.

Can you afford to have just one person come to see you and leave sore and unsatisfied? Not if just an average person influences 250 others in the course of his or her life. Not if a lot of the people you deal with every day deal with a lot of other people everyday. I don’t care what you really think of the people you deal with. It’s the way you act toward them, the way you deal with them, that is the only important thing.

When you turn away one, just one, with anger or a rude remark, you are running the risk of getting a bad name among at least 250 other people with money in their pockets who might want to give some of it to you. This is a business like attitude that you had better develop and keep in your head every working hour of every day. If you don’t then you could be wiped out by Girard’s Law of 250.