Friendly Competition

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” is a sometimes quoted and often misquoted saying that is credited to the book The Art of War from over 4000 years ago and the Godfather Part 2 movie a mere 40 years ago.

While much has been said about that quote, today I’m going to share another personal story about a friend of mine who just passed away this past month unexpectedly and how that quote started off a friendly competition that became a true friendship and mentorship for nearly two decades.

I’ll conclude with some lessons and wisdom for you to apply to your life and business.

This friend of mine is Ron Latham.

I thought I first met Ron in 2003.  I’ll explain more about that in a moment.

In 2003, I was returning to the world of media and marketing to join a group of radio stations in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  Travis Broadcasting was their company name which a year later became the Summit City Radio Group.  Ron was one of the older salespeople in his early 60’s and I was in my early 40’s.  Ron was very competitive and instead of just being boastful, he went out and beat his competitors.

As one of 6 new salespeople that started in early 2003, he didn’t really pay attention to me or the rest of us, he just went out and did his thing while we did ours but I later learned, he took pride in being the best each month.

About a year after I started, management held a sales meeting and announced new goals and budgets for each of us.  When the meeting adjourned, as we were all walking back to our offices, most of my coworkers were unhappy, including Ron.  I asked him, what’s wrong and he told me over his shoulder, “I don’t care about their stupid goals, I have my own that are higher than those.”   I responded, “I just have one goal.”

Ron stopped walking and turned around and said with a little snarl, “Yeah, what’s that?”

I told him, “To beat you.”

That lit up his eyes with a competitive spirit that said, “Game On.”  We made a little side wager, loser would have to buy lunch at the end of each month.

Ron hated to lose, and I did too, but I’ve been what I call “quietly competitive”.  Cool and calm on the outside, but a fighter just below the surface.  Over the next several months, this lunch wager was fun.  We compared billing and the first month I won.  Probably shocked the old guy that someone like me was able to beat him at something he’d been doing for 40 years.

“Anyone can get lucky for a month,” he said as we ate that first lunch that he paid for.  The competition continued.  Month two, he got his revenge and I bought lunch.  Month three and month four came and went and I won those two months. Then it was his turn to be on top for a month while I got a free lunch the month after that.

Within 6 months a new found respect and friendship developed out of this friendly competition and while I believe I beat him by at least one month before we stopped, everyone really won.  Ron’s billing grew to new heights, as did mine and we helped a bunch of local businesses with their advertising and marketing.

Ron decided to leave those radio stations when they did some programming changes that wiped out a big chunk of his monthly billing and income, but he was a wanted man, in a good way.  He had offers to sell advertising at other places including the monthly Hispanic newspaper.  That’s a story in itself.

The publisher of the Hispanic newspaper, Fernando met Ron and did a Spanish Language weekend radio show which expanded to 7 nights a week.  The programming changes I mentioned cancelled Fernando’s radio show, however Ron joined forces with Fernando and became the Gringo Sales Manager for the Hispanic paper.  See, Ron couldn’t speak a lick of Spanish, and didn’t want to learn.  But he saw the opportunity for mainstream businesses to advertise in the paper and invite the Hispanic community to spend their money in their stores.

After Ron turned 65, he moved to California for about a year with family but couldn’t stand it and returned to Fort Wayne.  Ron had an apartment in the same historic high rise that the Hispanic newspaper was located and the paper was Ron’s main gig.  It didn’t pay a lot he said but it was his “buttered popcorn money”. He and some of his older buddies would get tickets to the local college football games in the fall, Komets hockey in the winter and Tincaps baseball in the summer.

Ron was always a huge sports fan and basketball was his main game.  However he also took up golf and other activities to stay in shape.

In 2013 I joined WOWO radio.  I learned that the WOWO radio sales team had a tradition of taking a day off in the summer to go golfing. The only golf that I knew was miniature golf so Ron offered to teach me and once or twice a week we’d spend an evening at the golf course using some passes he traded for advertising in the Hispanic newspaper.  When the big event came that summer, I wasn’t the worst, but we quickly played “best ball” to keep the game moving.  My golf skills have only gotten worse since that first year and I never was able to beat Ron.

I did beat him bowling a few times and miniature golf too.

Remember the lunch wager I mentioned awhile ago?  When Ron returned from California, he and I started a new tradition of a weekly lunch without the wager since we worked for two totally different forms of media.

Over the nearly two decades that we were friends, I learned a lot from Ron.  He started out as a bit of a mentor to me.  We explored ideas and brainstormed.  If I had a client that I needed some extra input on, Ron was a great person to bounce my idea off of.  And it turns out, he did the same with me.

My step-daughter who is now in her 30’s was on the girls basketball team in high school and Ron’s wife at the time was the head coach for another girls team in town, one that won multiple championships.  I learned a lot about the game of basketball too from my friendship and conversations with Ron over the years.

I noticed over the past year that Ron was slowing down a little bit, as all of us were forced to live our lives differently with the onset of the Covid-19 Pandemic that shut down so many things including all the sporting events that Ron would have normally been doing.  He and I continued our nearly weekly lunches when the world began opening up, even if it meant a trip thru the drive thru and sitting in a parking lot “socially distanced” in our own cars.

March 4, 2021 was the last lunch we had together.  He turned down the opportunity I offered him to return to his beloved WOWO Radio as a part-time, “free lance” salesperson.  WOWO was where he started his advertising career 60 years earlier.

A week later, he contacted me in the middle of the night with a plea for help. It was a few days after he had contracted the shingles virus in his ear and the constant pain was making it impossible to get any rest.  I went to his home, contacted medics who took him to the hospital and the last time I saw Ron was when I visited him in the Emergency Room to deliver his phone.  The medical staff were assessing his situation and over the next two weeks discovered some other undiscovered health issues that ultimately made it impossible for him to recover.  His only son was allowed to be with him in Ron’s final day since the hospital was abiding with the strict precautionary protocols brought on by the current pandemic.  That was the only person outside of the medical team who got to see Ron after I saw him in the ER a couple weeks prior.

I found three pictures to share of Ron and myself.  The first was from 2009, when he and I were in our weekly lunch routine while working for different media companies,  I think he was scowling at me having another hot dog or something.

The middle picture was snapped in 2004 about the time we were in the middle of our friendly lunch wager competition at a basketball tournament that our radio stations were sponsoring.

And the last picture was a shocker to both Ron and myself.  When he was preparing to move to California, they were downsizing and Ron found a box of old pictures from the 1980’s.  Turns out we did NOT meet in 2003.  We actually played basketball on the WMEE Basketballer’s team. This picture from 1982 features a gangly radio disc jockey named Scott Howard whose only qualification to be on the team was I was the night time WMEE radio disc jockey, sitting next to a much better basketball player named Ron Latham who was a ringer for our team so we wouldn’t be entirely embarrassed when we went out to play in charity games.

With the passing of my friend who was 18 years my senior but we developed a friendship like brothers, I have some lessons to pass on.

1.  Friendly Competition can be life changing.  While you may view your competition as the enemy because they are going after the same customers you are, that’s just an illusion.  You and your competition are different in ways that may not be obvious. Those differences is what is likely going to determine who the customer buys from.  Learn from each other and you’ll both be better. In the fast food world, some people prefer a flame broiled Whopper while others prefer a Big Mac.  Apply that to what you do too.
2. Mentor One Another.  Just as I learned from Ron when he and I started working together in 2003, he was also learning from me over the years.  I recall a comment he made 10 years ago about how he could never do things my way because we just thought differently.  But we both used the other persons strengths to improve ourselves.  Today, I have 5 very different people on my advertising sales team at WOWO radio.  They are doing the things that Ron and I would do in bouncing ideas back and forth and mentoring each other.  How can you develop that in your world?
3. Get Personal.  When you make it all about business or competition, you lose out on the human side of competition.  Do you know the names of your competitors family members?  Do you ever hang out with them?  If something were to happen to you, could you reach out to them for help?

Thanks for indulging me today with this reflection of my nearly 2 decades of friendship with my adopted older brother, Ron Latham that I disguised as some lessons for all of us in what can happen with a little Friendly Competition.