A few nights ago, Robin Titus and I took 3 clients from Norway to dinner.

Before the dinner, I was told that one of the business men attending is one of the richest men in Norway.

We had a great dinner at Nobu with very nice, down to earth people.

At one point during the dinner, the man whom I had been told is a multi-billionaire leans over to me and says how he was impressed with my team, and especially Robin.

He told me that he googled “Robin Titus” and commented on how he was impressed to see Robin has already been in several newspapers, with the several news articles on him.

One of the richest men in Norway googled 27 year old  “Robin Titus” to get a better understanding of who he was working with …. very cool.

I had a 3 hour run the next morning, and during a large part of the 3 hour run, I thought about this super successful business man … doing his homework on Robin Titus.

Recently, Sophie and I had lunch with Kuwaiti friends/client of naseba.

Over a great lunch at La Petite Maison in Dubai., I shared the story of having a conference call that morning with an American who had requested for the call to “see how we could do business,” but he didn’t even know the name of my company - had no idea what we do and never even looked at our corporate website …  “but, I promise to look at it later…”

My Kuwaiti friend told me I should have told the guy, “always do your homework…” and then he told us a story about how in the mid 90’s he bought a 14,000 acres ranch in Montana…

One day he organized to see a property and flew from New York to a small city in Montana for the day just to see a ranch…
He had spoken to the owner of the company representing the ranch who organized to meet him at the airport.

My friend told us he was ”shocked” when he arrived because he was greeted by only a young man, in his early 20’s – no one else.

In a beautiful British accent our friend described walking off the private plane with what he referred to as a teenager standing at the bottom to greet him … and no one else.
His wife was not with him – he had taken his lawyer and CFO.

But within 10 minutes of being with the young man, he quickly realized that the kid had done his homework … and knew everything about his potential client.

This was before Google … so he still doesn’t understand how the kid was able to know as much as he did – “I guess he hammered the phone calling everyone he could find who knew me, including newspapers in Kuwait to get as much information on me as possible…he even knew my favorite food; my favorite tea; that I like cigars … he knew more about me than my wife!”

As he says, he had halfheartedly looked for a ranch for several years .. and really wasn’t thinking of investing as much as the ranch he was looking at … but because the young man was so good at his job; he had done his homework … this “professionalism and seriousness” encouraged him to look seriously at the property.

… ultimately, he bought the ranch, and less than a year later, he got his brother to buy another ranch from the young man, and over the years he has referred several other friends to the man.

I wonder how much money the sales agent made just because the guy had done his homework?

Always do your homework – no matter how busy you think you might be.