This morning I had a 6:05am flight from Melbourne to Newcastle.
I was staying in Belgrave, about an hour away from the airport.
So I wake up to my alarm at 3:45, jump in the rental car, and arrive at the off-site car rental depot at 5:00. Perfect timing, we are about a 6 minute shuttle ride from the domestic terminal.
The rental place is littered with cars, but, there’s nobody around.
I see a guy in a long sleeve pink shirt drive in with a small white Kia, the same car I had, but there’s nobody else around, the place is shut down, and we need a shuttle to the airport.
Pink shirt guy is a little agitated – and as I walk up to check out the situation, he starts freaking out that there’s no shuttle bus, and we won’t make it. He had a 6am flight…
So, I feed him cab numbers to call as I try to book an Uber on my phone to get us there, but the app tells me that there are “no cars available..” and 4/5 taxi companies didn’t pick up the phone. The last one mumbled that they would send something soon, but it wasn’t very convincing.
While I try to figure out another solution, pink shirt is pacing the driveway, and meanwhile, another van of customers needing a ride rolls in…
I speak to their driver – same thing, they need a lift and have a flight soon, but not until 7am..
We now have about 35 minutes until our planes take off, and I come up with a scheme. I ask pink shirt and another nice woman with the 6:05 flight who’s also turned up out of nowhere, if they are happy to pitch in $30 each if I can convince the van driver to drop us off. He could then come back to the depot to then get a shuttle once it arrived, and still be able to make his 7am flight.
This means the van driver man would get $90 to drive about 12 minutes round trip, and would still make his flight easy. It’s a great deal.
He says no. He doesn’t want to take it.
He looks at his “maps” app to find a reason not to assist – checking out distances, times… then pretending he can’t understand.
Finally, I convince him that this is a rate of $450 per hour, and it’s a great trade, and we’ll all make our flights…
Eventually he reluctantly agrees and we end up making it to the gate right as the final boarding calls go down.
While the $90 was generous of us, as humans, we find that generosity itself is often not enough.
For our generosity to be accepted, we need an element of trust.
Initially, to him we were a crazy looking trio in a hurry saying we wanted to give the man $90 to take us for a ride at 5:30am.
Then, after some level of trust was established, the perception changed.
Being generous is a great option for anyone in business.
But things take time. If your gestures of generosity aren’t accepted straight away, we might need you to show up for a little longer before we are comfortable engaging.
Generosity builds trust, and trust builds generosity.
