What I Learned Having Dinner With a Millionaire

Fidgeting in my seat, I cleared my throat and reached across the silk table cloth, until my fingers brushed the Crystal Wine Glass.

Pulling the delicate Glassware towards my lips, I glanced across the table and met eyes with a Man who made more in a single month than I would within the next five years.

You might have considered what it’d be like to meet someone who is genuinely wealthier than you could ever imagine, so let me tell you about the day I shared Dinner with a multi-millionaire.

Wait, how did I get here?

Okay, I talk a good game. I have plenty of great ideas and I know the value of lip service, so when the day came that I bumped into the CEO of my Company, I spent a couple of minutes addressing my ideas about our Investment Platform. This was, I thought, a fairly blase meeting.

“It’s fine”, I pondered, “he’ll never remember this conversation”

The trouble was, he did remember that conversation and the following day, I received a meeting request from his personal assistant.

Dinner at The Spanish Butcher, one of Glasgow’s most prestigious Steak restaurants… and it was tonight.

The Meal

So, here I was, sat in front of the one man in the world who could, with the click of a finger, lose me my Car, my Mortgage and well, pretty much everything I own.

Wine, that’s the first thing that I noticed. He liked a Glass of Wine and he had the taste for finer Red than I could appreciate.

At Special request, our second bottle of Chateau Margaux 2010 arrived at the Table, in the arm of a young Waiter, who glanced at both of us before smiling, courteously and uncorking the top.

“Let me Taste it first”, a firm statement from across the Table Cloth. It was met be a worried look from the Waiter, who, in turn, looked in my direction as I gave a crooked Smile and raised my eyebrows.

The Wine swished around the Glass as my affluent Host motioned it below his jaw, with his eyes closed and his Mouth open. For the next few seconds, myself and the Waiter were silenced and shared a palpable angst about the forthcoming reply.

Moving the Glass to his lips, He took a generous sip of the Wine, looked towards me and said “Perfect, I love a full-bodied Red”.

The Waiter sighed with relief and left us to our Meal.

The Conversation

Perhaps the first thing that you should know about having dinner with a Millionaire is that you consider absolutely everything you say; Almost to a comedic level. Every sentence that tumbles from your Mouth is immediately questioned in your own head, as you get clammy palms and a noticeable tinge of Rose Red to your cheeks.

I reeled off several such sentences and found myself telling him about my Holidays, Cars, Love of Football and so on. I did genuinely feel for the Guy as he sat there with a Smile on his face.

He was though, very courteous and allowed me to speak. Every reply was measured and seemed to be pulled from a team of literal analysts. No words were mis-placed and none missed their mark. I could see why he was trusted with the Company, he was cut from an entirely different cloth than me.

When I had fumbled my way, awkwardly, through my Life story, we began to discuss Business, with my powerful guest taking the lead. This was, perhaps, where I began to realise the true magnitude of who I was faced with.

To say that, over the next 30 minutes or so, I was given a sales pitch that would make a Fish buy Water, is an understatement. What had started as a view into the future of the Company, had delved deeply into lessons learned, Financial goals and scale.

I was utterly and totally out of my league.

Interjecting wherever I could, I tried to add in responses that met the flow of the conversation. My ideas from the other day padded out the future of the Investment Platform, however, this was merely Cotton Wool in the path of the Sales Pitch.

What I took away from “that Night”

Although this is a very short excerpt of what I went through in our meeting, I took away the following, key points from my Night:

• Millionaires have an aura — Pretty much every Millionaire stands out from the crowd, with few exceptions. Be it the confidence with which they walk or the way they hold themselves, you can almost smell the success on them.

• You are not as interesting as you think you are — A harsh lesson, but I quickly worked out that my life stories weren’t quite as interesting as they sounded in my head!
• The words of a Millionaire sound expensive — In conversation, it was almost as if I had paid to hear him talk. Each sentence flowed naturally into sentences that wouldn’t be out of place in a Life motivation talk. Everything he said left me feeling as if I should leave the room in debt.
• Millionaires Love their Wine — Like really, really love their Wine

So, next time you happen to be invited to a Meal with your Company CEO, make sure you rehearse some impressive stories and, importantly, bring some very expensive Wine!