Sanford Weill never turned down even the smallest client. Why? Because you never know where a relationship might go.

In 1960, Weill and several partners founded Carter, Berlind, Patoma & Weill, a Wall Street firm that concentrated on retail sales and investment banking.

"A lot of brokers at the time didn't want to take on certain kinds of business," Weill said in a recent Investor's Business Daily interview. "I didn't think that way. Some of my first customers were waiters and captains, people I met in restaurants, working people. Their accounts may have been only $5,000, but they know people. They might recommend me to someone with a $500,000 or a $1 million account."

Ultimately, those restaurant employees helped lead Weill to his salad days. Weill went on to turn a small Baltimore-based finance company, Commercial Credit, into international financial giant Citigroup.

Now retired and the author of the just-published "The Real Deal: My Life in Business and Philanthropy," Weill used what he called an "informal decision-making process" in running his companies. Its main ingredient? Personal contact.

"I never used a computer," he said. "I don't have a BlackBerry. I don't send e-mail. I managed by walking around. I got to know thousands and thousands of employees in the company. I listened to what they had to say. My policy was to answer phone calls from anyone inside the company before anyone who called from outside.

"It's very hard to manage a business by talking to just seven or eight people. If you walk around and hear the same thing from enough people, then maybe it really is happening."

Tell It Like It Is

Members of his inner circle were never yes men.

"I hated people who told me what they thought I wanted to hear," he said. "I already know what I feel. I want to hear other opinions and other thoughts. If you don't get that kind of input, you're prone to make mistakes."

Sometimes meetings became contentious. But Weill felt that was important, because that allows "for a release of tension and ill will," he wrote.

Once Weill got the necessary information, he was ready to act. "People said I had intuition," he said. "But it was a studied intuition, based on years of experience and of reading and talking to people. My reaction was based on decades of being a student of this business.

"Also, I didn't have a fear of change," he continued. "I always looked on change as an opportunity, and when you do that, when you're open to change, you get to see a lot more things than when you're afraid of change."

Weill also is confident. When he's convinced he's right he moves ahead, ignoring doubters.

For example, there were many naysayers in the investment community when Commercial Credit acquired Primerica. But Weill saw the potential for great synergy and the opportunity for cross selling. So he went ahead.

"I may have gone against the grain in diversifying our business and accepting a leveraged balance sheet," he wrote. "But I felt confident we were heading in the right direction and (was) determined to prove our doubters wrong."

Weill recognized a good thing when he saw it — even if it originated elsewhere. In 1978, when he was running Shearson, Merrill Lynch introduced cash management accounts. These offered customers interest accounts, check-writing privileges and even credit cards on funds kept in their accounts. Previously, brokerage firms used these funds to generate sizable profits — without paying interest to clients.

"I think for a while I resisted what Merrill did, because I only looked at the side of what we would lose," Weill said. But he understood that the increased volume of business a product innovation can generate more than compensates for reduced profit margins. He changed his mind. "I became convinced over time watching what Merrill was doing that the improved product would enable us to be more competitive with banks," Weill said.

The Weill Way

For a person called upon to speak regularly, Weill suffered from "speechophobia." So he developed a special technique. "I was always very nervous about public speaking, and I never wanted to take lessons," he said. "I'd watched (others) who had lots of lessons and I thought sometimes they didn't teach them how to relate to people."

Instead of giving a speech, Weill regularly told his audience, "You've heard enough speeches. What questions do you have?"

"I wanted to be my bumbling self," he said. "I made eye contact, and always felt that by doing a question-and-answer format — even in groups of 800 or 1,000 people — we'd talk about issues they were concerned about rather than talking about issues they really weren't interested in."

Weill believes you make great progress only if you set ambitious goals. And set ambitious goals. And set ambitious goals.

"I always set a goal far out and as we approached that goal I'd throw out a new one and we approached that goal I'd throw a goal further out," he said. "The idea is to always have a goal."

That doesn't mean Weill was looking for a do-it-my-way confrontation. He believes you have to choose your battles.

In 1992, Primerica acquired a minority stake in Travelers Insurance. Weill had never purchased a minority interest in a company before, but still the four seats he had on the board enabled him to push for some changes. And there was — at least in the eyes of Bob Lipp, the manager Weill assigned to check into Travelers — a lot more wrong.

Some of Lipp's issues were minor. Travelers maintained a full weather forecasting department when Lipp felt anyone interested could easily check the Weather Channel. The chief medical officer was a dentist. But with so many other issues, Weill urged patience. "I counseled him to be careful in choosing his battles and stay focused in the big picture," Weill said.

He took that advice to heart when he was approached in 1987 about working out a deal for E. F. Hutton. Weill did his due diligence, and found some financial and legal issues. When the Hutton board decided to put the company up for bid, that was a deal breaker. Weill doesn't like competitive deals and didn't participate.

While he would've liked to add Hutton to the Commercial Credit portfolio of companies, Weill chose to stick to his principles. "I understood that it's always best to walk away when you can't move forward on your own terms," he said.

BY CURT SCHLEIER