Chapter 78

     Our home group leader came to me and asked me if I could go meet with a man in our church who was starting a business.  He had never run a business before nor even been a department head at a company.  He knew I was a consultant and thought maybe I could help him.  I agreed to go meet with him.

     A few days later, I drove over to Overland Park, Kansas up off 79th street and met with the owner.  He explained his business model addressing the issue of how software being purchased did not always work the way it was supposed to, and even at times was destructive to the computer.  

     The site he had developed allowed users to post reviews of their experiences with published software products, which gave it up to a five-star rating.  The business model was to contact software publishers and offer them a chance to upgrade their listings on our site, producing a sale. 

     The interview went well all in all, but I found this guy to be incredibly arrogant person, which to me people like this are just not fun to have to deal with.  However, some of them can be helped in kind of a “despite themselves” type of way.  When I was leaving though, I said to myself, “Be careful Rick, this is the kind of guy who could ruin your life.”

     Our first day of training was so brutal, none of the sales guys wanted to come back the next day.  All did except me,  I had seen enough and sent a note letting the owner know this was not for me.

     Returning to my regular routine, I went to the prayer room later that morning.  Shortly after, the owner showed up as he had tracked me down through Lori and he invited me out to lunch. 

     We went to a local spot for lunch, and he asked me if I would come back and give it another try.  I told him straight up, that I thought he was way out of line with how he treated his employees, and his arrogance was unsurmountable and not something I wanted to work around.  

     He admitted he had a problem with pride but made an offer to me stating he would give me full permission to be able to speak up whenever I felt he was out of line, without the fear of retribution and he would listen and try to work things out. 

     That willingness to at least try to treat people right caused me to accept the offer and I returned to work the next day.

     We began sales in April 1996 and for a couple of weeks, we sold nothing at all.  The owner had hired a consultant who had informed us during their test market run they had closed 98% of the sales attempts they had made.  After getting started we found out that no deals were actually closed during the trial run, but they had only gotten expressed interests.  

     They stuck by the sales approach they had developed and would not let us try anything outside the parameters of his dictates, and the sales attempt was a total failure. 

     Two weeks of attempted sales was all I needed to know; this was not going to work.  After many conversations with the owner and making recommendation after recommendation to try sales a different way and being soundly rejected every time,  I realized there wasn’t much I could do for the guy.  Two weeks was enough for me and once again, I resigned.

     A few weeks later I got a call from the owner.  He told me they had not sold any upgrade listings and needed help.  He said he would let me come in and try anything, as long as I could start closing sales right away.  I came in the next day and using a more consultative sales approach, coupled with negotiating on our price point,  I closed the first deal for the company that day.

     Sales took off from there.  We used a T.O. (take over) sales process where the salesman would get the client to the point of sale and then brought in the sales manager to negotiate the close.  It worked and sales started to climb.

     The problem for me was that the owner only paid a very low rate and wanted the salesperson to close deals for commission to make his pay and even on a good day, it was not enough for me to make it worth the effort income-wise.  This was supposed to have been a six-figure income job and the best possible was well below that.  So, I resigned again.

     A few months went by, and I got another call from the owner.  They had flat lined the sales at about $20,000 per month and he was running out of the funds his family had put up for the enterprise.  He needed help right away.

     I agreed to come take a look at everything and found that the users were very interested in the information the site provided, but wanted to know where they could purchase the software that had good reviews.  The natural course would be to offer the software and make additional income from product sales.  

     I presented the idea to the owner, and he promptly shot it down.  That night I was thinking and praying about the problem when the Lord spoke to me, “Don’t tell him, show him”. 

     Right away I knew exactly what to do.  That next morning, I met with the owner and told him I would arrange with software publishers of our top ten most popular reviewed products for us to be able to sell.  He agreed to let me try, stating if only to prove it wouldn’t work.

     It took me about a week to set it all up.  We listed ten products for sale through the website and began selling software.

     A few months later, the owner called me to let me know the venture had failed.  I asked him about the sales ramp numbers which he thought to be dismal.  I asked him to graph the growth in a spreadsheet and tell me the projected income within a year.  He got instantly excited and asked me to come in the next day.

     This ended up changing his whole business model, forming a new company and adding thousands of software listings, we created one of the first software cyber stores on the Internet.  I eventually came in to become the sales manager and ramped up sales to a bit over $1.2 million per month with a gross profit of about 8%.

     There was a key account executive that we hired when I took over as the sales manager.  The original sales staff had burnt out on the owner’s whims and low pay.  I had to fight to get this account executive hired as all of the other leadership team members  were against the hire.  The owner finally relented stating his all too frequent phrase, “I’ll his hire, just to prove you wrong.”

     Needless to say, the owner was totally wrong about the account executive as he became the number one producer, bringing in more sales than the others combined.  But more than that, the account executive brought us what could have been the most profitable deal we could have ever made.

     The account executive came to me telling me about a guy he had on the line asking for us to build him a website similar to ours.  He had seen the company’s cyber store which had been implemented with some of the features I had come up with for ShareValue.  He was asking us to build him the same site with a few minor modifications, while promising not to compete against us selling computer products. 

     The owner finally agreed to speck the deal, and he bid the build-out at $250,000.  We got a call back a couple or so weeks later with an offer.  The man had a bid for $125,000 cash and $125,000 stock and wanted to give us the first opportunity if we would match that offer.

     The owner was so ticked off over the fact that the guy had the gull to shop his specks and try to negotiate the price, he flat refused.

     Everything in me said we needed to do this deal.  I pleaded with the owner to just bite the bullet and do the deal, arguing that we already had the site built and the cost of modification would take less than $25,000 in programing, most of which the owner could do himself.  This would give us $100,000 in cash flow to focus on our sales growth.  But he wouldn’t budge.

     On my last call with this man, I explained the situation and how the owner felt, trying to figure out some way to patch the deal up, but to no avail.  Before we hung up, I asked him if he had registered his company yet and could he tell me its name so I could track it in the future. 

     Very enthusiastically he stated, “amazon.com!” 

     I thought about it for a few seconds but could not come up with a correlation between the name and selling books. 

     So, I asked him, “I may be missing something, but what does the Amazon name have to do with selling books?” 

     Jeff responded saying, “It’s a great name. We are all going to get rich!”

     I walked out of the meeting with the owner mocking my desire to do this deal.  He asked me if I had asked God about it.  I informed him that I hadn’t.  He demanded that I do it right now as he was really put out with my reluctance to let the deal go.

      So, I asked the Lord, “What about this deal”.  Instantly he responded saying, “You would do well to drop everything you’re doing and go work for this man.”