It started as a hunch. Thirty years made it a certainty.
I started my sales career selling Christmas cards door to door. I grew up in Appalachia, in a hometown of 52 homes, the youngest of five children. We weren't poor, but there wasn't a lot of extra money floating around, so if I wanted something, I had to earn the money for it. Selling Christmas cards seemed easy to me. Just show people the catalog and they gave me money. I followed that up in the spring selling seeds, then lawn mowing and snow shoveling and leaf raking. It was all about figuring out what people were willing to pay for and delivering exceptional value. That drove repeat business and word of mouth, which was pure gold in that little neighborhood.
My first real sales job was selling newspaper subscriptions over the phone. We substantially grew subscription revenue, but more importantly, subscriptions drove advertising revenue, which was where the real money was. Understanding that connection let us charge high fees for every subscription we delivered. I traveled and set up phone rooms for newspapers all over the East Coast. What we did for those stodgy newspaper companies was close to alchemy, creating rapid growth and profitability where there had only been steady decline. Our offer was simple: we only got paid on the results we delivered, so getting them to say yes was easy.
Buffalo, the year the steel mill died.
After college I moved to Buffalo the year the Bethlehem Steel plant shut down. It was the fourth-largest steel mill in the world. Twenty thousand people lost their jobs and the city was devastated. Every business that served the mill shut down. Most of the businesses that served those businesses shut down too. A disastrous domino effect.
Yet in the midst of all that failure, there were businesses that thrived. I studied them. I talked with their leaders. What I saw was a difference in point of view: they simply refused to die. They doubled down by getting close enough to their customers to smell their breath and learn in detail what they needed, then delivered that and more. They survived. They grew. They thrived.
My training and consulting company figured it all out right beside them, and the lessons of survival stuck with me. Inside every company are the seeds of a double or a triple. You have to find them, nurture them, feed them, and fuel them with optimism and strategy and hard work and the belief that you will succeed no matter what. That is what I do with every company I work with.
Over the next twenty years I worked with more than 2,000 clients, digging into their businesses to take them from where they were to where they wanted to go. When you're inside that many businesses, you learn the patterns, and patterns are the magic. They're shortcuts. They drive the heuristics. Seeing the patterns quickly is the key. Fixing the broken ones fast, and leveraging the ones that are working even faster, delivers the growth that stays so elusive to most companies.
The belief holds up where it counts: the scoreboard.
The conviction isn't a slogan. It's been tested in some of the most demanding rooms in business, and the numbers bear it out.
And the belief has shaped work across the corporate landscape, from the Fortune 500 to fast-growing founders:
Abbott · Ameriprise · AutoZone · Bayer · Caterpillar · Intel · Merrill Lynch · Verizon · Husqvarna
We grew Husqvarna on very small budgets, because we had a small group of zealots and a brilliant CEO who believed in missionary work: converting one small dealer at a time, until we could convert one medium-sized dealer at a time, and ultimately one large dealer at a time. Meanwhile we grew the heck out of the small dealers by coming alongside them as business partners. We learned their business until we knew it better than they did. Then we helped them grow exponentially.
I'm impatient. My need for speed drives me to make big changes faster than most leaders are comfortable with. They like it when things are under control, but exponential growth isn't calm and organized. It requires breaking things and rapid change, and that's the most fun you can ever have in a business: building a high-performance team committed to a daring destination and willing to do what it takes, ethically, to get there.
The ideas, written down, so they outlast any one engagement.
Along the way, the frameworks became books, twelve of them, on selling, branding, alignment, leadership, service, and growth, including the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek bestseller Overpromise and Overdeliver. Thousands of keynotes carried the ideas to stages worldwide. And the methodologies, Collaborative Selling, Revenue on Demand, We Before Me, gave companies repeatable systems, not just inspiration.
The through-line across all of it never changed. Every book, every talk, every framework is another answer to the same question: how do you grow, on purpose.
The real alchemy: turning lead into gold, for everyone.
I believe entrepreneurship is the greatest wealth creator in the world. It's the real alchemy, turning lead into gold, creating prosperity for all.
My next venture is designing a platform to engage, facilitate, and launch millions of people into the bliss and joy of entrepreneurship, and the freedom of owning their own thriving business.