Well dressed in Utah Valley means that you’re wearing your best pair of jeans tucked into your nicest sneakers.
A well-dressed 30-year-old man takes the stage, boldly, with his hands in exactly the right place. Confidence personified.
“These are the five steps to success in sales,” he begins, plastering his magnum opus on the screen.
Lead the customer to a ‘yes’
Assume the sale
Manage your time - time is money
Be persistent
Offer something of value
A group of other college guys cackled behind me. Channeling my inner Larry David, I turned around and shushed them. It was a rented out theater, to be fair, so I felt like movie etiquette should apply. I had free popcorn and candy to prove it.
We were two speakers deep into the 2008 company-wide sales training in Lehi, UT for Platinum Protection, a now defunct home alarm system company that sold their product door-to-door using an army of college kids. Birthed from the incestuous backwaters of Utah-based “summer sales” companies, Jason Downey was mid-speech when what turned out to be his team of hyenas nearly (shame) choked to death holding back their laughter.
To be descriptive, Jason was a bro. When you Google “Utah summer sales bro,” a GIF appears of Jason, ears tucked in to his sk8er hat, Affliction tee and True Religion jeans in place, caressing his high school football state championship trophy with a face that says "this tan is natural and I banged your mom." Is it banged or bung?
“The stockings were hung by the chimney with care.”
My mother was bung by J Downey with care.
“My father was hanged for being a traitor.”
My mother was banged for being a vixen.
It’s banged.
Now don’t presume that Jason is a dummy. On good word he made $700,000 the year before so, you know, to college freshman he was... a god, basically. Or at least he was that one god that got veneers at 25, you know the one. It was enough to buy him a huge house with a pool, two new Mercedes SUVs (one for his mom, aaw) and a Lamborghini. At the time that made sense - that was more money that I’d ever known anyone to make so I was mainly surprised that he hadn’t bought a professional sports team.
As it turns out, the peanut gallery behind us was frollicking in the hidden message embedded in Jason's presentation - the five steps of success - L - A - M - B - O. It was like magic eye art for dipshits. He made a half-hearted attempt at concealing his glee upon the planted discovery, made evident by bold letters in a Michael-Scott-like PowerPoint animation to ensure that the joke decapitated the dead horse. But hey, this guy made stacks on stacks. In the infamous pyramid shape of Utah-based organizations, he was standing atop, admiring the view, soaking in the laughter of the plebs. He made predetermined percentages on the sales of the teams in his region, his own team’s sales, and his own personal sales. Layers of money and prestige that would make any recently returned Mormon missionary like myself rush for the Kool-Aid stand.
Indeed, this is an industry built on the back of the Mormon church’s mission program. In Mormondom, kids in their late teens (mostly boys) serve a two-year mission to some part of the world to spread God’s word. With thousands of well-trained salesmen coming back home every year to BYU, the church-owned college, it would be a crime to let all of that persistence, grit, and tenacity go to waste as mere “spiritual growth” experiences. Similar to military training, Mormon missions create resilient youth, obedient and battle-tested, ready for the wonderfully structured life that lay ahead. For most boys, this looks something like graduating college with a Mormon-temple-married wife and a baby on the way, debt free, moving to stable accounting job, serving in the church part time while working said job full time until said wife raises all six children so that you can serve the said church full time as a “senior” missionary, hopefully at a church history site like Adam-ondi-Ahman (aka Davies County, Missouri - aka the location where the literal Adam and Eve lived when they were literally kicked out of the literal Garden of Eden and where the literal resurrected Christ will literally have a secret meeting with LDS church leaders before the literal second coming). Or maybe the warehouse where they can peaches in Salt Lake. Either way, it’s a blessing! Where was I? Sales. So in an effort to monetize the sales skills forged in the fires of pavement pounding preachers, budding entrepreneurs tapped the Utah Valley student market and created a multi-billion-dollar industry, converting volunteer salesmen for God into Lambo-buying salesmen for [insert product here]. An embarrassingly obvious business opportunity, worthy of a slightly oversized flat-billed hat tip to you, Todd Petersen.
And I drank the Kool-Aid. I sold pest control door-to-door one summer. That was hard. I sold home alarms door-to-door for two summers. That was harder. But before any of that, I sold golden plates and sobriety door-to-door for two years. That was my pièce de résistance. Years later I explained my door-to-door days to a coworker who said "I can't think of anything harder to sell, except for religion of course." I didn't give him the pleasure of knowing that I ate religious sales for breakfast.
I came to door-to-door sales for the money, and I stayed for the money. For a college kid whose job opportunities included Subway or selling my own plasma in order to afford dinner and a movie with a lady, the prospect of commission-based sales struck a particularly hopeful chord. "Don't spend the summer in some boring internship,” they say. “Go with your friends to a new city and make thousands of dollars," they say. So I did. And they were right. It was a blast and I made good money. Every year when April turned to May, I put on the white polo and khaki shorts uniform, reached up and grabbed the lower-middle-class-from-rural-Nevada chip off of my shoulder, and used it to knock on 100 doors per day, six days a week, all summer. This translated into a little over one sale per day for ~100 days. At around $500/sale * ~120 sales, I pulled in ~$60k that first summer in personal sales. I was in love. I had found my calling in life. I had achieved the American dream and got to see more of America in the process. Texas. Ohio. North Carolina. Chicago! Naturally, I immediately went shopping for a BMW. Standard procedure for a noob trying to look less nooby. My manager was older and wiser than me (a graceful 24) and said that that was a dumb idea. Gratefully, I kept my Honda.
It was now fall 2008 and the housing crisis was in full bloom. My dad is a general contractor in the Las Vegas area, the equivalent at that time to being the Budweiser sales rep assigned to Utah County. To make matters worse, my parents had recently lost their life savings in a Ponzi scheme, a sadly common occurrence in rural America and a decision from which they’ve never fully recovered. “The eldest son of a financially struggling family has two choices,” so went my logic:
Sit in Humanities like a schlup, grinding out an undergrad degree with a $5/hr side job or
Take a page from Frank Abignail Jr... “I’m gonna get it all back now Daddy, I promise. I’m gonna get it all back.”
Now I wasn’t willing to do anything illegal - I was a righteous Mormon boy after all. But whatever paid me the greatest number of U.S. dollars without explicitly breaking any laws, that’s what I wanted. Little did I know that that was the slogan for the Utah Valley Chamber of Commerce (bam), which helps explain the multi-level-marketing industry (bam bam).
So this is the point where my friends started dropping out of school and I almost did too. Many thought that this was the life and would be forever. And for some it has been. Lord knows where this little desert boy got the condescending idea that they were all fools, but I continued on with school, however unsuccessfully. At the same time, in an effort to create a sufficiently large nest egg should my parents face foreclosure of the house that my dad and grandpa built with their bare hands, I became a sales manager. Now this didn't mean that I got a paycheck, haha, how silly. It just meant that if I recruited people to sell for me then I would make a portion of their sales. It meant that I moved one level up the pyramid. This required recruiting students during the school year, training them by practicing sales in nearby neighborhoods, and making sure logistics were in place before school let out for the summer. I went from a 3.9 GPA to academic probation virtually overnight, punctuated with a D+ in Financial Management (as an investment professional the irony is, of course, not lost).
But for a country bumpkin like me, that just meant that I got to make money AND get a degree. Hooray! The quality of that degree didn’t matter nor did my grades. After all, you only need good grades to go to graduate school, right, and that wasn’t in the cards for me. So, assuming my generic degree would be accepted universally as a fungible VIP pass, I started browsing the job market. I googled around to find which industries made the most money, my one and only goal given the circumstances in my family and in the country. I saw a lot of references to Wall Street (ironic given the recent implosion), which was great because I loved New York due to my Saturday Night Live fetish. Done. That was easy. So right before a big sales training one night, I stopped by an information session for a company called “Goldman Sachs”. Funny name but I’d heard of them from TV and thought, “if these guys are on Wall Street, I need to make sure they know who I am and that I’m interested in them.”
I showed up in sneakers and a t-shirt, copies of my resume tucked into a faux leather folder that I saw the rich kids carrying. The ballroom was packed with hundreds of students, mostly guys, suited up, ready for church. They seemed to know what to say and to whom they should be talking. They talked about their internships at places with Morgan in the name and how excited they were about investment banking, whatever that was. Now what I experienced at that moment wasn't a feeling of embarrassment for not being dressed up or unpreparedness for not having interesting talking points. I'd been a fish out of water before and was good at fitting in. But this was different. This feeling was more like a deep and profound truth that was being injected into my chest like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. It was obvious to me and I assumed that it was obvious to everyone else. I was fully expecting at any moment for someone to step up to the mic and say, "You with the used Vans from Savers. You don’t belong here.” That feeling converted to imposter syndrome over time as I found some professional and academic success, but at that point it was, to me at least, quite simply a tangible fact that not only was I not a competitive player in this game, but that I didn’t even realize what game was being played. That was the first and last information session that I ever attended.
I buried myself in recruiting and preparing for the summer, the thing that I knew and could control. I made ~$80k each of the next two years - better, but not commensurate with the time that I wasted recruiting during school, and not enough to make up for my bad grades. With graduation upon me and no job prospects of which to speak, I started interviewing with anyone that would listen to me. I was determined to not become a lifelong door-knocker. A handful of on-campus interviews ended with what I can best describe as that feeling when your relatively attractive blind date arrives, sits down, and smiles, only to realize that she doesn't have any teeth. You know the feeling. Dinner is already happening so you make conversation, but you just can't forget about the whole no teeth thing. How will she even eat her food? Should I order the soup in solidarity? Do I ask why she has no teeth? Does she have some disease where her teeth fall out and she can’t buy dentures? Am I the crazy one here or is she supposed to mention something about the fact that she looks like a functioning meth addict? You see, in this analogy, my grades are the teeth. The girl's lack of teeth equates to my lack of good grades, both discovered only after it was too late. No teeth = no grades. That's why I used the example, because of the analogous relationship between the two general concepts.
By some miracle, performed no doubt by St. Isidore the patron saint of farmers and rural communities, I stumbled upon someone who was willing to overlook my grades and actually cared more about my sales background. He was the manager of a private wealth management office for Merrill Lynch. I’d actually heard of them. He took me out to a nice steak dinner, talked the job up, and I signed the dotted line. It was a dream come true. And it was an actual paycheck, not commission-based. I was making $57k per year right out of college, with no internships and a 3.0. Waiting for the catch as the anticipation for graduation came, it never arrived.
I moved to San Francisco, which was actually the best decision I ever made, and started my all-but-assured path to fame and fortune. I rode the bus into work smiling, looking around, expecting all of the other lottery winners to be friendly and welcome me to their ranks. “I’m new here,” I’d say. “Oh! Welcome to the 30 Express. This is the nice one that skips the riff raff and drives straight through to the financial district, where the streets are paved with gold and the ATMs spew cash out like a fountain at the Bellagio. Can I trouble you for your full name so that I can emboss it on this membership card which will get you into the most elite clubs and restaurants in town? And you look like a 38 long - I’ll have your jacket made by the afternoon return trip home. Don’t worry, you’ll never have to worry about money again. You work on Wall Street now.” I stood in the only square foot that could house me, clutching the strap above so that I didn’t fall into the guy sharing my shoulder space, probably some hedge fund manager. Water was dripping slowly onto my head, explaining the vacancy. There was a smell that I couldn’t place at the time but with years of experience became quite familiar and identifiable - that of an unbathed human body secreting various fluids over weeks and months into unwashed clothes. The San Francisco homelessness epidemic would become more tangible years later, but at first all it did to me was start to remove the luster of my first day as a professional.
The fading of the luster accelerated. I basically realized after a few days on the job that my job hadn’t really changed. All I had really done was swap walking shoes for a phone. I was actually part of a training program and after a year I would be switching from my salary to my commission, so I had exactly one year to try and exceed my salary starting from zero, a fact not explained to me. Most people didn’t make it and their income decreased for a few years until they made it out of the hole and into positive territory again. So I dialed for dollars. 200 calls/day * 5 days = 1,000 calls a week… and the numbers game continued. I actually did well, but after years of pounding the pavement and months of pounding the phones, I was tired of sales and ready to move on. So, like the guy who tried to trade a paperclip for a house, I worked my way through jobs, upgrading firms as I went, trying to reach the top of the food chain.
It’s true that salesmen like to hear how good they are with people just like attractive people like to hear how attractive they are (so I hear). But what they both love to hear is how smart they are. An insecurity held as long as I can remember, my brain lies to me that I’ll never be smart enough. And so I attempt to prove it wrong. I spent six years studying part-time, adding letters to my name to make sure that my salesmanship wouldn’t have to do all of the talking going forward. I asked future employers if I would have to do any sales, marketing, or anything else that could be perceived as salesy. I wanted to be respected and the only way I thought to do that was to run away from sales. The irony of course is that the smartest people I know are also the best salespeople. That I should have embraced that strength rather than shunned it. And there’s the buried lead - my oversimplified, binary decision tree of “sales or smarts” was only two-thirds correct. The answer was “and” all along. Put that on a motivational poster.
My exit from sales was almost as satisfying as my entrance. Those years were a formative and valuable chapter of my existence, but it never felt fully me. I just played a sales guy on TV. There are still days when I miss the highs and lows. The days when I’d make five sales and put $2,500 in my pocket or have a five-day cold streak and punch a nearby telephone pole until my hand was swollen and throbbing. Like a hunter-gatherer eating what I killed, there was a great deal of freedom and, while intoxicating, pressure, to direct sales. Pressure to measure up, but also real economic pressure that only someone without a safety net knows.
Ultimately, I ran away from sales and often still find myself avoiding it like an old girlfriend despite my better judgement. And I can’t complain. Things worked out great for me, and most of the time I don’t actually miss it. But every time I see a bright orange Lambo creeping slowly down the street, I wonder.
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