Salesman

I have a degree in photojournalism which was accomplished in 1998, two years before the internet blew up the Nasdaq. In college, I had no idea that the internet was going to demolish journalism as we knew it, but I am also pretty sure that I didn’t know anything about where my heart wanted to lead me. I had already worked through one major drug addiction at the end of my senior year making me miss walking for my graduation by three credits. I had to uninvite my entire family and go live with my brother – who took me to the barber the first day to cut off my long hair which represented my rebellion. He also recommended that I get some kind of rehab, which I didn’t really know how to address as he had also created an awesome job for me. I decided to dive into work which was the creation of a digital photography company in the year 1998.

I was lucky because my brother was an NFL executive and he had access to one of the best sports photographers in the United States and they both thought that digital photography would be the future. We started a little firm called Action Photography which was blessed to have the Seahawks contract for some base income but we were trailblazing with use cases for the digital products that we were creating. Our first outing with all of our equipment was a soccer tournament – this is where the evolution of my salesmanship began. We had the seed of an idea that we could capture photos that parents could never get – we had lenses that were over twenty grand and our new digital camera bodies were fifteen, when you threw in two five thousand dollar printers and a box truck to haul it all, we had quite an array of equipment. We just had to figure out how to monetize it. I walked out to a massive soccer field on a weekend where thousands of parents and coaches were navigating a complex with fields as far as the eye could see and found the league president who gave me the green light to come to their next tournament as long as I shared 10% of my profit. It simply took communication skills to be able to test our proof of concept – would parents by professional images of their children – the answer was yes, if they saw how good they were.

The service evolved to including the team photographs as part of the service to each sports league – we displaced photographers that had been servicing the same leagues for over twenty years. We also added golf tournaments and corporate events which could be commemorated on the boarder of the photograph with beautiful digital graphics. We built a service that was all about instant gratification with a premium product. I was naturally better at the building of the business opposed to the understanding of light in a photograph, even though I very much enjoyed photography what charged me was the growth and the opportunity. I began to realize that my ability to tell our story and to draw others into it was my strongest attribute. One beautiful spring day I was providing action shots to the Redmond Little League, these are the children of Microsoft execs, I began to have a long discussion with the league president whom I had sold our service to and who was very interested in everything we were doing. I came to find out that this man was worth a mint, he had sold his technology business and was very much interested in helping us take ours nation wide.

It sounds like all is well in the world of Jimmy at this point, but that was not the case, I had replaced my drug habit with alcohol. I worked seven days a week on the photo business as the weekends were when all the kids were out playing sports as well as all the corporate events. We worked Christmas at the Space Needle taking photos of Santa with the kids and New Years at Microsoft’s New Year’s Eve Party – we didn’t stop. Every night I was wiped out and I stopped at a bar to keep myself company. We had a business manager at Action Photography and he was a much older man that I took on as a mentor, the only problem was that he liked to drink as much as I did so we became the best of drinking buddies – a twenty-two-year-old college flunky and a sixty something failed business man. Actually my mentor had made and lost millions in his life through multiple successes and failures and his stories of wealth and success were intoxicating. My brother worked so hard at his job that he was very much at the periphery and I ended up being completely led by my mentor, which took me down a very different path. My brother is an excellent listener, if I would have had the guts to tell him where I was at, even though I’m not really sure that I knew where I was at. He had already proved that he was willing to help me – it seemed that he created a business that fit my exact skill set. He let me stay in his home and get myself back on my feet right after college and, looking back, I owed him a lot. I never paid that debt – I just ran from business right after I had sold the idea to a group of investors, including the president of the Redmond Little League.

Doing the wrong thing lead me down a path of a multitude of wrong things, but I did find that I was naturally gifted at selling things, services and ideas. I used this skill in the black market at some point and really fucked up my life, but the falling down is where all the gold is. I took an interview with one of my mentor’s drinking buddies who owned a construction chemicals company and wanted me to sell his products in Texas and surrounding states – he offered to pay me twice what I was making and give me a car allowance. Why would I take this job when we were about to have a huge investment into our photo company? The investors had a completely different company they wanted to spin out of our service company – we had created an on-site service of instant world class photos and they wanted to put everything online – this was in the year 2000 when getting online was not as easy as it is now – we were still dialing in on modems that sounded like they were connecting to a spacecraft every time you got online and the smart phone was really stupid at this point. My twenty-two-year-old self thought the old men that wanted to dismantle what we had built over the last eighteen months were wrong and that I would show them by walking away and selling construction chemicals. I was really running away from accountability and from a solid core of folks who cared about me. I thought of this new job as an unbelievable opportunity and adventure, which it was, just one down a dark path.

At 22, I was not the most responsible salesman, and to be honest the training that I received was excellent, but limited. I was supposed to go out every day and promote our products to construction distribution companies, contractors and architects. The architects would specify the products which the contractors would then have to buy from the construction distributors. I had an eight state territory, but the majority of my business was supposed to come from the three major cities of Texas – Houston, Dallas and San Antonio and surrounding areas. Each day should have been scheduled to include a group of architects, contractors and distributors, but most days consisted of drinking by the pool. The days that I did go out and demonstrate our products were productive, but my level of discipline was horse shit. I failed at this first job even though I kept it for a year without getting fired and sold some impressive jobs near the end. I spent a lot of not-so-business-like funds on my business credit card which my boss asked me for when I quit, a little foreshadowing of my moral compass being broken.

My third adult aged job was earned by asking a woman to go home with me from a fancy Dallas bar – the owners of one of the bigger contractors in Texas had invited me out to drinks even though they didn’t really buy my product. They believed I was a hustler because I had built a relationship with them. I believed they we young owners of a very successful enterprise and I wanted to work for them instead of the drunken snake oil salesman that I had found myself attached to. I told them they needed to hire me after we had consumed several beers and they said that I had to prove to them that I was a good salesman. They pointed at a woman sitting down the bar and told me that if I could get her to come home with me, that they would hire me the next day. I was successful at this conquest and even brought the girl home to the owner’s house and enjoyed the night with her in his guest room, so there was no denying that I had achieved the objective. After having breakfast with my new boss-to-be and taking the fine young lady home, I set off to their office to negotiate the terms of my employment – and, no shit, I got a job that paid twice as much again by being nice to a bubbly young lady who was in to me enough to enjoy a one night stand.

This was a rise in life for me and I fit into this new office environment quite well, being that I needed some structure to excel, but I was only brought to the office for a couple months of training and then sent back to Houston to start an office for this young company out of Dallas. This is what I had negotiated, let me start a Houston office for you – my youthful confidence was unwavering. What I had learned at this young age was that relationships were key and that having the ability to walk through any door and to create a relationship from scratch was the gift that I had – it would take me many years to understand that listening was the key to selling. I started my career with the courage to walk through the door and the ability to vomit knowledge on others as if they needed it and sometimes that was enough. The reality was that I could make the human connection and that is what most others are looking for. The bosses only gave me three months to get the Houston office going – they panicked at that point and asked me to come back to Dallas, they even gave me more money to do so as they realized they had jumped the gun on starting a satellite office. The week they called me back to Dallas, I signed up three large contracts in Houston. I had learned to manage my time better.

I didn’t really like Dallas, the overall vibe was of pretentiousness, and I preferred the blue collar feel that the Houston rough necks gave me, but I moved to Dallas to work for these young owners that made me feel like anything was possible. In that next year in Dallas I became proficient at all things waterproofing and learned how to read construction drawings and documents as well as wine and dine the general contractor construction executives. I made a great living for someone under twenty-five and I was starting to build a foundation of expertise in industrial construction as I was also fading back into my old addictions being the salesman that kept the party going all night long. At that age, I didn’t realize what I was learning, I was just pretty sure that I was awesome and invaluable, neither of which was true. I had become a salesman, but I had not yet become a man..