My Trip to the Million-dollar Club
How do you sell $1 million in print and promotional products in a year? What about $2 million? $5 million? $25 million?
I'm not sure I have the answer, but I do have some ideas. I recently had the chance to talk to several million dollar-plus selling distributors, and spend some time thinking about how they got to that level of career success.
Proforma, a large print and promotional products distributorship, was kind enough to fly me out to write about its annual Million Dollar Club event. It's a three-day celebration of all Proforma's owners that have passed the $1 million mark in sales for the year. It's held at a different resort every year. The 2015 event was at the beautiful oceanside Terranea resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. While there, I spoke with high-earning Proforma owners, as well as their support staff and supplier partners, to figure out how and why these distributors were able to break the million-dollar mark in sales.
Proforma Resources and Support
To grow past a very small size, most businesses must specialize their labor. Each staff member cannot have the same job, because at a point, one person with specialized skills will be much more valuable than three or five people doing one-third or one-fifth of the same job. Example: A bakery with a single location would probably function fine with five staff members who all bake, work the front counter and handle deliveries. If that bakery wants to grow to have 20 locations, however, it makes much more sense to have a dedicated staff of bakers, salespeople, and delivery and fulfillment experts. With a much larger staff, the bakery chain can afford to specialize jobs without sacrificing staff flexibility and redundancy. The bakers can focus just on baking, without having to worry about picking up shifts at the counter or helping plot delivery routes, since there are enough staff in each specialty to share among locations, and the same would be true for the salespeople and fulfillment experts. This specialized bakery is a much stronger business than the smaller one, and essentially, it's this kind of specialization that Proforma and other distributor networks offer its owners.
"At the end of the day, my sole focus is our clients and making sure that they're happy," said Glenda McCarthy-Gaspar, Proforma SI Promotions, Newmarket, Ontario, Canada. "When I was doing things on my own, it was very difficult. I've never been transactional, I've always been the total product solution provider, and it's very difficult to do that on your own," she explained. She said that without Proforma's e-commerce, purchasing clout and credit offerings, she would not be able to handle the accounts she currently has.
How Proforma offers specialization to its owners depends on the owner. It has many resources, from marketing and e-commerce to accounting and collections. Owners can pick and choose from these services, taking what they need to grow their businesses.
Joey Klinger, strategic accounts manager, SanMar, Issaquah, Wash., who has attended Proforma's Million Dollar Club for the last four years, commented on the flexibility of Proforma's service offerings.
"You know what's interesting? In our industry you have business owners [who] are salespeople, but a lot of times people are either good at business or good at sales," he said. "What's unique about this environment is that you have people who are very business-oriented who employ salespeople, and then you have salespeople who are good at business, and then you have people who are salespeople, and they're all successful. Proforma provides an environment where each of those entities can thrive."
Spouse, Sibling and Family Support
Of the 118 Proforma owners at Million Dollar Club this year, 43 (or about 36 percent) worked with either a spouse, sibling or parent. Of the remaining 75 owners who are not directly working with a spouse or family member, 70 brought a spouse or partner as their guest to the Million Dollar Club event.
Granted, just because someone brings his or her spouse or partner along on a vacation, it does not mean that the spouse or partner has a meaningful impact on the owner's business success. Also, it could just be a correlative detail, coincidence, or perhaps even reverse-causal (meaning that being good at sales leads to long-term romantic relationships). But, at least anecdotally, my conversations with Million Dollar Club members seem to support the idea of spouse/family support.
Melinda and Mike Durkee of Proforma Durkee, Huntersville, N.C., are a married couple working together and new members of the Million Dollar Club. While we talked about the reasons for their success, Mike Durkee mentioned that their relationship was one of the things that got them there.
"I think we have different strengths," he said. "Melinda is very good at sales and getting things done, and I give kind of an overview picture of where we want to go and how we want to get there." The pair both also mentioned how they approach goal setting in different ways (Melinda likes multiple benchmarks, Mike likes a single, hard-to-reach goal) and how they can talk over difficult business decisions together and come to an agreement. An example: Melinda was initially against affiliating with Proforma, while Mike was for it. Mike was able to convince Melinda to give Proforma's recruiters a chance to talk things over with her, and she eventually came to agree that it is was the right choice for their business.
A spouse or partner who is separate from the business also can be a huge help. McCarthy-Gaspar, who does not work directly with her husband, still cited him as a major reason for her business' success. She said that he was the hardest-working person she knew, and because he values hard work so much, she finds motivation in working hard out of love for him and a desire to make him proud. Since her husband works in IT, she said that she's able to bounce technical questions off him (McCarthy-Gaspar does a lot of business via e-commerce platforms) and also have him help in a pinch with technical presentations for clients.
Drive
When asked about what they thought is unique to million-dollar sellers' personalities, many people mentioned traits that would be considered components of a high personal drive to succeed, such as competitiveness or a high pride in their work. And while there are probably many ways to describe the drive of Million Dollar Club members, Greg Muzzillo, Proforma's founder, probably explained it best.
When asked why it's so rare for distributors, industry-wide, to sell more than a million dollars, despite there being so much market share available, Muzzillo said, "Let's talk about that. Inside of them, they don't want to do it. Because they're satiated, they're satisfied at some level of income that doesn't require a million dollars in sales. We have a lot of folks that do $400,000, $500,000, $700,000 a year in sales. They're making $100,000 to $200,000 a year, and that's more than most people will make. They don't want the complications of, 'What does it take to get to many millions of dollars in sales?' It probably takes hiring a salesforce and getting outside of a small business and growing something, which is something that some of our owners don't want to do.
"So we have a lot of folks that are at a half of a million or they're, whatever, $300,000, $500,000, $700,000, and they might say they'd like to make Million Dollar Club, but they don't mean it in their heart and mind. They're comfortable where they are, and if they're comfortable and happy where they are, I'm comfortable and happy where they are. My job isn't to make anybody unhappy, I just want to really identify the folks that want to get here, and then give them the tools, the resources and the support that really Proforma has as a $420 million company, that's on its way to a half-billion-dollar company.
"I think there's some people who are happy to be comfortable in life, and there are some people who are driven to create wealth. Some people that are happy to be comfortable in life, they can make a $100,000 or $200,000 or whatever it is, if they're happy I'm happy, and that's OK. I mean there's a lot of people who would chew off their left arm to make $100,000 or $200,000, right? So there's nothing wrong with it at all.
"But the goal, I believe for many businesspeople, is not only to create wealth, but to create what we call a lifestyle business. The ability to make money off the efforts of others. Because if you can build a business and you can go to Hawaii for three months and tell somebody else where to send the check, then you're making money because you're the owner, and not the most important worker at the company. And many of these people are very driven to build that lifestyle, so it's not just about wealth. It's also about a lifestyle."
What I like most about Muzzillo's explanation is that it's simple, yet gets at the core of what drives success. You can talk about resources and emotional support systems all you want, and those things are vital to be sure, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to how much you want it.