Born To Sell

What can I say, I was born to make quality sales calls! It’s my thing. While I don’t think it is quite as exciting to tattoo, “Born to Sell”, on your bicep as it is to tattoo, “Born To Raise Hell,” sales is still exciting! Maybe, “Born To Give Myself a Raise!” would be a more exciting tattoo on a bicep. I don’t know, but I can tell you, I love to sell and I was born to do it.

When I was a kid we were poor in money. We seemed to have things but I didn’t have any dough. I wanted to buy penny candy at the local store. I guess the old guy in there was really a, “Pusher,” because he had the best penny candy in town right there on the rack. Black Jacks, Mary Janes, Neccos, Boston Baked Beans, Tootsie Pops, and tons of even better candy! By the time I was ten I had a two dollar a day penny candy habit and the old man at the candy store had me addicted to sugar. I had to make some dough to keep me from going cold turkey from my sugar habit, and I had to make my money outside the house because my folks didn’t have much money to throw around.

What could I do? I had to Sell to make a living, same as my dad did, but what would I sell? That’s when I figured it out. I would sell the other kids at school cartoons for ten cents a drawing. I would draw whatever they asked me to draw for a dime. I would draw anything; the preacher making out with a sheep, a kid’s dad with a saddle on his back, a kid catching a big fish, the principle on his knees saying he was sorry to a bad kid, I didn’t care. I can’t tell you how terrible some subjects of the drawings were, but I can say never turned down an assignment. Also, the more fun I made of the kid’s enemies when I drew the cartoon for them, the more the kids liked my drawing and reccomended me to others.

I started off Selling the drawings myself, but then I Hired a couple of kids and paid them two cents for every drawing they sold for me for ten cents. “You make two cents for nothing,” I would tell them, “While I do all the work.” I also got my Sales Kids hooked on the penny candy, like I was, so they would sell even more. Kids make great Sales Goats if they are motivated. I got so many customers I started up charging the new kids, and began offering more complicated drawings for a quarter. Anyway, it worked for quite a while and it supported my penny candy habit almost all the way through elementary school.

One day my dad and mom found about a pound of candy in my room and asked me how I came across the money necessary to buy it. When I told my dad what I was doing, selling my cartoon drawings, and then about hiring the other kids to go out and find me customers, his eyes opened up wide, and he said to my mother, “My kid’s a better salesman than I am.” I never forgot he said that. It was also the end of my spiral down into penny candy addition because my Mom cut me off after that. She yelled at the old “Pusher”, at the store too. I really had to beg her not to throw that pound of candy away, and in oder to keep any, she made me share it with the kids at school.

I learned many valuable Sales Lessons from that time, and it was the beginning of my career in Sales, and Sales Motivation.

Let Uncle Billy know if you were, Born to sell? Were you Born to give yourself a Raise? What did you sell as a kid? Were you a Kid In Sales?