THE PHIL STAUDT BLOG

Just an old salesman

by Phil Staudt February 2, 2010

Just an old salesman, tryin real hard to adjust.

I maintain several blogs, and this blog is NOT a marketing blog, and I promise to keep the hype and salesmanship to a minimum, but this article is more about my personal story, and since I am a sales person, this blog article is about Internet marketing and selling. I know that if I ever want to be an Internet marketing guru or big shot in the online world of mentors and trainers and coaches, that I would be advised to not really tell it like it is, but then I would not be me. I have gone through a lot of hard times, and I have also done a lot of dumb things that cost me dearly. When I was younger I went "all in" a few times in the poker game of life. Now I am not as much of a risk taker.

I also could have made a lot more money, and have had a much easier life, if I were willing to lie and cheat and rip people off. But I am picky about who I sleep with, and I have always realized that I would have to sleep with myself for the rest of my life, and I enjoy going to bed knowing that I chose to not make my living ripping off people.

Over twenty years ago, I took a part-time job as a telemarketer for Dialamerica, selling magazine subscriptions over the phone. It was a part-time gig, because I had been ripped off by a finance broker in Denver, Colorado, who lied to the finance company in California, which was factoring my accounts receivable for my business, to cover up the mistakes that were made in his office. I did not find out about his dishonesty in the matter until six months after my bankruptcy. It did not make any difference then, because the damage had been done, and he was buddies with the owners of the finance company, and I did not have the money or connections to go after him or his company. However, having to go to work as a part time  telemarketer for Dialamerica, provided me the opportunity to meet one special person, who is now one of the top Internet marketers and sales people in the country, and owns several successful sales companies, and has been working independently as a full time Internet entrepreneur since 1995. So, out of my adversity, came the opportunity for me to be successful as an online marketer twenty years later, because of my association with my friend, who I met decades ago during a rough period in my life.

The first evening that I worked at Dialamerica, I was the second-to-the-top sales person in the room, which had about 40 people working. In the 1980's, we had to dial phone numbers on plastic boxes that sat on the desks that had push buttons on them (see wikipedia > push button phone; high tech version of dial phones) and they had cords coming out of them that were connected to plastic handles with speakers in them that we had to talk into. Across the room, was a fellow about my age who had a good phone voice, and obviously understood how to make sales, and he was the only one in the room who dialed as many numbers as me, and ended up making one more sale than me. Nobody else in the room was even close to the amount of sales the two of us had. I introduced myself to him, and asked him if he wanted to join me for coffee at Denney's after work. It took very little time for the two of us to find out that we had the same interests and experience being entrepreneurs and sales people. 

At that time, my new found friend was experimenting with using automatic dialing machines to do surveys and get leads for sales people. He had several businesses going at that time, but he had been ripped off several times by customers not paying him, so there was little money to work with. In spite of that, I worked together with him, and he was able to get equipment, rent space and get phone lines hooked up, and put together brochures to sell leads to sales people. The operation was rolling along nicely, and orders were coming in, and then Mountain Bell notified him that they wanted deposits on all of his phone lines, including his home phone, because they said he had not a paid a phone bill from years ago that he did not even know existed. And thus ended his lead-gathering business in 1987. He and I ended up working for another telemarketing company, and they shut down their Colorado offices, and he moved to Ohio, and became a sales manager for a telemarketing room there.

In 1987, I moved to Kansas City, and we went separate ways, and lost track of each other. I worked at restaurants and sales jobs in Kansas City, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Portland.

I have been doing Internet marketing and promoting affiliate programs since 1999. But during most of that time, I was also busy managing restaurants and bars, and being the owner and operator of several small businesses.

In mid-2003, a company I had done work for, went out of business, owing me a lot of money. I had a year left on a lease for one of my offices, or I would have been on my way to Las Vegas sooner, where it does not rain all the time. Instead of just exercising my buy-out option to pay six months of what was left on the lease, I decided I would try and make some money first, which did not work out the way I wanted. Actually, the term "wipe out" comes to mind.

My trademark throughout my life has been to get up and get going, no matter what, or who, has knocked me down. Getting up and getting going after being wiped out, is something I am all too familiar with doing, because I have had an abundance of bad luck in my life, added to my own stupid mistakes and bad decisions. As a young sales person, I had a tape deck in my car (see wikipedia > "cassette tape"), and was constantly listening to recordings of Zig Ziglar, Dennis Waitley, Tom Hopkins, Earl Nightengale, Dale Carnegie, and dozens of others. So, I understood the principles of positive motivation and goal setting and being successful, which made me keep on trying, despite the odds. Now, I have a more balanced view of things, and I am more careful and cautious. Sometimes, positive thinking can you get into, and keep you in, things you never should have gotten into in the first place.

In 2004, I shut down a business I owned in Portland, Oregon, after some incidents involving some gang shootings. I am not going to say anything else about that story at this time, but that is what prompted me to decide to close up shop and move down to Las Vegas in 2004, where I had lived in the early 90's, and where I had worked for sales companies and restaurants and taxi companies. Up until then, the economy in Las Vegas was always thriving, and moving and grooving, and I knew Las Vegas would provide me with a good enough economical environment to get back on my feet. Unfortunately, it did not end up being economically favorable for me.

I worked at a restaurant on the strip for a year in 2004-2005, and then I went to back to cab driving, because I knew I could work lots of hours, so I could be able to make enough money to quit and just do Internet marketing. The time I went to work as a cab driver in 2005, was probably the best income taxi drivers have ever made in Las Vegas. But, word must have gotten out that I was going back to cab driving. From that point on, the Nevada Taxi Authority Board decided it would be good for everyone involved, if they started giving lots of extra medallions to the few cab companies in the oligarchy system of cab companies in Las Vegas, and they kept on piling on additional cabs on the streets, which resulted in continuous declines in cabbie income (http://blog.vegastaxidriver.com). Once again, I realized I had made the wrong move, and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I wanted to stick with the same job for awhile for the sake of medical insurance and credit. Hard work is supposed to get people ahead, but that has not been the case for me in most instances.

A little over two years ago, I was surfing on the Internet on my day off, when one of the waves I was on, took me over to a website belonging to my friend whom I had known in Denver, Colorado, who I had not been in contact with for two decades. I contacted him, and we started talking to each other on the phone on my days off. He came to Las Vegas a couple months later to be a speaker at a conference, and he and I were able to spend a long time catching up on 20 years. 

At that time, I was about four months away from having everything I needed saved up to quit my job, and I was planning on doing Internet marketing full time. I had constantly been working on Internet marketing and blogging, and trying to keep with things, when ever I was not working. 

But two months later, on May 29, 2008, I had a stroke, and totally lost my ability to speak and write. I had to learn how to talk and write all over again, because the brain cells that made that process work, were dead. I was out of work for 6 weeks, and when I got back to work, there was a world-wide recession which put Las Vegas into a tail-spin. I stuck with the job until February 2009, but every month was worse than the last, and I was making less than I would have if I were making minimum wage. It was time to walk away from that job, even though unemployment in Nevada was at an all time high. But it was time to make a move.

Fortunately, after 20 months of hard work and speech therapy, I can say that I am about 95% back to where I was before my stroke. I went out and got hired by a few telemarketing companies in Las Vegas a year ago, more to prove to myself that I could talk well enough to do it than anything else. I tried out a cab company that said I could work part time, but I decided to just stay at home instead, and concentrate on doing the Internet marketing business I have been wanting to do full-time since 1999. For the past year, I have been promoting affiliate programs, recruiting city portal directors, and blogging. This is a great time to be self-employed and work from home.

My friend has been working on a brand new online marketing business, that he added to his other existing Internet companies, and he just launched it a week ago, and this one is going to be a very financially rewarding (http://vip-wealth-club.info). It is good to be working for businesses where nobody has to get ripped off in order for somebody else to succeed.

There are many more crazy and unusual things that have happened to me that have made my life interesting, miserable, and wonderful. When I have been dumped on or ripped off or had bad luck or taken a wrong turn, I may have been down, but not out. Zig Ziglar says that a big shot is just a little shot who kept on shooting. 

In addition to selling, I have also done factory work, cab driving, restaurant management, and running small businesses, but I always end up doing sales, and I love it.

by Phil Staudt February 2, 2010