Here Is the Short version of my story

I ve had to sell myself my entire life but first started a job in sales when I was 17.
I was young and  ve and refused to listen to the advice of my parents, I joined up with a fly by night sales company that sold cleaning products. In the newspaper ad they promised All expense paid travel, company car, fun and excitement. In reality I had to share, ride as a passenger in a suburban that had 2or 3 3 people too many in it at all times. The hotel s that they had us stay in were 6 to a room. As far as expense money they gave us each $10 a day and even back then was next to nothing

For the next few years I moved from one job to another
selling everything from cars to vacuum cleaners, Insurance, and cable TV subscriptions. I was like most starting out salespeople afraid of the customer. Afraid of the possibility of rejection. Afraid of people hanging up on me or shutting doors in my face.
 
It was the best sales training  that anyone could receive, sink or swim. Eventually I developed some great selling skills and am now at the point in my life where I am one of the greatest salespeople I know. However, in 1990 I became burned out on all the sales jobs I had and decided to try going through college again.  I didn t have the time or patience to go through a 4 year degtree program  so I enrolled in a 2 year program for computer science. This time I wanted to get something from college so I took 18 credit hours per semester and I did everything possible to finish number 1. If it hadn t been for the typing class that was required I would graduated with a 4.0 GPA instead of only a 3.88.

I didn t wait until I was finished  before looking for work. I didn t own a personal computer so Spring, summer and winter break were spent at school studying. 1 semester before finishing I landed an entry-level job as a programmer getting paid $5 per hour. I agreed to this low wage so I could get my foot in the door. All my other classmates waited till after they got their degree and ended up doing data entry for the state.

From that $5 per hour job I went to making $50 an hour as a freelance programmer. My first assignment was for a local Computerland doing their inventory system. It was there that I found out about Gray market purchasing. They had a section of their warehouse, which was labeled, as scrap area. This area is where they would put computer parts that they thought they could not sell. If a computer came in and the customer wanted a different video card they would pull the one that the computer came with and put in this scrap area. I asked them one day if they could give me this hardware instead of paying me in cash.
 
The owner, PCM, saw sucker painted on my head  and said Sure why not. I then filled up a cargo van on a Friday with all this Scrap and took it to the Flea Market to sell. On Monday I returned to the Computerland with an empty van and a lot of cash in my pocket. PCM then decided to start doing liquidation and hired me to do this. This is where I had the chance to put all my skills to good use.

We would purchase inventories for pennies on the dollar and then resell it wholesale to parts houses around the country for a little less than they would purchase it from distribution for. Sometimes we were making a 1500% markup or more. Our fax machine back then must have weighed about 50 pounds. In order to send a fax to a 100 people I would have to feed each page individually 100 times over. Now with the advancement of computers things are much easier.

In 1993, a mutual decision, I went off on my own  and formed my own company. I had less than $100 to my name. I would have to use a third party to finance my deals for a split in the profits but eventually I was able to get my customers to prepay for there products and some of my suppliers gave me terms. I was doing both retail and wholesale first year sales were almost $6 million back in the days when we were doubling our money at a minimum.

I wanted to share my success with other people so I hired a friend of mine that I had grown up. I taught him how to sell, prospect and even about finding product. He went from never making more than $20k in a year to making over $50k in his first 7 months with me. Unfortunately he did not plan for the slow months and he developed some expensive habits. He decided to do side deals, while still working for me, for counterfeit products.  Also, my exemploer, PCM, set me up. One of my competitors was raided and he was found to be producing counterfeit software. At a bar, PCM said George why dont you turn in jeff as your supplier for your imunity. After prison I called George and as soon as he found out that I was back he sold his store and left the state.

I lost over 2 years of my life because of his side deals. The Feds picked him up and volunteered a way out for him. They told him that he could be prosecuted along side me or that he could give testimony against me for immunity. I never dealt with counterfeit products but because I was his employer they figured I had to be orchestrating his deals. I won my appeal 11 days short of my sentence. During this time my wife and kids had to live in shelters for the homeless because the feds took everything from me.

I tried to bury the hatchet after my release and even tried to do business with him but in the end he was still surviving by taking advantage of others, only looking out for himself. For the first year I took a job buying and selling computer software but eventually had to go out back on my own I ve changed the products that I deal in about a half dozen times. Each time because profit margins would get very low for the products I was dealing in. Each time I took on a new product I was making at least 30 to 40 points wholesale on them. When I did retail my margins were at least 60 percent. Currently I am dealing with a lot of imports selling both online and offline. With imports I am getting brand new merchandise for the prices of closeouts I used to buy in the US. I still deal in closeouts. I have read so much material on marketing, selling on the Internet, designing good ad copy, etc. etc. I absorb the useful information and dispose of the rest. I save all the junk e-mail s I get because these give me ideas for creating my own ads plus I contact the companies doing the emails and they become my customers.

Some of my fellow business associates think I spread myself to thin, that I need to specialize in just one product. These are the people that only stick with what they know but in order to stay ahead of the game we need to always explore new kinds of products. We need to stand out from the rest.. One of my favorite authors says it best “We need to be Purple Cows”. All the other s in the heard just blend in, we won t remember them 5 minutes later but the Purple Cow….
I am the Purple Cow and I do what it takes to seperate myself from the rest of the herd.