It's time for Conventions of a Serial Salesman. Author, expert sales trainer, and serial entrepreneur Steve Noodleburg wants to help you change your life and your business using his 27 roles for influencers and leaders. This is the Conventions of a Serial Salesman podcast. With Steve Noodleburg, here's Josh Cohen.
It is Episode number 70. 7-0, Ben. 7-0, Conventions of a Serial Salesman, the podcast, 27 roles for influencers and leaders, here from the beautiful ESPN West Palm studios, right by Steve the beautiful intercoastal. It would be the hot ESPN's dude.
So full disclosure, so we do these shows from West Palm Beach and the Heat Index every day for the last two weeks. At the time of this recording has been 107, 108, 109. It's still been warning. It's been insane, which is so rare down here.
But then we get a friend Jim Bennett who's here from Albany who is soaking it up. Listen, listen, this weather is so spectacular. I haven't seen Sun. I swear since December.
Jim's a sweaty no problem. I'm like, are you kidding me? It's all of a set of bitching. He's like, you can't even get 10 days of stuff.
Yeah, it's all, you know, it's perspective. It's all what a great topic. Absolutely. I believe we'll get into perspective as we get on through the next half hour.
This is Episode number 70. Like I said, it's the Art Donovan episode. Art Donovan. So at least we're getting to some Hall of Famers now.
We just need to get out of the offensive line in realm though and finally get into CC-768. Once we get to the 80s, we'll be better with wide receivers and things along those lines. You already brought him in now, but Steve, why don't you introduce us to our guest for this edition? I'm so excited about today.
Lots of different reasons. But, you know, the business that I'm in, I get to meet awesome people. Jim and I met probably almost two years ago. Yeah.
And he is responsible for teaching me something, which in general is not many that I can clean that from. He did and I'll get into that later. But he's an awesome entrepreneur, awesome family man, and he's moving to our town. So I'm super excited to have him here and he's going to share all of his thoughts about what he's done, how he's done it.
And trust me, how he's done it is so special, relates to a lot of what you do with sports figures, my son, you know, the same discipline in this. So welcome to the show, Jim Bennett, serial entrepreneur, serial investor and soon to be new South Florida resident. You betches, Dave. Listen, I am so thrilled to be here.
You know, being an entrepreneur is my passion. You know, family is my rock, but being an entrepreneur is my passion. Since I've been a small child, I've owned businesses. You know, I strung tennis rackets for Cornell University.
I cut 30 lawns a week. My father had a bunch of rental properties that I did nothing but paint and clean and do everything under the sun for. And when I got out of college, it was, oh my God, now what do I do? Well, of course I have to go into business for myself.
And it's been a spectacular ride. And the only place, the only time that I ever learned, truly learned was when I failed. Which is hard for people to get their arms around, but all of us that have experienced what would be considered tragic failure. That's where the biggest lessons are.
It is so true. So from day one, the second company that I owned, I was in business with a guy and we were in business probably six months and we had this thing crank and it was my idea. He came in, I wanted to partner. We just jacked this thing.
And in six months we were making money and we were rolling and I showed up to work one day and he wasn't there. He wasn't there. Whoops. Yeah.
For a week. And you know, I called him on the phone. I said, what's going on? He said, just send me my check.
Wow. And so I said, listen, you know what, you are spectacular guy and I love you. But I got this into this to be a partnership. So you know, we got to come to an agreement and he didn't want to.
So I said, listen, by Thursday of this week, we're going to come to an agreement or I'm going to dissolve the company because I'm not doing this. I am not doing this. I am in this to be a winner. And you know, I'm not in this to do somebody else's work.
So I haven't mentioned any of the companies. I would leave that to you. What you've done, what you're, you know, the company we worked on together, which was fantastic. You know, share that.
And then I will share the lesson I learned, which was not a pretty scene we've talked about. Yeah. No, it was, you know what, you know what, it was a learning experience for both of us. Totally.
So I started inside of the worldwide express franchise system, Transportation Logistics in 1997. And I opened up my office and literally that day, the franchise award, David Kiger's lights were being turned off in his apartment. And you know, she and I met at the perfect time. I had a hundred grand to my name, wife, three kids, and she was pregnant.
And I said, I have, this is it. I have looked. I have strategized. I have built a business plan.
This will work or nothing else. Oh, they're nothing. I love that. And I jumped right in.
I made a deal with him. I gave him 50 grand for the territory. He floated me. Which was which territory up the north?
Up in Boston. He floated me a hundred grand in a note that he kind of let me pay off. Over time, I got up every Monday morning and I drove to Boston at four a.m. From Albany.
From Albany. Well, you got to understand. So at four a.m., you know, I land in Boston at seven. Then I run my day till about seven.
Then everybody leaves. And then I had a futon in my office that I slept in. So every morning I got up and I went to the YMCA and I showered like a good boy. And I'll clean and pretty.
Pretty great. I'm happy you did that. Creating culture. That's a good culture.
You know what? I was doing even the landlord came to me and said, listen, I've never seen anybody like you, but I'm going to let this happen. I'm going to let it slide. And I did that for about two and a half years.
Wow. And that was, let me tell you, I didn't know this story. This is make a break. This is it.
You know, your family goes to live with your mother-in-law or you become successful. I think people listening here, this story and we're wowed by it here. And it's an incredible display of dedication and eventual business acumen. Some people might be wondering why put so much pressure on yourself.
Why was this an all or nothing? But why at that point in your life did you decide that, hey, this is it. This is going to work. This is going to succeed.
I'm going to ensure that this takes place. Well, you know what? I can't, I couldn't see myself working in a corporate environment. I'm an entrepreneur.
That's what I do. It's part of literally my DNA. And it was taught to me by my father. You know, my father was a college professor, but in order to give us a much better lifestyle, he had businesses.
He had a printing company that ran full time where I worked all of the time. He had an imaging company. He had all these rental properties. So growing up, you know, I saw my father.
He would come home from working at Ithaca College and all of a sudden he was doing quotes. And I'm like, you know, from minute one in my life, I was he was my hero. And I saw what he did. And I fell in love with it.
I fell in love with everybody. Which is not for everybody, right? So clearly everybody. So when you talked about opening up, you said my passion is for being an entrepreneur.
You either are or you are not. Yeah. I mean, you have to love failure. Yeah, it's crazy to be an entrepreneur because so in World Wide Express, you know, I get my first territory, get it up, you know, a couple years.
We start to make a little money. Everything's great. The franchise will want me to buy out a franchisee in Phoenix, Arizona. I end up buying him out.
And then I got into the whole, okay, now I'm going to expand. Now I got to learn how to build teens. And you know, I was I happened to love reading. I read a lot of business books and I had just gotten done reading.
Jim Collins, good to great where he talks about it's the people first, the wrong people off the bus, the right people on the bus and the right people on the right spots. And for me, that was huge. So I sat down and I did a little study and I took everybody that had come into the company, everybody who had left. I looked at their personal traits and I realized all of a sudden, oh my God, athletes are crushing it in my business.
Absolutely crushing it. Which is why I knew you'd love it. Why am I hiring anybody else? It was a hard concept to get everyone else to to jump on board with because my whole company, my philosophy of was we only build from the ground up.
So anybody who's a sales manager was a sales rep and anybody who was a sales rep started brand new out of college or second job out of college because we wanted them fresh. We wanted to teach them our way. Mold them. Yeah, absolutely.
Well, you hit on something that a lot of companies don't do or what they do. They don't do well and that's teach them. You know, I've met this sales team. I know who they are.
They're breathing fire. Yeah. Okay. So it was so competitive and so like team, it was amazing.
That's what I said. What's that on here? So we got once we figured out the who then we figured out, okay, we're not a logistics company. We're not a transportation company.
We're a sales training and development company. So the number one thing when a kid sits down for an interview with me is I tell him, I'm going to the number one thing I'm going to give you is I'm going to give you the ability to sell at the highest level to only presidents, owners and CFOs, which is a life changing event. And they don't know the difference because 99% of the people sell to the office manager or the purchasing agent and those deals get blown up all of the time because they're not selling at the top. I developed a sales training methodology where you sell at the top because when deals get sold at the top and something goes wrong, nobody says anything.
Well, right. There's nobody. They're not blaming anybody. They're not blaming the president for changing companies.
Let me ask you this again. It's a confessions of a serial salesman, the podcast Jim Bennett, serial entrepreneur, investor who is going to pick up his life and head down to South Florida here soon from where he is right now in Albany, New York. When it comes to credit a culture and it comes to like you developed your what you're looking for in someone who is going to sell someone who is going to fit that personality trait or traits that you're looking for. How long did it take you to develop that?
Because as Steve was saying, being an entrepreneur, you either are or you are there's no middle ground. Where do you how did you come up with the culture and what you were looking for? Okay. So you kind of understand I was in this business for 20 years before I had a very significant exit.
And the reason I had a very significant exit was because I built a spectacular culture over time and the culture was built upon the who everybody's an athlete inside of the company sales reps, sales managers, everybody is an athlete director of sales, VPS sales, head of account management, all of our account managers, everybody's an athlete. So we have this culture of athletes. And what do athletes love to do? I love it.
Calm, so we ran contest after I spent countless nights going back and forth over what contest to run next. It was the thing that I had to be most creative with because it's learning how to turn on the competitive juices of an athlete and get them rolling. So when I tell you, I had one contest that was the best of all time. So at the time we were probably sitting at 65 reps, 15 account managers and 13 or 14 sales managers.
So what we did is in each category, we matched up the number one rep with the number two rep, the number three with the number four and all the way down. So then at the annual conference, you know, the payout was $1,500 per person. And it was the most exciting intense thing because I was standing up there and I'm calling people out the winner is, oh, excuse me, the loser. And you can't imagine nobody wants it is devastating to be the loser.
These kids kill themselves because a, they're being called out on stage and they want to be the winner. So it turns out, I can't really teach that, which is what's so special about athletes. I have worked with the team. They look the part, they all took care of their bodies.
So they were all men and male and female were all really good looking. The competitive part that work certainly is great. But you know what? Teamwork, camaraderie, discipline, you know, you start naming all the things that make the greatest athletes.
I use all the sports analogies when I talk about sales training and sports training. It's exactly the same thing. Okay. So what, what do football players have for every position you've got a playbook, right?
Every position. Well, guess what? Inside of our company, every position as a playbook. Every I'm talking about receptionist has a playbook.
Everybody has a playbook. So everybody knows what they're, what they're supposed to do, what they're supposed to say in any interaction with a customer. So then it becomes up to us to train these people. So we train, we train, we train, we train, we train.
Here's what we do. We'll bring them in for the first two weeks of their career. It's spent in the classroom learning, learning, learning. Then they go out in the field and they spend a minimum of two weeks or two days a week for the first six months all day long with a sales manager.
Okay. Then they're average six months. We've already gone through that scene. Oh, he's, he's, he's, he's, they know this stuff inside now.
So then after six months, you're back in the classroom, spend another week to 10 days after another six months. You're back in the classroom, spend another 10 days. It works like, when you train people every single day, when they come back from the field, they do a wrap up and then we do role plays. And the role plays are the most intense part of the day.
Because of every day. Well, at the beginning and the end of every day. And here's why, when you're in front of a customer, customer doesn't know when you say something wrong. But when you're in the office and you're sitting around a table with a sales manager and seven other reps and you're doing role plays and it's going and going and going and all of a sudden you get blown up because they know when you didn't pick you apart.
Yeah. They picked you apart. Yeah. So you can do that again.
Yeah. It's like film study in the football. Exactly. Exactly.
And, and that's why, you know, we were a sales training and development company for athletes. And it's fascinating. And you know, the reality is that's what all companies should be first because the product price or service comes second. So secondary.
So secondary. They don't get that. The situation I had with Jim was I spoke at an event in Cleveland. One of his people were there.
It was a customer service. They really were attracted to my message. They connected us. We had an unbelievable phone call and on the spot he hires me to speak at the end of your event.
I did no homework. I knew nothing about the company. Nothing about him. He's laughing now because here I get hired as fast as anybody I've gotten hired from, which is how entrepreneurs work by the way.
They got a good feeling. Whatever. I started sending him some stuff and I sent him a clip of somebody that was calling out people who co-call. Now their entire culture was teaching these young kids who have no network to go out and build a network.
This is how you do it. You want to do this? You want to make X-Men of calls? We start on one side of the street and we hit every door on that side of the street.
And then we go across the street. So I don't know anything about the company. I send him this stuff to look at thinking I'm the hero and I get copied on an email that he sends to his people like, how could we hire a guy that's talking negative about co-call? I see it.
I totally shit my pants. But I was going 80 miles an hour on the mass turn-site and I didn't realize you were copied on the email. And here's the best part. Because I called him up and said, hey, can we speak?
And he asked me one question. He goes, what do you know about my company? And I was honest. I said, do you know what I got to tell you?
Nothing. Which to me is the biggest sin of being in sales. I learned like just because I got hired doesn't mean my job is over. I still needed to learn.
And so we got through that. We had an unbelievable event. I worked with them for a while. And so I've been I think I'm fortunate to have been part of that culture because you're never too good for training.
And when after the phone call, he says, I'm going to send you the training manuals. And Shay will tell you that the training manuals came via email and I printed them and they were each very robust for every level of the company. So it wasn't just like a little pamphlet. And this was like better than I've seen from IBM, which was no way.
We tell you what to do when you show up at 7.45 AM and we tell you what you're supposed to do every second of the day. It's all right there in front of you. And I tell kids, listen, when you come to work for me, you're coming here to be successful. I'm going to teach you how to be successful.
I'm going to give you the skill. All I need you to give me is the will. If you give me the will, if you want to be successful, if you will come to work and not mail it in, there's a difference between coming to work and coming to work. Absolutely.
And listen, if you come to work and put in the time, effort and energy, I guarantee your success, guarantee it because my business, we 21 years, you hone it down. And that's what we worked on over 21 years was honing it down to the absolute best practices that worked. And then we put it in manuals and then it's mandatory wherever we go. I'll tell you a quick little story.
So I jump out to my, one of my LA offices and the kid who's a sales manager is a superstar. He's literally the guy's a rock star, super athlete in college. And I sit down and I'm kind of wondering why his reps aren't more successful because he was one of our all time billing reps. And I said, okay, just show me your cold call.
So he was, he was skipping everything. But his sales, his sales in the office were off the charts. They were not killing people, but his sales reps were terrible. Yeah, no process.
He wasn't properly passing down the exact. Just because you could do it doesn't mean you can teach other people to do it. I said, kid, listen, listen, I appreciate the fact that you are rocking it in sales, but it's my business and it's my way and you have to do this. Which is a really tough discipline as an entrepreneur.
Sometimes you just say, okay, he's an outlier. We're going to let him live on an island because like me, when I was growing my business, revenue counted first, you put numbers up. I was like, I don't really care how you do it. That's not how you skip.
So what I said to him was, dude, I got a position for you as a senior sales rep. You can run around the country. You can run. But unless you do it my way, you can't be a sales manager.
Sure. And I think you see that like you were saying, see the parallels between that and how professional franchises and college programs are running. It's very, very similar. And we've had a lot of people on this podcast, CEO, COO, president, vice president, people that have just started a business or just out of business.
And I've learned something from everyone, but something that you said, Jim, that I wrote down was to be an entrepreneur, you have to love to fail. And I feel like that could have several different definitions. Could you expand on that? Listen, I will.
So World Wide Express, well, first of all, I failed several in several other businesses. Okay. The one right before World Wide Express absolutely lost every dime I had. And as an entrepreneur, that's just the way you think you know, you're all in on everything.
But inside of World Wide Express, we had several moments where one time our major supplier was airborne express and we were waking up every day to see, check that New York Stock Exchange to see if they were still in business. That was a rough period because it was, you want to know what keeps you up at night? Here I am sleeping in my office under a cot and I'm checking to see if my supplier is still in business. So that was one, number two was when DHL bought airborne express and they got into it and they did some hub integration.
And we were just, we probably lost 50% of our customers in a period of a couple months because of it. Then in 2008, the major financial crisis hits the United States. November 10th, DHL calls us up and says, we're giving you 30 days to get all of your customers, packages out of our system, find a new supplier or we're shutting them all. So the franchise order negotiates a deal with UPS.
And at the time I was at about $45 million in business and we went down to about in 30 days, $8 million. That usually is a death blow. People don't get off the ground. That's the Mike Tyson, I get punched in the face.
What's your plan now? Right. And it was. It was a death blow but I turned to my wife and I, she said, she has been my rock throughout my life.
She said, whatever you want to do, I'm all in on you. I believe in you. I mean, that's so cool because that's not the case all the time. No.
It never ends. Yeah. No, no, my wife is truly something special. She's believed in me and she has been the person that has really encouraged me to be me and not go off and do things that aren't me.
And so we had that hit and I decided to stay in and I gave it everything. Now my anxiety came out in the fact that I gained about 80 pounds. Sure. And you were 80 pounds heavier than now?
Oh, yeah. Wow. I owe you that way. I was 80 pounds.
Well, I was eating and drinking a lot because I was trying to, they were all that stress. And I was doing a lot of traveling and, you know, it was hard, hard on the body. But people only see the success. They don't see the travel.
They don't see the work. They don't. We have a short time before we're done. I want to make sure that we focus on one last point.
When you opened up, you said your family's your rock. Your wife and your kids. And in getting to know Jim, the story of his kids is so special. If you could touch on it just a little bit about who you are, how you built your family and what success they've had, which is, you know, Michelle and I were like overwhelmed.
Yeah. First of all, I've got a wife who's a great person. So, she has such a big giving heart. You know, I knew right away that she was it.
We met in February, engaged in September, Mary and June. You know, it was, it was quick. I knew it. She wanted a big family.
I wanted a big family. And when we started to have kids, we lived in the city of Albany and I said, listen, I want my kids playing youth sports with inner city kids because I don't want my kids living out in suburbs, not knowing who America is and not playing with America. And not getting that off or losing. Exactly.
I'm not getting a trophy from playing soccer. I knew I knew the last kid on the team. Okay. You're going to get a sense of how like really is.
Exactly. So, my kids are big hoopers. So, all of a sudden they're playing on teams where they're the only white kid and they realize that they got to bring it so hard every day just to get off the bench to get any playing time and it built character. But more important, it built friends.
Every one of my kids friends, best friends is a person of color. And this really changed the dynamic in our house. Most people probably know of a kid by the name of Taylor Battle who I now call my son and has been my son since he's been eight years old. He is a spectacular human being.
Set every record of Penn State. Every record of Penn State. And when I tell you, that's not who he is. Who he is is a beautiful human being.
I met this kid and this kid wanted to learn from me. And it was just an, he taught me more about life than I'll ever know about anything else. His gratitude, his, you've never met a more humble person in your life for everything that he has accomplished. And then we took his brother in Boo and Boo is just went off the Northwestern to be the point guard of Northwestern Wildcats.
He is a he is another kid who is just tremendous. They are tremendous children. And what they've given us in our lifetime can't be replaced. My son Ian, my biological son Ian has a best friend, Darien, who is another kid with just magnificent, magnificent.
Is that who I saw the highlight of? No, that's another one. And my youngest son will his best friend, Hamier Wright, who is a forward for Washington and going into his junior year is one of the best human beings on the planet. So humble.
And just you watch him. He's six nine with a seven three wing span. The best part of him is his personality, his humbleness. It's who he is.
And he looks out for my son, Will and my son, Will looks out for him. They are brothers like you can't believe. I mean, it's an amazing story that I did not know about you. And then as we started peeling back the onion learning about you, you deserve every piece of success that you've experienced because you got to figure it out.
You know, it's, I beat with lots of people and lots of money who just didn't figure it out. They're not happy. They have families that are shambles. Inching the words, the building blocks, gratitude, you know, the family as the rock.
Those are the set of pieces of success, regardless of money. Money does not buy that. Oh, you believe me, it doesn't even touch it. You know, the best moments of my life are all with my family.
The best moments of my life are not buying a car, buying a house. The best moments of my life are when I've got all these kids around me and we're together. And listen, I've got an extended family with my wife. We have 35 people, everything's giving in Christmas.
We have 37. The invites in the mail. Let me tell you, one year we had two people show up and my wife looked to me and I said, I don't know. They knew me.
They had me invited them over. Thanks for giving me questions. That is phenomenal. No, but I had invited them.
Like I didn't quite place them, but then I eventually did. And I just want to argue that seriously, you know, it's, I'm overwhelmed the more I get to know you and I'm happy because I think the people that are listening to this know that there's a road map where you can be a good guy. You can concentrate on your family. You do not have to give up all of those things to get success.
I didn't learn that early on. I gave it all up to get at all I focused on was to get. And I think a lot of people in my place share that sentiment. It was that at all costs, I wanted the prize.
That's not the prize. I got there and that's not the prize. Yeah. And you know, that's what happens when you get older.
We're not old yet. And you realize, you know, you realize that man, sometimes it's too late. Oh, I know you've given it up. You've ever done it.
I'm blessed that I have a great family and I have a great woman in my life, the first lady who's here. Miss Michelle. You know, we're an awesome lady. I have great kids.
We're experiencing that now. And the more we focus on that, the better our lives get while the rest of the stuff takes itself. So you've done that not only for your family, but your commitment to take athletes and just so that we're clear there's usually junior college or division three. Listen, love division three.
Those guys are getting any money. They're not going to play pro ball. They get up at four o'clock in the morning. They're doing this.
Yeah. They are such grinders and they come into our company and it's this is this is we take it. It's easy for them. I mean, we've got we've got we've got we've got a girl up in Albany or excuse me, I know Boston office, my son's company.
She's number one sales revenues company. She's a swimmer. She's a rock star because it's when she knows knows it. Right.
And she's wanting the game to be third and she wants to beat every boy out there. That's your shoulder. And since her formative years, she's as a swimmer got up at three a.m. every single day for her life.
So she's ready to get up and work and get going. And she kills it. Yeah. That is.
It's unbelievable. Fascinating. It was inspirational. It was educational.
Jim Bennett, serial entrepreneur and investor. 70 was a episode. Steve, this one's a two. I'm it's a you know, I'm glad you led the ship.
I'm in this new seat and I'm not sure I'm going to give it back to Josh. It's the power. See, you know what? Who needs Josh going?
Well, as everybody who listens to the podcast knows we don't want to ask how you do. And we ask you to tell us something good. So Steve, let's tell us something good here. Listen on the heels of what we just heard.
I am super blessed to have this gentleman as my friend. I can't wait for him to be here and to share more experiences together. So the reason why I do what I do is always about the people and this is the best validation of that. So if that's not good, I don't know what good is.
Jim Bennett, thank you. I don't want to be good. Jim Bennett, great, great job. Thank you for being a part of it.
Thank you. Steve Novak, should we do this for number 71? We'll keep doing it, Kenny. You know what?
You do a great job, my friend. Thank you. Hey, you're the one in the power chair. You're in the power chair.
Now, I'm just trying to get on your good side. I know we're going to show this gentleman how to live in poverty. Yeah, I know. Jim Bennett and Steve Novak, I'm Ken Levak.
This has been Confessions of a Serial Salesman at the podcast. I'll talk to you next time.