Episode #746 - Navigating Sales, Services, And Global Markets with Kelley Thornton

Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

The life of a salesperson in big corporations or really anywhere is more in my experience, more often like your first experience than your last in terms of life of a salesperson is one of abuse and how much abuse you can take in terms of cutting territories and cutting commissions when you do well. And the old story that most corporations are run by attorneys and eventually become run by attorneys and accountants who've never made a sale and in their wildest dreams cannot find any real value for a salesperson and because they've never had to sell themselves. However, in spite of the fact that sales makes the world go around. And so you're in this thing where you get no respect, you get.

Exactly.

But you have no power in there, you know, but you, but you put up with it for 18. You had to have experience in there that were brutal, that you just had to live through.

Well, I was, you know, I was, I was very, you know, I say this with total humid humility is that I was a very successful sales guy. So I got, they did, you know, they did treat me pretty well, right. But I want to tell you, I, to your exact point earlier about what you made with Mark Cuban. I had written a business plan and I had it, I spent hours and hours and hours writing a business plan and I had it ready to go. And I was like planning my exit, you know, planning when I was going to leave that to start my second business, which was an in store design and strategy company. And I kept on getting winning these big orders like, you know, there were huge paychecks, right? You know, tens and tens of thousands of dollars of paychecks. And I was like, gosh, and you know, I gotta leave, I gotta start my own business. I gotta start my own business. But the business, and had it not been for what I was describing earlier that, that I got started financially quickly and that I had had a great opportunity in sales to make money, I wouldn't have been able to get through the next 15 years of my life. The next 15 years of my life. When I started my second business in 2008, 2009, I started hemorrhaging money for, for the next 10 years. I, I had, I didn't have, I, I didn't have, you know, I had, I burned through all the cash that I saved in my first 20 some years and I had a lot of cash saved. Burned through every bit, every bit in my 401k, my 529s. I was saving up for a kid's college fund. I had a half million dollars in there, burned it all starting my own.

Businesses and so talk more about those 10 years because they unfold one day at a time. Yeah, you know.

Yeah. I mean, boy, you know, the problem is, is that I was good at sales and good at marketing, but I opened up a service business, an agency. I was selling product, I was using design and marketing, but selling a product and I went to the service space and services is very, very, very difficult. It's probably millions of people listen to your show that, that know what I' Any service business you're in is very difficult. And I didn't, you know, I didn't do a good enough job of scaling. You know, scaling a service business is really just adding people. Right. And keeping a high margin in your, in your, in your service. So I did that for 10 years and that's where my clients were. The same clients at my big corporation. So I still did tons of work for all those companies I just mentioned before. And those companies were kind enough to take me around the world and educate me about outside of the global market, how people would shop for, shop for products. And that's where I learned about how men were shopping for personal care and skincare products outside of the US And I realized there is a massive opportunity to sell skin care to men in the U.S. i need to come back and start a new business, get out of the advertising space. Aver and I had a global company with offices in London and in Taipei and, and the US and, and move from a services in this industry to a back to a product and make a product and sell it. And that's Tiege Hanley, my men's skin care company. Now.

Now what do you mean? You had come in all around the world, Taipei and this side and the other. What, what was the, what was that? That was the design. I thought that was.

Yep. So after I left international paper in 2009, I started a company called Purchase Point and it was a design company. It was a basically a shopper marketing focused company. Shopper marketing. All that really means is how do we, how do we bring marketing, brand marketing into the retail environment? So understanding how a person goes into the store to buy something, how can we help them convince them to buy product from them?

Right.

That was the company. So it was a very design centric company. We Were developing in store retail marketing strategies for big global companies like Unilever. They would disseminate our marketing strategy for let's pick a brand, Dove Bar Soap. They would disseminate our marketing strategy for how to approach retail with Dove and they would disseminate it to Argentina and the US and etc. Etc. So they would take our, our strategy and, and, and disseminate it globally. So I had a team in, in Taipei for 10 years. Had office space, 3, 4 different offices in Taipei. Had a team in London to support our, our European business and, and then here in Chicago to support our U.S. business. And we worked around the clock. So we, we would pick up projects in, in London. We would, you know, take them back into the US we'd pump them into our, into our design team. We'd work on it during the day, then we'd send it all overnight. About 35 people in Taipei. We would work on it in Taipei, ship it back into the US get it over to Europe for the day. So we were, we were always working around the clock to service our customers and design and strategy.

How much traveling did that involve for you?

I. A tremendous amount of traveling. And by the way, I don't recommend it for anybody. There's no, you're not a hero if you've got millions of miles. Sorry if I'm offending anybody, but you're not, you're not a hero. You know, I, except when it comes.

Time to walk on the plane.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, it means zero, really, if you imagine, like, great. I mean, you probably have millions of miles, right? Yeah, you have millions of miles. I mean, if you could take those millions of miles and turn them back around into hours.

Right.

You know, I mean, you do it in a millisecond. Like I'm going to add, I'm going to, I'm going to add another three years back onto your life that you sat on planes, you know.

Yeah.

Do you want that or you want your frequent flyer miles?

Yeah, but now this, you got to be expanding. How did you learn how to open up these locations and hire these people in the long distance areas and manage those things? You know, those. I mean, the complexity of that. Because the reason I want to dig into that for just a second is that a lot of people, once they get to be successful, they get a product, they're selling the U.S. they start thinking, you know, really would be exciting to be, you know, international and without knowing what that means, but you know what that means. Yeah, super. What does that mean?

Yeah, you know, I mean, so then it just, that goes right back to the people conversation. I mean, you have to have, you know, the right people. A service business, you know, is very different from a branded business which I have now. I have a brand. Tiege Family is a brand service business. You can hire highly competent, very experienced people that have done a skill for a long period of time and they can be very successful without a lot of handholding. And you can have a global business, you know, relatively easy. You know, you have to set up a legal entity, you have to make sure, you know, there's a lot of accounting and back office and payments and you know, compliance with regulation from location to location. And that is, that makes it difficult, you know, and you have to pay certain VAT taxes here. But I think like if you come, if you hire super competent people, you can, you can accomplish a lot of that. So I had really competent people that, you know, that were able to speak the language, that lived here in the US and were able, you know, to speak the language and all different types of things.

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And did you that expansion probably was led to the hemorrhage of money, you know, opening up, you know, starting up these things, your tremendous investments. Was that why you were hemorrhaging money? Because opportunity was there. You had to see, you had to act now or be gone forever. And so you just got to. There's no choice. Yeah, but the end result is you're hemorrhaging money.

Yeah, I mean you can't. It's very hard to scale and you know, and it's very hard for services business. I mean, what do you know, what do you do? And you have clients. We had, we chose big clients. And they pay you in ridiculous terms, you know, I mean, they're paying you in 30, 30, 60, 90, 180 days. And, you know, and you're providing a service, so.

Right.

So you're, you're, you're paying that for that service immediately, right. In payroll at the end of the month. And you're not getting paid, you know, for months out. And, you know, and then how do you, how do you have capital to grow the business and hire more people and develop more sales and take on more projects? I mean, you're constantly, you know, you know, cash is just. Is very difficult to scale a services business. You know, that's, it's, it's really, really, really hard.

And that's part of what you learn when you go into these, you know, a situation like this is probably a lot of these things are not immediately obvious to you right now at the beginning. It's like, oh, no, that's how it works. I'm screwed.

That's exactly right.

Yeah. And so now what would you say just from a marketing standpoint, a mentality standpoint, you say these other, these global companies, they taught you the different ways people look at things and they buy things. What kind of insight could you give for people who have got that thought in their mind about the differences in marketing, you know, either services or goods and, you know, a brand in those, you know, international markets?

Yeah, I mean, well, there's a lot of different ways I can approach that question. I mean, I think, like, you know, having international business is very good. I mean, it's very strong. Right. And being diversified in your channels. I mean, let's just get away from necessarily from specifically international. Being diversified in income channels is critical. Right. So today, you know, at my company, T. Shanley, you know, the international business is, is. Is a, Is a portion, a very important portion of revenue, and we want it to be in a certain, you know, in a certain percentage of our overall revenue case. There's, you know, you know, a explosion of the, you know, the Ukrainian war throughout Europe and we lose 10% of our business. We want to be able to. So I think it. Having looking at things globally does allow you to have a more diversified portfolio of revenue. So that is, that is a very important thing and is a very helpful thing to our business now and was for. For my, for my prior company. So. Yeah. And then on the brand side, I think, like, it really does help you think about, you know, so if you have a product, it's all about customer, right? So we're selling a product to. Everything's about customer sales and customer. You said it earlier. I mean, so if you have a product, it's all about customer. And so that we think about, like, globally. What does a customer think? Like, globally? A lot of guys want to buy, you know, American made products overseas. Right. They want to be, they want to be cool and they see quality and they see, you know, they want to, they want to be like the Marlboro man, you know, and so, so I think there's an awesome opportunity from a brand perspective to understand global clients and to grow your brand and have a, have a, you know, a channel of income that, that, that is, you know, helps you diversify your revenue portfolio.

It is interesting to think how many cigarettes the Marlboro man has sold around the world. Oh, yeah.

Crazy.

How many cowboy boots and cowboy hats. People wanting to be cool. Yeah, that, you know, it's amazing how that works. But people are all, you know, the further away, you know, the more attractive you are. And so it's a matter of getting that to work in your favor. So tell us about launching this. Let's get into you. Did you ever work with Unilever? You said they, they made shampoos.

Oh, yeah.

Ever working with them? I mean, did that kind of lead you into the, you know, the, the cleaning products and that was it. Yeah. And, and you know, it's, it's one thing to think about, you know, it's like you probably had no idea this would be the direction you would wind up in, but it's a matter matter of following what doors open for you, you know, and like, just take the, you know, you're wondering, you know, what is my direction I should go. It's like, well, look in front of you and see what's in front of you that you could pursue that maybe you're saying no to because it hadn't dawned on you that that was a possibility. But it's right in front of you.

You know, and so there are, it's endless. Like there are possibilities for business under every turn, every turn you take. If you just keep your eyes open. There's, there's opportunities everywhere. I mean, it's just, I have so I have so many. I have URLs, I have patents, I, I have, you know, so many business ideas and things that I want to do. It's just incredible. There's, there's great ideas. But Unilever, really, they were awesome. They're awesome at brand. They're really, really, really good at brand. They're really good at Global. You know, I mean, dove brand is, you know, you pick a product, Ben and Jerry's, you know, nor Dove, you know, Axe, which is an unbelievable brand or degree, you know, suave, on and on and on. Actually, I think they just sold suave. But, you know, I think like, those companies are really, really are very, very good at marketing and they're really, really good at, like, you know, global reach. And anyway, I just learned a lot from them.

Let's just go this. How would you say, like someone's got a much smaller company and they say that, you know, what can they learn from this? A big monster company like Unilever, like you say, the really good at marketing and, and brand. Why are they good at that? How do they perpetuate that from year to year, decade to decade? Is it in their training, in their culture? What do they, you know, things happen because people do things. You know, you have a philosophy, you have an insight, and then you wind up doing things. And what, what outreach, what training, what effort, what emphasis do they put that a smaller companies can learn from? Because we all want to need, we all need to be great at marketing. You know, if you want to get good at something, get good at marketing.

They're great at processes, they're great at marketing, they're great at branding. They're. They hire brilliant people. They train them. You know, they, they really are good at training. They move them around their company globally. So they, you know, if you're, you know, what I would call a lister, somebody was on a list to get, you know, they identify you pretty early on as being very good talent. Yeah, they're going to move you, you know, into Canada. And from Canada, they're going to move you to London. If you do really well there, you might go to Shanghai and then you're going to come back and be a VP in North America. So they do a really good job of training. They're very, very clear about their mission. Very, very clear. I mean, crystal clear. They started talking.

It comes in with the Orient, I guess they have a very particular onboarding orientation thing like this is what we're.

All about from A to Z. I mean, it's crystal clear when you get there what they're all about, what their mission is, what they're trying to do, where they play. And they're really good at understanding customer and they're really good at product. I mean, they're good at everything. What they're bad at is agility, speed.

Yeah, that's the ocean liner. Can't turn on a dime. Can't.

And that's why we exist.

Yeah. Well, the thing Is, well, that's one of the places where opportunities exist in the marketplace for somebody can come into a place and be agile and adaptable, where the big boys can't move around like that. But in terms of orientation and A through Z, one of the things that a big mistake made in companies is to onboard employees. And you don't take the time to say, this is what you've joined. This is who we are, this is what we. In other words, approach it like you want this person to be around for a long time and to, you know, be seamless into it. The Yankees. I was trained in financial services by Bullet Bob Turley and with the Yankees and you know, he was in that clubhouse for 10 years while they were winning all those pennants. And he said they go down to spring training and I forget the guy's last name, but this is Bob's roommate, Hank somebody. But he said every year they'd get down to spring training and this guy would get all the rookies in a room and said, listen to me, you idiots. You know, this is the Yankees. You know, we don't score around, you know, we do everything every day, every bat, you know, every practice is geared towards winning the World Furies. And, and you know, we take it serious. We're not going to tolerate this. And if you guys screw up and we see you slacking around, we're going to beat your brains in. You know what I'm saying? We're going to throw you out. And so. But right, they had one guy who had the riot act. Like that was the first orientation session. And you know, I remember when I went to Georgia Tech and I started in architecture, they headed our orientation and it was fair. I mean, it was brutal, but it was fair. He said, look at the two people in front of you, the two people behind you and the people on either side. If you're. And five years, they'll all be gone because only one out of seven is going to last. And so I geared you up to like, okay, if I want to win at this game, this is, you know, I got to be better than six out of seven. And so companies don't. That's some, that's something I think that you probably learned and you carry, probably carried into your business. Now that's been a part of your success.

I mean, almost, almost. Some stuff is almost copied page by page. I mean, you know, our recruiting process, what we do to recruit, how, how, how we go through a process of hiring our onboarding, right? How we onboard people and the review process we do, you know, very tight onboarding and then we do a review process, a 30, 60, 90 day review process after someone joins. We're everything we do at our company, every single thing we do, every meeting that we have, every, every review process that we have, every third 90 day roadmap we work in, 90 day sprints at our company are all based on our core values and our mission. Everything is based on our seven core values.

And what are those, if you don't mind me asking?

No, I don't mind at all. They are and it's good that you quiz me on it and let's see if I can get them. All right. Act like an owner. Okay. Act like an owner connected to data further together. Be creative, be uncomplicated, have a backbone and commit.

Yeah.

And so everything we do is around, is around those, you know, those core values and we talk about em in every we, we, every meeting we have, we we say how is that connected to data? You know, how does that. Further together, how does that have a backbone and commit. Cause people are always disagreeing. So we're, you know, we, you know, not everybody's going to agree to, to, to a strategy. So you know, the, this is all part, right? And then the mission, the constant mission every day.

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