A Story About a Father & Son - Global Sales Mentor | Zach Selch

The young customs agent held up a little packet of powder that he had fished out of the bowels of my Briggs& Riley carry-on, and he locked eyes with me looking for a sign of panic or emotion. He dipped— licked a finger and dipped it in the powder and brought it up to his gums. And a little bit of disappointment crossed his face, but it was replaced by determination as he scooped up a little pinch of Put it on his tongue. We both knew this was a pivotal point in our lives. He was looking for a promotion that might involve a suit and a raise. I could be going to jail. We both knew we'd be telling this story for the rest of our lives, and we both knew that in about 2 minutes he'd be calling his wife. He thought he'd be telling his wife about his promotion, and I thought he'd be asking his wife to pick up some Listerine. How did I end up a little pinch of powder away from a Colombian prison? And really, the only way I can answer that is to go back in time about 50 years. When I was a little boy, I didn't care for Spider-Man or Superman or Batman. There were 2 cartoons I watched on Sunday morning— on Saturday morning: Jonny Quest and Commander McBragg. Yeah. A little boy and an old man who traveled around the world, picked up adventures, and had the most fantastic stories anybody could want. And that's what I wanted out of life. I wanted to see the world. I wanted to meet interesting people, and most importantly, I wanted a library of stories that spanned the globe that nobody else had. At the time, this was about as likely as my jumping over tall buildings or spinning spider webs. Recently at a party, the issue of trailers and campers came up, and I mentioned that when I was a little boy, I lived in a camper. And one of my North Shore friends said, "Wow! Was that some type of a family adventure?" And I laughed. I said, "No, that was extreme poverty." In 1977, as part of my family's ongoing In our ongoing struggle to hold on to the bottom rung of middle class, we were evicted from an apartment and moved into a trailer. Now, not one of those really nice double-wides in a park with a barbecue pit and a swing set. No. This was a 29-foot trailer on blocks parked behind a gas station in rural Pennsylvania. And we could use the toilet in the gas station, and my sister and I would ride our bikes down to the community pool twice a week to take showers. To this day, I have no idea what my parents did that year for hygiene. Down the street from this gas station was a flea market, and in that flea market was Dave Delano, a retired outlaw biker with facial tattoos that represented acts of violence and crimes from his youth, a scraggly beard, a gap where his 4 front teeth had been, Ooh. 4 stands in the flea market, and he gave me a job in the flea market selling cutting boards and welcome mats. The provenance of each was unknown. And every day that I wasn't in school, I was at that flea market selling, mostly to tourists who came on buses from Baltimore and Philadelphia, and sometimes from New York. It was the best mentor and the best job an 11-year-old boy could ever have. One day Dave called me over, barely suppressing a laugh, and he says, Zach, this gentleman has a complaint about you. And I look, there's this large sweaty tourist, and he has one of our top-of-the-line $30 cutting boards. Actually, no, he had 2 of our top-of-the-line cutting boards under his arm. And as he sees me approach, he turns to Dave and he says, And he says, I don't want him to open his mouth. He doesn't say anything. He goes, my wife bought one of these crazy expensive cutting boards. I came to replace it, and he sold me another one. If he opens his mouth, I don't know what the hell I'm going to buy. And I knew then how I was going to see the world, because if at age 11 I could sell $30 cutting boards in rural Pennsylvania to tourists, I could probably sell anything. And I figured if I could sell something in Pennsylvania, I could sell anywhere in the world. When I was 15, my mother went to her mother's funeral, and my dad packed a duffel bag and came to my room at night, and he said, I think I've done everything I can for you. Would you mind terribly if I left to start over? And I thought about it, and I said, you know, It makes sense. He has done everything that he can for me. I have a job and he doesn't. School's going okay. And it was pretty obvious to me that this wasn't the gig he really wanted. He did not enjoy raising a middle-class family. So we hugged and said goodbye, and he moved back to the little rural hamlet that he had been born in, and we didn't see each other for about a decade. Well, life went on for me. It went according to plan. Pretty much the plan I set for myself at 11 followed. I went into the Army, and then after the Army, I took the skills I learned in the Army and the skills I learned from Dave, and I started selling military surplus ambulances in Africa and Eastern Europe. And then I became a product manager at a company, and then I became a regional sales manager, and then I became a director, and then I became a vice president, then I became a managing director. And things worked pretty much according to plan, and I got to sell in about 140 countries around the world, and I was able to live for half my life outside of America. And so I was pretty happy. What I wanted to achieve at age 11, I pretty much got to. And about every 2 years, I'd fly through New York and layover. I'd rent a car. I'd drive 4 hours northwest to this little village To see my dad, and we'd sit in the veterans hall and have 50-cent beers. And if I was lucky, it would be Tuesday and there'd be a free hot dog lunch. And I would tell him stories about million-dollar deals in Kathmandu and Dar es Salaam and Thessaloniki, and he would tell me about chicken feed and copper wire and sheetrock. And we wouldn't see each other for another couple of years. And over time, more and more, instead of sitting over 50-cent beers at the Veterans Hall, we'd be in doctors' offices talking about treatment for him as he got older and he needed somebody to take care of him. I was in the room when a surgeon said to him, you know, if you have this procedure, you have a 30% chance of not getting off the table. My dad said, okay, when? And the doctor looked A little confused, and my dad said, I can't lift a piece of sheetrock anymore. And the doctor looked to me thinking maybe my dad isn't fit to consent. So I translated. I said, Doctor, my dad has an excellent understanding of probability. My dad cannot work with his heart the way it is, and he figures there's no sense in living if he can't work. So he'd rather have the surgery and take his chances. Afterwards, I said to my dad, so In the 1 to 3 chance that tomorrow I have to find something to do with your body, do you have any preference? And he sort of looked like he had never given it any thought. He said, look, strip me of anything that identifies me, put me on a bus to California. They'll figure out I'm dead in a red state and have to bury me at taxpayer expense. Well, he actually lived for a few more years to lift sheetrock. But you can only throw a coin so many times before it comes up tails. And eventually somebody was handing over 4 pounds of my dad's remains to me. I had opted over cremation over Greyhound. And my first thought, there was a pond near where my dad lived that he had swum in as a boy and sat by as an old man. And I was going to go and dump the ashes there. And I'm telling my sister this on the phone on the way over, and she says, you know, he always wanted to travel. I go, and she goes, he never got a chance. Oh no. He never got a chance to travel. I said, I know. She goes, you travel. I said, I know. She goes, you could take him someplace interesting. I said, I know. So I decided, you know, I never had a real chance to go to a ballgame with my dad, or the circus, or, you know, anything like that, the zoo. I thought, this is my opportunity to spend some quality time with my dad on my own terms. Yeah. So my dad has been to the Ganges, and the Nile, and the Thames. And the North Atlantic and the South Pacific, in Sydney Harbor and Hong Kong Harbor. My dad has sat on some of the most luxurious and iconic bars in the world while I drank. And my dad has visited some of the most interesting and most— some of the most obscure landmarks in the world. My dad in death makes Anthony Bourdain look like a homebody. And I've never had any problem the whole time. Except for little hiccups in Egypt and China, until I get to Medellín, Colombia. And now I'm looking at this poor, frustrated customs agent who is wondering if he's still going to get the promotion if the gringo bought really poor quality cocaine. And he waves this envelope around and he says, Señor, ¿qué es eso? And I said, mi papá.