The Butler Project

Here’s another excerpt from an interview Mark did with Jim, who is a pest control company owner worth “many millions of dollars.” When I first listened to this interview, I thought Jim’s ideas were way too far out there in left field to apply to real life, but I finished this post with a new respect for the man and myself.

Jim’s actually brilliantly efficient because he sees the big picture and shoots straight to get his desired results. I’m not sure I could ever spend the night on the couch in a pest control office, but I’m definitely looking for ways to apply Jim’s methods in my life because I would really, really like to have similar results. Enjoy this story:

Jim: In my capacity as a regional manager [for a national pest control company], the job description was very vague; [it] was “Get your regions to perform well, and here’s where we expect sales to be, and here’s where we expect costs to be.”

And I looked at the sales training model that . . . the company had been following the last couple years, which had not been yielding very good results. So I spent the off season going and speaking with all of our competitors and just the top tier of people who had been successful. And I developed a totally different sales training paradigm, and that’s the paradigm that my company rejected (see Why I Quit My Job).

When I would get together with my associates who were the other regional managers, they seemed to be very excited that they now had this corporate account where: “Look at the nice rental car I can rent,” and, “I get to go stay in a nice hotel.” And it made them feel like executives, and so they were able to again rationalize how they could spend their time.

Their Sales Training Model

When they (the other regional managers) would go work with an office [it generally looked like this]: on Monday they’d fly in at 1 o’clock in the afternoon and maybe they’d go to a baseball game or out to a nice dinner. They’d meet up with their team at night. The next morning they would maybe do a sales training, and then go into an office with a manager.

[The] next day they’d take their manager out to dinner or breakfast and maybe they’d spend a couple of hours doing direct training with salesmen … Then they’d fly home, [after spending all their nights] in a hotel.

My Sales Training Model

Here’s how I planned the same trip: I would fly out Sunday night. I would get to where I was going at 1 o’clock in the morning Sunday night, so I could spend Sunday with my family. I would get up then at– if I was on the [west] coast, I’d get up at 4 o’clock in the morning so I could contact my offices on the [east] coast and do phone interviews and congratulations based on sales training.

At 6 in the morning [local] time I would go in [to the main office] with [the] manager … and see what needed to be done [there]. At 9 [or 10] o’clock, I would show up with the salesmen … and conduct the sales training meeting and then be with them in the field all day long until literally 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock at night.

Then I’d sit down and do performance reviews, evaluations, [and] put together specific training action plans for each individual rep that I worked with, and I would stay in the office the three days until I finished those plans. I didn’t get a hotel; I got the cheapest rental car that you could possibly buy, and I slept on the floor or the couch in every instance for two years.

Comparing Results

So when we got together … to evaluate our efficiency as regional managers, here’s what it looked like: I was on the road three times more … I specifically spent [3 or 4 or 5 times more] time direct training reps than the next manager in my position. And my costs, even though I was on the road that much more, my costs were less than a third of what anyone else’s were. And that wasn’t MY company! That was me just being a responsible steward for the person I worked for.

And then people would have the gall to come to me … and say, “you made … the owner of the company probably in the neighborhood of 2, 3 million dollars, and you only got paid this, doesn’t that make you mad?” And I’d say, (laughing) “You gotta be kidding me! First of all, I made a lot of money. I mean, it certainly wasn’t what [the owner] was making, but I was under the assumption that this was [his] company, it was his contract and he paid me to do this, and that if I made him a lot of money, well, doesn’t that make him want to have me around and perhaps pay me more in the future?” I mean, isn’t that my job as his employee?

The whole mentality of the fact that you did well and so therefore the employer should be penalized or that he cheated you . . . [he] honored his agreement with me, he paid me what he was supposed to pay me! Of course, I didn’t feel cheated!

I Couldn’t Avoid Becoming a Millionaire

Not only that, it provided me an opportunity to work and grow… I think the other managers, the other leaders, were specifically trying to rationalize and take advantage of finding opportunities to be indolent instead of finding opportunities to improve, be productive and be efficient. I’m saying you do that over a period of time.

If one person’s consistent habit is finding a better way to do it, being more efficient with their time and other people are trying to figure out the newest kind of rental car to drive or the nicest hotel to stay in or how to be able to take in an Astros game while they’re in Houston. In one day, that doesn’t change things very much; over the course of two or three years, you have one person who’s stagnant and not improving, and some significant skills can be developed by someone else to where in my case, I couldn’t avoid becoming a millionaire. Honestly, that is the true reality of it.