Being An Account of How One Business Man Made the
Little Things Count. Do You?
My business (rubber goods) was in a bad way. Somehow I couldn't seem
to make it return enough to pay my income tax with. My wife and I were
frankly upset.
At last one morning she came to me and said: "Fred, the baby will soon
be seven months old and will have to have some sort of vocational
training. What are we to do?"
That night was the bluest night I have ever spent. I thought that the
end had come. Then, suddenly, the thought struck me: "Why not try
character-selling?"
This may sound foolish to you. That is because it is foolish. But it
did the trick.
I began to sell my personality. Every man that came into my store I
took aside and showed him different moods. First, I would tell him a
funny story, to prove to him that I was more than a mere business
automaton. Then I would relate a pathetic incident I had seen on the
street a week or two ago. This disclosed my heart. Then I did a
fragment of a bare-foot dance and sketched a caricature of Lloyd
George, to let him see that I was a man of the world. After this, I
was ready to sell him what he came in for, and he would go away
carrying a very definite impression of my personal
characteristics--and some of my goods, in a bundle.
A week of selling rubber-goods in this manner, and I was on the
vaudeville stage, earning $250 a week. How much do _you_ earn?