Thinking About Starting a Business? Try a Sales Job
blogs.wsj.com
blogs.wsj.com
My ex tried working for them, years ago. Not a fun experience. Cost her money in the end -- the best salespeople at Cutco are the hiring managers, who begin by selling their prospective employees an expensive demo kit. Beware, beware, beware.
And, in case you don't know, I should mention that even high-quality expensive cooking knives are a big ripoff. The first words out of every pro chef's mouth are "go to a restaurant supply store and buy a basic steel chef's knife, with sterilizable plastic handle and a brand like 'Global', for about $19. That's what all the pros use, and they chop more than you'll ever chop."
But perhaps a chef's needs are different from an ordinary person's, in that a chef has a lackey to sharpen his knives every night? For those of us who are too lazy to sharpen our knives regularly, perhaps a $100 knife is worthwhile?
But if you're making an order to fill out your kitchen, it's no surprise the cheap but fully functional knives will be ordered. $20 * 10 is a lot easier to justify than $100 * 10.
So, I lied. You might not want to use a $20 knife. You shouldn't spend a penny less than $26. ;)
Note that this is a brand-name product. Wouldn't be surprised to see the no-brand version at a supply store for $19.
Note also that knives are a personal thing. If the cheap one doesn't fit your hand you'll want a more expensive one. C'est la vie.
It's true that keeping your knife sharp is really important. Unfortunately, you can dull an expensive knife as easily as a $25 knife. You should get a steel and try to figure out how to use it. You should get your knife sharpened when you sense it's getting dull, or you'll injure yourself. You should use the right cutting board. You should have a knife that's all your own and hide it from other people, lest they smash the edge into a solid metal object. You should watch Alton Brown's show about knives to learn these things.
Mr. Brown recommends pro sharpening because he thinks all the homegrown solutions suck by comparison. Cook's Illustrated, OTOH, recommends the $80 Chef's Choice 110 electric home sharpener, which you can afford with the money you saved on that $110 chef's knife.
Pro chefs carry more than one knife, in a case. You also need more than one, but not many more. In his book, Anthony Bourdain (famous pro chef) recommended a chef's knife, a flexible boning knife, a paring knife, and an offset serrated knife. Alton Brown (famous geek pro chef) also suggests kitchen shears and a 4 to 5 inch utility knife. Cook's Illustrated suggests that you might want a slicing knife if you carve a lot of roasts (alas, I don't; I married a vegetarian), or a cleaver if you often make homemade chicken stock (see above).
You'll also need some steak knives if you're not married to a vegetarian like I am. ;)
Think about it: a kilo of steel is roughly 75 cents. A pound of plastic is less than that. I'm not being exact (commodity prices are hard to find online), but they are both >> than $25, which seems to be the consensus on the best you can get for a knife. And from an industrial point of view, it's really not that hard to assemble a knife. I don't see where the money goes. Maybe the handle?
Besides, if you pay $100 for a knife, that means you are a) a squanderer, b) gullible, and c) someone who overestimates the returns of investing in cutlery. Wouldn't a boxcutter do? These traits are not entrepreneurial. I wouldn't fund you. Maybe I'm a little extreme (I have a really hard time paying an extra $.04 per can for significantly less unedible tuna) but I'm pretty sure $100 per knife is retarded.
Really, the most important lesson is that you only need one good chef's knife. If you take good enough care of it (i.e. avoid needing to sharpen it so often that it becomes a matchstick) it will last a lifetime. So, really, go for it. Blow the $99 if you've shopped around and found the most comfortable knife in the world. It's not much money when amortized over your entire life.
(Incidentally, the first irony here is that my own chef's knife was a gift, from someone who probably does not read Cook's Illustrated, so it's probably a $70 knife.
The second irony is that, after a few years, I've concluded that my knife really doesn't fit me very well. So I'm probably going to end up buying another knife or two in an attempt to find something better. I'll be starting in the $26 range!
Which brings me to my last piece of advice: Don't give knives as gifts. Give gift certificates to stores that sell knives.)
I have a blog post I've been meaning to write called "What do you REALLY want to do for a living, aspiring entrepreneur?" inspired by a comment reply here where someone effectively said, "I'm not really that into growing a company, I just want to do a startup 'cause I love to build things and hate stupid managers". If your startup is successful, you generally grow (at least a bit). Before long, your job is hiring, BEING the stupid manager everyone gripes about, customer service, working with vendors and service providers, and doing sales/bizdev.
"Sales reps may have to buy their own demonstration equipment." It is a signature of a pyramid scheme. Encouraging young adults to participate in such scheme is evil.
I don't know a damn thing about CutCo, but having people buy their own equipment isn't just the signature of a pyramid scheme... It's the signature of franchising as well. Hrm. Is McDonalds a pyramid scheme?
Either way, high commission "eat what you kill and pay your own expenses" aren't inherently evil.
The extreme example of this is Steve Wozniak I think, who didn't even want to be top technical guy in his company; he just wanted to be an engineer.
Not really. In fact in many cases it's the opposite.
CTO's of highly technical startups are sometimes the company's best salesman, since no one understands the technology better than them, and they are out evangelizing their product, meeting a lot of prospects.
There are quite a few companies where CTO's are glorified sales reps, but this typically happens in larger companies and not startups.
Ultimately, you have to evangelize to folks that will buy your product, that is the key :-)
When I moved to California in the jobless pit of the dot-com bubble burst, my first two jobs involved knocking on doors. The first was soliciting donations for the D.A.R.E. program for a Sydcor company called "Synergistic Marketing Concepts". The second was pushing Electrolux vacuums.
Nothing forces a geek to face their social ineptitude like knocking on a door and trying to convince an annoyed stranger that they should trust you enough to give you money. I was never very good at either job, but I managed to keep from starving. By getting from "terrible" to "barely competent", I learned some essential communication skills that have helped me greatly as a hacker.
Besides direct sales, another good training is to do technical support for a terrible company; the worse the product, the better the experience. If it's related to finances in some way so that your customers don't get paid if it doesn't work, so much the better. When you hear raw unadulterated panic in the voice of a customer, and the rage that this panic creates, and learn to convince them that you're going to make everything alright, it forces you to have a lot of compassion for users.
The time on the road w/ the sales team was invaluable. I learned more in that year then I had in the past five at the company: creating a story, telling it well, listening to the customer and their pain points, deciding how to approach a new client, working up a quote, determining the relative value of a customer and more.
It has paid off handsomely in my current work. And I have much more appreciation for how sales work and how sales guys think.
But if you want to practice your sales skills, instead of getting involved in an existing door-to-door sales and/or multi-level-marketing racket, why not start your own door-to-door sales business? Pick a product, buy a trunkload of it, then try to sell it. You'll not only get the experience in sales, you'll get experience at choosing products that the consumer wants, and you'll get to keep all your profit (err, minus taxes) instead of a measly 10% commission.
I fully agree with the title, but these "independent reseller" schemes seem to be hit-or-miss at best. It might be a better experience to work in sales at a big company, rather than as an independent reseller. John Doerr plays up the fact that he worked in sales at Intel before his VC life. Or even better, sell something you made.
With my startup, I often have people telling me I should invest in radio outreach, print up business cards etc and do more marketing. This advice is all well-intentioned, and some of it is very good (like having decent business cards), but we've been doing a radio thing (free mind, you) for the last 3 months and haven't seen any fruit at all from it. I dunno. I think my time's better spent making the product better.
Also, as a journalist, that's about the lamest, least informative blog post I've ever read on a newspaper site.
However, if you absolutely think you have to put yourself through that ordeal of selling crap door-to-door, perhaps collecting money for charities would be a better choice than selling products of questionable quality.