It's a people business. Of course it is competitive, but it basically consists of knowing the product, applying whatever creativity you may have, and then being willing to try to sell that combination. That is the only thing I can sell in comparison with the next person.
(S) I travel a lot. I will travel to thirty cities from January 1 to March 1, I'll speak to 5,000 people, plus I'll go to regional shows. I'm leaving for Tampa and St. Petersburg. I'll work down there with some salespeople for about a week. The day before that I am going to call on a manufacturer to help the salespeople. The day before that I'm going to be in Milwaukee with a big insurance company trying to wrap that up and help the salespeople on that account. The day before that I am going to St. Louis to put on a sales meeting. I put on lots of meetings, mainly educational. I try to help by explaining our product line. Sales people want to know what to do with the calendar and who to call on.
I cover the United States through the 500 distributors I call on. That develops into maybe 6,000 salespeople who are selling our product. These companies can be a one-person operation or can have 1000 salespersons working for them. The advantage for me to go in and lave sales meetings with them is that I cannot possibly knock on every door, industrial account, and commercial account, whatever it might be. These people have access to over 700 additional supplier lines, if they want them. So, I am really competing with other products that are in our price category. We try to cover all budgets and price ranges. We have products ranging from $0.25 all the way up to $2,000. From advertising specialty items to gift items to fund-raising items.
An advertising specialty is given to the recipient without any obligation on the recipient's part. The item usually carries an advertising message with it. A business gift is usually the same way; it is given to someone. The difference between these and a premium is that you have to do something in return to receive a premium. In other words, you have to mail in a box top or something like that, or you have to fill out something, or take some kind of test, or do something in return.
There are two national shows, winter and summer. I always go to both of them. Then there are regional shows all over the country. I go to several of them each year as well.
Q - What can you tell me that would help me understand the nature of your business?
A - If you really stop to think about it, people put their advertisements on a product and put them there for a specific reason. Whether they are thanking their customer with a gift or using it strictly as an advertising specialty, they are trying to encourage people to buy their product, to use their services, or to instill good will. What it all boils down to is that when they can use something, whether it is a coat, a T-shirt, or a ball point pen, you are giving them something that will stay in front of them, not a widget that will go in the bottom drawer.
I believe in calendars and pens. I believe that you need to stay in front of the public for as long as you can, and I think that our medium allows people to do that. If they've done any advertising at all, people are concerned about costs per thousand and this type of thing. What we are laying out for them is the return that they can get from specialty advertising. For $0.40 they can hang a calendar on the wall. Where else are you going to buy a year's worth of advertising for $0.40? Well, that's the beauty of our industry. You put a person's name on something, and I guarantee it is not going to get thrown away.
The biggest distributor in the industry has close to 500 sales people, and they do somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 million gross sales. We have 5 salespeople, and we do about $1.7 million.
We've got a real good cross section of clientele we do business with. Some of our companies are probably in the Fortune 500 and some of them are just poor boys, entrepreneurs who are in the service industry. Our company, like probably a big percentage of the companies involved in specialty advertising, is kind of a mom-and-pop operator I guess we are like a manufacturer representative, because we really don't maintain any inventory. We don't have any product off ourselves to sell. Of course, that is one of the most beautiful things about it, you don't have to worry about dated merchandise, something that goes out of style.
Most of the time customers call us. I'd say 75 percent of our business comes from customers who have already placed an order before. If it's a big enough order, I will call them several times to get i repeated; if it's an order for a case of matches, they will call me to repeat it.
