I’ve been in business for years. I started a company in the early 1980’s called U.S. Telecom in Memphis, Tennessee. I was a financial consultant for Shearson, Lehman, and Hutton. District sales manager for a communications company from which I was fired along with all the other District managers. This forced me to start another business, thank goodness.

For the past 13 years I’ve been involved in the vacuum cleaner business. At first I had a problem with telling people I was in this business because of the stigma of door to door vacuum cleaner salesmen. However, I have since found out that the “best” salespeople in the world are “in-home” salespeople.

I started out in sales but quickly moved into management, and after a couple of years I set up a new sales office in a remote little town of 17,000 people in Dyersburg, Tennessee. I started hiring and training salespeople and in one year my office was the number one office for the Thermax Corporation in Tennessee.

I was promoted to the state director of Arkansas and within one year I had six new offices set up. Sales were good and getting better when out of the blue our finance company that had been in business for 50 years and was located in Dallas, Texas went out of business. Since Arkansas had a usury law in their constitution limiting the amount of interest a finance company could charge, their were no finance companies in Arkansas. We could sell a lot of machines, but we couldn’t get them financed. The combination vacuum cleaner/steam cleaner machines were a big ticket item and we were selling them for around $1600.00, which meant that most people couldn’t write a check or put the sale on their credit card.

to be continued…