In Search Of Excellence - Cold Calling: Master The Art To Succeed | E50

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

Cold Calling is one of the best ways to grow as an individual as well as accomplish even your wildest dreams! It requires confidence, composure, and sales skills – all of which are extremely hard to master!In today's competitive marketplace, many salespeople and business owners are relying solely on digital marketing techniques to generate leads and close deals. However, there is still tremendous value in cold calling, even if it seems intimidating or old-fashioned. The very fact that so many people are scared to pick up the phone can be a major advantage for those who do.I started my Cold Calling career at Mural Stone Construction where I made 200 calls a day trying to selling aluminum siding. At the end of the summer I made one sale – it was something that changed the course of my life forever. Feeling the value of my work in a commission check was especially rewarding to me. (03:09) David SolomonTwo of his jobs in collegeExperience with Merrill LynchDifference of cold calling then and nowThe responsibilities of finishing what you start(07:14) Daymond JohnLearning to face rejectionHaving a strong rejection musclePerfecting your approachPutting yourself out there(10:09) Sharon StoneWhat to do when the odds are 1 in 1,000,000Sharon’s dad beat cancer with a 3% survival ratePeople who chose to win, winBe grateful, say “please” and “thank you”(13:39) Steve CaseThe power of MORECustomer MentalityFinding business opportunities in college(15:34) Mark CubanEntrepreneurial spirit How to sellBuilding confidence (17:39) Tim DraperTrips to San FranciscoThe importance of cold calling skillsBeing able to connect with peopleGetting over your embarrassmentElon MuskCold calling is a personal connection(25:54) Trina SpearSelling scrubs from a car to hospital workersDeveloping communication skillsBelieving in a product you sellBeing interested in your buyersServing a warm cup of cocoa or coffee(30:44)  Brad KeywellAnn Arbor experienceCreating a businessSelling guidebooks and posters at collegeSponsors:Sandee | Bliss: BeachesWant to Connect? Reach out to us online!Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

In this episode of In Search of Excellence, we'll be talking with some of the most successful people in the world who have mastered the art of the cold call. They'll be sharing their stories of how cold calling has been critical to their success and also give us advice on how to get over our fear of cold calling on our path to excellence. You may start out with 99 rejections, but when you get a sale in the 100th person, you will forget about the other 99. Along the way, we'll all learn lessons how to improve our success rate, what to do is just as important as what not to do. At some point, maybe as early as five times in, it will also become easier.

We will lose our fear and we'll learn how to handle rejection. Cold calling has been a huge element of my success and it's something I learned when I was 17 years old. The summer before my senior year of high school, I worked at a company called Mural Stone Construction where I sat at a desk with a phone book in front of me and made 150 to 200 phone calls a day trying to sell home improvements to residents in lower income neighborhoods in the city of Detroit. My job was to get leads and if

any of my leads resulted in an actual job, I would get a commission in addition to the $5 per hour I was making. Over eight weeks, I made more than 6,000 calls with at least 2,000 of them to elderly residents who were just happy to speak to somebody and hear my voice. Of the 6,000 plus calls I made, I had one sale to a 70-year-old woman who needed some aluminum siding on her house. I made $1,300 from that sale, six and a half weeks worth of pay, or 81% of what I made that summer. While it was a ton of money for me, the lessons I learned that summer from making those 6,000 calls were 100 times more important than the money. I lost the fear of rejection, of people telling me to lose

their number and never call them again, of hanging up on me and swearing at me. I was no longer afraid to pick up the phone and call somebody I didn't know. I was no longer afraid to go up to somebody and introduce myself. Over the next 10 years, I mastered the art of cold calling. I went door to door to every room in college at the University of Michigan asking people to buy t-shirts I had made. More than 95% of people didn't want to buy one, but 5% did, which resulted in thousands of dollars, which went to good use, including a lot of pizza. When I was 26 years old and wanted a career change, I sent 300 cold letters to the CEOs

of some of the most successful companies in the world and landed in impossible-to-get job, one that didn't even exist, with Eli Broad, who at the time was only one of three people who had started two Fortune 500 companies. Since then, I've cold-called investors. I've cold-called potential customers who became customers, resulting in many tens of millions of dollars in sales, which have created billions of dollars in value for our portfolio companies. I've cold-called potential employees and hired them, including a 30-year veteran of Anderson

Consulting, which has a $175 billion valuation, and convinced him to join an eight-person startup in Santa Monica, California, where he made $100,000 a year. I've cold called entrepreneurs I wanted to meet and invested with them. Enjoy the show. I want to talk about two of the odd jobs you had in college and focus on one in particular. You worked at a summer camp during two of your summers, one before you graduated college and in the summer after your freshman year in college. During another summer,

you worked at a Merrill Lynch brokerage office in New York City where your main job was to cold call clients and ask them to open an account. You had a zip code list and had to make 100 cold calls a day. You cold called for eight weeks, which meant you made 500 calls a week or 4,000 calls in total.

It was agonizing. And after the first week, you went home and told your dad that you couldn't do this for the entire summer and he said yes you can that you committed to it so you need to finish it and he said to you that you needed to find a way to make it into a game to make it more exciting out of the four thousand calls over eight weeks you got two meetings that's the hit rate of 0.0005 which equates to five one hundredths of one percent. Of these two meetings, one opened an account, a success rate of 0.00025, which equates to 2.5 one hundredths of one percent.

Similar to you, I had an internship at Merrill Lynch. Mine was part of a senior high school project. I didn't do any cold calling there, but I did a lot of it two summers later when I worked at a company called Mural Stone Construction for eight weeks. I was given a phone book, a telephone, and a desk and would call 100 people a day on a phone where my boss would listen and where I could ask people in lower income neighborhoods in Detroit if they needed home improvements. Most of the people I called were old and lonely, and they were happy to be speaking to someone on the phone.

I had the same exact success rate, one sale, which resulted in a commission check of $1,300, which I still have a copy of. Going back to your two meetings in the one account, as incredible as this is, your boss told you that the end result was highly successful. Do you remember who opened that account, the size of the account,

and how much you were paid for that? And the game you developed to make this somewhat fathomable? And in search of excellence, how important is it to develop and have cold calling skills, which most people hate to do, and to keep coming after it despite the nonstop rejection when people hang up on you, or be rude to you, or even swear at you and call you names? Well, first of all, I think the point you made that the world has changed a lot. At that point in time, there were a lot of people that I got on the phone that would talk to me. The world is different today.

I don't think that this kind of cold calling works the same way today. But I think you make an interesting point. What I take away from the experience is not so much what the hit rate was. I had never done that math myself. Although, I think the interesting thing about it is the experience of having to get comfortable picking up the phone, calling someone, and trying to figure out how to get them to talk to you. I think it's a valuable skill. I'm glad I did it. I think the difficulty of doing that over and over and over and over again throughout a day required, I think, a good amount of

resilience, persistence, and it good amount of resilience, persistence. It was something that was really important. I think the advice my dad gave me that, look, you signed up for this and you got to finish it was really good advice. I think that carries through to a lot of things. Not all things are easy. Not all things are going to be as productive as you'd like them to be. But at the same point, if you take something on, you really have a responsibility to try

to complete it, to try to finish it. I do not remember the name of the person who opened up the account. I do remember the name of the Merrill Lynch broker who I was working for. His name was Mark Pollard. I was not paid anything. It was a summer internship. It was a non-paid summer internship, where if I was paid, I was paid a anything. It was a summer internship. It was a non-paid summer internship. If I was paid, I was paid a very, very small stipend, and there was no commission attached

to opening an account. It was really the experience of being in that office and learning a little bit about how that business worked. I will say the following summer, I went back to working at the summer camp. It was an interesting experience, but I think I like being outdoors. I spent the rest of my summers during college outdoors working at a summer camp. So maybe that reflects a little bit on the nature of how I felt about that experience. I started my entrepreneurial career at University of Michigan selling t-shirts as well. I'd print

them for $5. And back then you had to go in the phone book to find companies that printed 100% cotton shirts. The 50-50 shirts were not good quality. So I took $400 of my bar mitzvah money, made the shirts. I sold the short sleeve shirts for $12. The long sleeves were $6. I sold them for $18. I'd go door to door in the dorms, get kicked out, go into another floor, go to another dorm and get kicked out. But the cold calling skill was invaluable to my future, as was the ability to get turned down and go to the next sale because you forgot about the previous sale when you made money. How has cold calling been an important factor in your own success? You learn to accept rejection. As an entrepreneur,

as anybody, you're going to face a lot of rejection. But as an entrepreneur, you seek the rejection. Right. You go and you call people. And, you know, as a regular person, you often people try to kind of shun away and they don't they don't they're not vulnerable. But that's the point. Right. That's being vulnerable, calling somebody and letting them not only say I'm not interested, but say your stuff is crap. I don't want this. I mean, you don't know what they're going to say because you don't know what moment you're going to catch them in. They may just insult you, you have to perfect your approach because every time you get a no, you learn what you shouldn't say or what may not be appealing to people. And every time you get a yes, you learn what is appealing to people and what triggered the response. So I think it's critical. And you can only do that once you put yourself out there in real time and real action. If you sit there and just look at books and wait for the perfect time to happen, you're never going to get that interaction with somebody else.

So you can never improve. You can only think in your head that you have everything. But sooner or later, you got to get out of the gate. And cold calling is and knocking on doors and standing on corners is the ultimate way to see if you have something of value. And a lot of us, we're not going to have anything of value. We're going to have to close it up and then restart over again a little more wisely. There's a stadium at Michigan that holds 100,000. Now today, it used to hold 100,000. It holds 116,000. It's the biggest stadium in the United States, but I would stand out there with boxes

of shirts and sell them to 100,000 people going by, most of which went down one street. So that was placement, distribution, very important to success. You're 21 years old, you head off to New York City, and you're going to walk into one of the most successful, famous modeling agencies in the world without an appointment, basically show up, say, hey there, I'm Sharon, and I'd like to meet with Eileen Ford. I mean, there's a lot of people listening and watching today who may be thinking of a really bold idea, but they're really afraid to go for it. They're really afraid to try it. They're thinking in a million years, there's a negative 0% chance of this ever happening.

What's the worst thing that can happen? They're going to say no. You start out with no. If you end up with no, so what? But if you don't try, you're never going to get a yes. Good. So, say it again. What should people do when the odds are one in a billion? Go get it. Go get it. I mean, my dad had esophageal cancer. They gave him a 3% chance of living three months. We tortured my father. We told him to wash the car in his tuxedo so he could get some wear out of it.

And my dad beat esophageal cancer. Who beats a 3% chance of even making it three months? Who beats it and lives? The people who want to. The people who say they're going to. The people who say, I'm not doing that. I'm not dying. The people who decide to win, that's who wins. The people who choose to win, that's who wins. The people who go in and say, I'm going to do this. She's going to throw me down the flight of stairs and bounce the fat off my ass. Well, guess what? I wish someone would because I want to win. If that's what it takes, let's do it. I'll stand at the top. You push. When I was 26, I was a very unhappy lawyer. I want to get out of the law.

And I had an idea. I was going to write letters to CEOs of big companies asking for meetings. And everyone said, people are never going to meet with you. I wrote 300 letters. I got 80 meetings. Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney. Sumner Redstone, who started Viacom. These are themes of in search of excellence.

One of the themes is believe in yourself. Anything is possible. So I love your story. For those listening- And say thank you. Say please and thank you to everyone who gives you an opportunity. Call them Mr. and Mrs.

Don't think you can waltz in there and start calling people by their first names. Don't think that people don't remember if you don't say thank you or please. It is really important to acknowledge people and let them know that it means something that they had a minute for you. Handwrite a thank you note. I hand wrote thank you notes to every single cast and crew member of all my films for as long as I could until my career got so overwhelming

that I couldn't. And there were 200, 300 people on every film set. And I wrote a handwritten note to everybody as long as I could. And I'm sure every single person who received one of your notes is still talking about it today when your name comes up in a conversation. And again, that's just, it's great advice. It's great form. And still now I try to come up with some kind of crew gift so that everybody gets something from me. I want everyone to know that I see you.

I see your dragging cable. I see you're out here in the cold and the wet. I see the hard work you're doing on behalf of this film. I get that you're there. I get that you're working. I sold t-shirts door-to-door. And one of the most important and valuable lessons I learned in college was going door-to-door and cold calling and getting 100 doors shut in your face, like you said. But it's the one sale. After the one sale, you don't care about the other 99 people that said no. Yeah, I totally agree. I remember one business I did in college also kind of ties into the kind of go-to-market strategy, who's your customer kind of mentality, which is I had this idea of selling fruit baskets to students during exam week. Instead of just eating junk food, if you're staying up kind of late, you had to eat fruit.

But I knew the students themselves probably wouldn't have the desire to buy the fruit, nor necessarily even the money to buy the fruit. So I ended up targeting their parents and said, while your kids are studying hard, don't you want to eat healthy? And that actually worked out pretty well, where parents were willing to foot the bill to get these fruit baskets to their kids doing that intense exam time frame. Just another example of seeing an opportunity, at that point I happened to be in college, figuring out what to do in terms of that particular product. But then also figuring out what's the best way to essentially bring that product to market and who are the logical customers for that, which even though the consumer was the student, the better customer to pay for it was their parents. You started your first business when you were 12 years old. And you did it in a pretty unique way. Your dad was playing poker with his buddies, drinking and whooping it up.

And you went into the room, grabbed the donut, and told them you wanted a new pair of expensive Chuck Taylor Converse basketball shoes. Your dad said the shoes on your feet were working fine and that when you got a job, you could buy whatever you wanted. At that point, one of his buddies who was drunk said, hey, I can get you a job. I have all these trash bags. You can sell them door to door. And you said, done.

You charge $6. They cost you $3. So you made $3 per bunch. Then when you were 16, you started a stamp company. You went to stamp shows and trade shows. You would trade up from one stamp to the next. You knew what you were doing because you'd stay up until 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. reading Lynn's Stamp News and Scott's Stamp Journals and then have them all memorized

to give yourself an edge. You also earned money by selling baseball cards and rare coins. When you were 16, you took advantage of a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette strike by driving 130 miles to the plant in Cleveland where the newspapers were printed. You found a truck coming out of the plant. You convinced the driver to sell you his papers so he wouldn't have to drive around and do his rounds. Then you drove back to Pittsburgh and sold the papers for five times the cost. To make money, you also worked at a grocery store stocking shelves and at a deli where you sliced off a piece of your finger. You had the entrepreneur gene. You were born with it. Can you tell us about the lessons you learned going door to door as a 12-year-old and the

importance of hustle and cold calling on our path to excellence. And can you also tell us about persistence and how telling potential garbage bag customers that you knew their daughter helped you succeed? You know, I think what I learned most was how to sell. And that selling wasn't something to be afraid of because it wasn't convincing anybody. I mean, it wasn't trying to change people's minds. It was trying to help them. And so when you're 12 years old going door to door, it's, hi, my name is Mark. I live down the street.

Do you use garbage bags? It was easy. It was just like, hey, for $6 dollars i'll bring you a box of a hundred whenever you need them all you got to do is call my house and then i'll bring them down to you and it was that easy and you know from there once i got that confidence it started to get easy whether i was selling stamps whether um i was selling magazines door to door, it'd be like, hi, my name is Mark. If I could show you how 75 cents a week can improve the education and entertainment of your family and put your kids in a better position at school, would 75 cents a week be worth it? Things that I remember to this day

and dealing with objections, those are all things that became core for me, you know, and really built my confidence. This episode of In Search of Excellence is brought to you by Sandy.com, S-A-N-D-E-E.com. We're a Yelp for beaches and have created the world's most comprehensive beach resource by cataloging more than 100 categories of information for every beach in the world's most comprehensive beach resource by cataloging more than 100 categories of information for every beach in the world, more than 100,000 beaches in 212 countries. Sandy.com provides beach goers around the world

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book by Randall Kaplan features stunning drone photography from exotic beach locations around the world. It's the perfect housewarming gift, a great addition to any home or office, and a fun and creative alternative to bringing a bottle of wine to somebody's house for dinner. Bliss Beaches is available for purchase on Amazon, where it has glowing reviews and a five-star rating. Get your next amazing gift and order a copy of Bliss Beaches by clicking the link in our show notes. We have Draper University logo. I was going to ask you about that. We have logo and condom. And they get a stack of them. Each team gets a stack of them and whatever they sell um for their team uh that money goes into uh whether they can um money that pays for the food and survival trade so there is a great

incentive to go ahead and do those things yeah but where but where do they go? Are they walking up to people on the street of San Francisco? Yeah. And then on the train on the way there, we always say you've got to get a life story of the person next to you on the train. So on the train up, they get the life story. They get to San Francisco. They usually go to Union Square. They sell the condoms.

And then we may have to combine they usually go to Union Square, they sell the condoms. And then they, we may have to combine those two things, then they have to go get a job and then they come back. But they've been two trips to San Francisco historically. I think there's two things that I'm hearing when I, when you share this with us. The first is the art of the cold calling. I think the ability to cold call as a founder, as an executive, I think that's critical to our success. And the other thing that I think of

is the ability to close. So where do you, do you think cold calling is a necessary skill for those who are going to start a company? You've got nothing. You've got company you've got nothing you've got a piece of paper you got a business plan you think gosh i hope somebody likes what i'm doing i hope i can raise money from someone some people don't raise money i mean that's the best way to start a company not to raise money and you own all of it yourself um but where does cold calling come into

this and what do you what do you tell people? People are afraid. I think when people walk in, they don't know about, you got to go sell condoms. People are thinking, I mean, in a million years, if you had told some of these people this, they would have said, I'm never going to do that. So you make people do that. But what are you going to say to all the people out there that have the fear of doing this? Because I think that's an impediment to a lot of

us a lot of people who you know to get motivation and to be well they should stop watching the snooze that's the thing that scares everybody the scary news but um i also think when you do it, it changes you because you're afraid to do it and then you do it and you go, oh, it wasn't so bad. And then you also realize that a cold call is really an opportunity to talk to somebody and to connect. And I think that that's a powerful thing, whether you're cold calling or not. I think it's really important to be able to connect with people, even if it's the people you work with or your customers or whoever. It's important to be able to connect. And I think you have something like that. And, you know, it's something they can laugh about. It's something they can, you know, tell people, Oh, my God, these guys had to, you know, got me into this. And now I'm selling condoms on the street. And it's actually, it's pretty interesting, because some

people go and sell the condoms. And then others, like, become street musicians or whatever, mimes, and they try to get money that way. So it forces them into odd situations that are a little embarrassing. And I think if you can get over your embarrassment, you can do great things. Think of Elon Musk. Elon says, we're going to Mars. Most people are going to look at him and go, that's nuts. But who joins him? The best engineers in the world, the ones who are going, that's a cool idea. Let's see what I can do with that. That's going to be fun.

How are we going to feed people? How are we going to house people? How are we going to house people? How are we going to clothe people on Mars? And so he ends up with the best engineers in the world and all because he's not afraid to be embarrassed. And look at what he does. I mean, his tweets are hilarious. I mean, he's doing a brain-computer

interface. He's doing a boring company that bores holes in the earth and allows people to travel that way. You know, the guy's willing to stick his neck out over and over and over again and take the embarrassment at the beginning because he knows down and deep in his heart that he might just be able to do it. I want to share with our listeners and our viewers. I started cold calling when I was a freshman in college. I sold t-shirts door to door, room to room.

You knock on the door, some people blow it off. You know, terrible, get out of here. And then some people bought the shirts, but I bought them for five. I sold them for 12. The long sleeve I bought for seven. I sold those for 20, bigger margin there. I sold them outside the big house, Michigan football stadium, 100,000 people in. And you got your box there and you're selling shirts. And I've done it. I've had some success and I've done it in the last 10 years. We had a portfolio company based

in Palo Alto. The ex-CIO of Salesforce was the chairman. We were at the big Salesforce conference. We had a little booth in the back. And my job was to go and find people and bring them into the booth. And you know what that's like. You're looking at badges and you're pulling people. And you get blown off 99% of the time. But a couple people went by the booth.

I have a product. It's called a collar card. It's basically a credit card that has four pop-out collar stays. We sell them to hotels and dry cleaners. We have record sales. First quarter, Tim, $0 for the first time in the 11-year history of the company. But I went to the Clean Show two years ago, and I'm sure it's one of your favorite conferences it's the dry cleaner show every drying cleaner in the country goes there I'm walking around with my

collar cards and I'm cold calling am I fearful yeah did people blow me off yeah does it bother me you know I'm used to it I'm 52 years old I was 50 when I went there and I still have to do it for my own success. So for those listening today, cold calling is something that I think we all need, no matter how young or old or whatever you've done in your career to that point in time. Oh, no question. I think you're dead on. People have to. And cold calling is a personal connection. And as soon as you start thinking about it that way, it changes your whole attitude. Then you realize all I'm doing is I'm stepping up to somebody, giving them an opportunity.

If they say no, no big deal. But you get a chance to meet them. My first job, paid job, I worked for a company called Mural Stone Construction. It was a summer job, 16 years old. I sat in an office with six people. We had a phone book, and we went through the phone book cold calling people.

Hi, I'm Randy from Mural Stone Construction. Are you interested in some aluminum siding today? I'd make 200 calls a day, and you have to be on for every single call sort of like raising money you know you're meeting with 20 venture capitalists and you had two weeks you have to be on for every single meeting uh but you're a little fatigued if you're 200 200th call it at the end of the day. And I remember I had one sale of, I think, $70,000. And I remember getting a check for something like $1,800. Oh my gosh, this is amazing. Greatest thing ever. It really is the greatest thing ever. It's really helped my career and some of the things I've been

able to do. I was working at Sun America. I was the assistant to the chairman. Eli Broad was my boss. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I had a t-shirt business in college. I looked around at a bunch of different things that year. I told Eli that I wanted to leave. I wanted to have my own business. He said, you're making a mistake. Of course, he sold the company eight months later, full vesting event for $18 billion. So I lost $2.5 million of publicly traded options, which is an oops. But we invented this technology to serve web content better, faster, cheaper, and more reliably. The company has created that market. It serves around 30% of the world's web traffic. But back then, we were four guys, a professor, a PhD student, a first-year business school student.

I was the only one with any business background. And it was basically a bunch of math formulas. We started with four computers in a professor's office. That's our network. We were asking companies like Disney and the largest websites, CNN, Yahoo, to let us serve their live traffic for them. And when I hear the parking lot, which is proof of concept, people are actually buying this. What made it for me was we'd go into these meetings, and because of my letter writing campaign, I knew people at all these companies, very senior people. And when I was 26 years old and really nothing, a lawyer, no one, I was last on their list. Then I know that I got this great job

working for someone of credibility. And I kept in touch with all these people. So I'd get the meeting. And I wasn't sure whether I was going to join. I wasn't going to join the company in Boston. There was no way. I was moving there. And we'd get these meetings with mid-level managers. It's just, okay, Randy, I'll set you up with someone. And every time people kept coming into the room. So it'd be a manager, a senior manager, a director, VP, senior VP, and then the CTO came in every single time. You could see the light bulb pop off in their head. And that was what gave me the impetus to join. It took me eight months to quit my job and to do that. What's interesting about the story that you tell also, you're in a parking lot and you're selling scrubs from your car.

You're accosting people who have either woken up at four or five or late at six in the morning, hit their coffee. They're going to work a 12-hour day, and you're coming up to them like someone at the beach where you've got headphones on, but it's even worse because they're going to a tough day at a hospital, or they're coming out of a hospital, and they've been there 12-hour, 16-hour shift, and there you are, hey, will you talk to me? I mean, the cold calling skill has been invaluable to a lot of people in their career. It's been invaluable to me. It helped make my career.

It did make my career. Did you have any sales experience before this? You had a traditional background. You were an investment banker. How important is that in our path to excellence? Oh, it's so important. I've really worked hard to develop communication skills over time. But if you're not, you know, if you're not selling what you believe in some way, and selling or sales gets kind of a bad rap, it's really convincing somebody of something that you think they need. And it wasn't a hard sell, right? Because the alternative was just so awful. But I do think, you know, having the ability to communicate a value proposition, having the ability to talk

about how you can change someone's life and how you could provide them with a better product and a better experience is really important. And I think, you know, we also did a few things that I think was helpful. So we would go to Starbucks and we would buy this super huge jugs. And so if you're coming off the night shift and, you know, and someone hands you a warm, hot cocoa or a hot cup of coffee, you know, healthcare professionals are the most grateful people in the world. And so it really endeared them to us and us to them. And so

it's also that, it's also understanding as people are coming in and coming out, what matters to them? How do you relate? And having those conversations. I mean, we spend a lot of time conversations inside the hospital, in the cafeteria. We would put on our scrubs for 10-year healthcare professionals and just sit right there at the table and ask them what they liked and what they didn't like and what bothered them

and about the uniforms they were wearing every single day. So, you know, you get to know people and people are, especially healthcare professionals, are incredibly generous people, generous with their time and their views. And they're so smart. And they wanted to, even at the early days,

they were so helpful to us. Back then, there was no internet. I was a freshman in 87. Oh, sorry. Yeah, sorry. Right, I was 1986. My bad, 1987. No cell phones. So we had the yellow pages pages the big thick book with the bold people who paid more for the bold which meant we walked a lot when we wanted to do something a bit i went to door to door sounds like you had done that before and you're walking in off the street you're introducing yourself it's a cold call you're trying to convince someone much older than you. You're 18 years old. And you're probably thinking, what is this kid doing? It was 10 times harder, maybe 100 times harder back then to start a company. You started in college selling guidebooks and posters. So what was that about? Where did it come from? Did you have a plan to do that?

Talk to us about that. I got to Ann Arbor and something about me quickly understood. This entrepreneurially is Woodstock. This is like, this is, well, Woodstock in the 60s. This is like, this is, well, Woodstock in the 60s. This is unbelievable, the freedom to be expressive entrepreneurially once I found myself independent and in Ann Arbor. And I don't know why, but I couldn't help it. I was so excited about all the opportunity. And my reaction to opportunity is to create. And the poster business that I created was sort of a riff off of the modern art posters that I saw in people's dorm rooms.

And my reaction to that was, that's amazing. I should do my, maybe there should be a modern art version of of the michigan logo you know the block m and modern art versions of other schools logos and why pay somebody to do it professionally let's have a contest for students to enter and and uh and that worked and then there should be a cultural handbook when you when you get to your dorm and get on campus every semester. And that worked. And so I just started to try things.

And those were days when I, or nights more accurately, in the midst of being in a fraternity and doing all the things that, thankfully, I did more that were sort of more cliche or core to the college experience, I chose a different path to complement those more traditional activities called creating businesses. And it helped me figure out who I was.