This is a post that is very difficult to write. Nonetheless, as I went through the events I will chronicle, I made a solemn vow that is I made it through I would someday expose The Southwestern Company for what it is. And so, bear with me as I recount the worst summer of my life. Bear with me, this is a long one.

I was a freshman at Oklahoma State, and somehow I was contacted by a representative of The Southwestern Company. I am still not sure who put them in touch with me, but one of the higher-ups at OSU was a Southwestern alum so there is no telling what kind of access they may or may not have to student data. Anyway, this representative gives me this deal about how I have been selected for an interview for a summer work program and could I come to a presentation on their program. I went. At the presentation, the other recruits and I were regaled with stories of how much money we could make in their summer work program and how attractive our Southwestern Company experience would be to employers once we were able to put it on our resumés.

Basically, the presentation was designed to do something we recruits would later learn all about in The Southwestern Company’s world-famous sales school: “Sell the sizzle, not the steak!” After a presentation which, by design, had all of us practically begging to be “selected” for this wonderful opportunity, I was selected for this wonderful summer internship program and assigned to my wonderful student manager Kurt. I liked Kurt actually, and I always felt for him because he suffered with cystic fibrosis. Anyway, he becomes my new best buddy, and we have to get my parents to campus to agree to let me be selected. My parents come, share with me their misgivings about the wonderful opportunity, yet give me their blessing because my parents are like that. They have always supported me and let me go my own way, even when they were not so sure. It’s a nice quality for parents to have. The long and short of it is that I and the other summer interns are going to be trained to sell a wonderful product that families really need, then we will be placed in other areas of the country to sell the product, rake in the cash, and polish our resumé.

Our preparation for this trek is that as soon as final exams are over we need to be ready to leave the next day and caravan with the group to The Southwestern Company’s world headquarters in Nashville, TN. Once there, we will have to front the money to split motel rooms with the other recruits from our university for the week that we are undergoing our world-class salesmanship training.

Sales School

Sales school was a week-long series of motivational speeches, company instruction, and sales technique practice at HQ in Nashville. You are issued your salesman’s bookbag (a putrid green monstrosity in my day). It is filled with samples of the books you are to have the great opportunity to sell that summer. The flagship product of the Southwestern line is The Student Handbook. If recollection serves it was copyrighted 1976. I was selling in 1996. It is a large book just chock-full of information for helping students with their homework. It could be sold solo or with the full 5-book Student Handbook Set (they preferred if we called it The Student Handbook System). There was a children’s book series (the first book of which was orange), and the hot product for the summer was a special-edition Olympic cookbook to commemorate the Atlanta Olympics. If memory serves, all of these items were billed to your account with the company.

The motivational portion of the week was handled by Mort Utley. Mort Utley was dead. I am serious. Mort had been The Southwestern Company’s resident motivational guy for years, and it was, for all intents and purposes, Mort’s job to sell The Southwestern Company to those of us fortunate enough to be selected for this life-building opportunity. Then Mort had the audacity to leave this earth. Fortunately, someone at The Southwestern Company had had the foresight to videotape Mort so that they would never have the inconvenience or cost of replacing him, even after death. So, we watched lots of Mort telling us how good we could be, and that we should sell the sizzle not the steak, and that we needed to learn our sales talks backward and forward, and that if we just committed to give it our all, we would succeed, and that we should never quit, and that if we had the right attitude about life, we could be given a pile of horse manure for a birthday gift and we’d love it because with all that manure, there had to be a pony around somewhere. Mort would tell amazing stories about how he would meet students desperately failing at sales, then Mort would give them a good motivating talk, and they would go back out there and try. And even if they didn’t do well or make any money, they wanted to come back again next year just because of the experience.

Aside from Mort, there were the company instructions. For example, you will have to find your own place to stay once you are in your assigned sales territory. The Southwestern Company’s recommended method of finding summer housing was to get in your territory and start knocking on doors explaining that it may sound crazy but you are just a college student from Oklahoma out here working for the summer and inquiring as to whether the homeowners might have a room to rent for the summer or maybe know of someone who would have a room to rent for the summer. I am not making that up. I swear. And you need to make sure you find a room the first day you are in the territory, because dalaying it to the second day could cut into valuable sales time.

Another little instruction: as soon as you can, usually with checks from your pre-paid sales, open a checking account at a local bank. But whatever you do, under no circumstances are you to have checks printed with The Southwestern Company’s name on them or your name dba The Southwestern Company. You are an independent contractor. Remember that!

The real theme to Sales School was 30 Demos a Day. If you will just demonstrate this needed product to 30 families or individuals a day, you will succeed! Make the commitment to do 30 Demos a Day! It is your new religion. Say it in your sleep. Everyone all together, 30 Demos a Day! As an example, over the summer we were very impressed by those who were so committed to the 30 Demos a Day philosophy that, if they were coming up short as stop-work time came, they would stop at a gas station and approach strangers just to get their 30 Demos in. What dedication!

We were also taught the proper procedure for knocking on doors. There is a right way to set your bag down, hold the product, knock on the door, introduce yourself–falling back on the ever-popular, “This may sound crazy but I am just a college student out here working for the summer…” routine, and demo the product.

We were given a recommended daily schedule of when to rise, eat, sleep, work, etc. We would need to live cheap and work 80 hours a week, but we would be rich and brimming with confidence after the summer of experience. Some guys didn’t even eat lunch while they sold, they just had a big container of peanut butter they ate with their fingers! What an example for us all! We all had to be back to our rooms, which we shared with other recruits, by a certain time each evening so that we could call our student manager and report the day’s progress—how many demos? how many sales? how much pre-paid? And if you ever had a 0 day, you would have to go spend the day with a successful seller and watch how they do it. We don’t like 0 days. At all.

And so, after our week of second-to-none training, we were all hepped up and chomping at the bit to get out there and sell, sell, sell. It was time for our territory assignments. I can vividly remember a meeting in which we were told this elaborate story about some sales territory and how awesome it was and how the Company was going to pay for this, that, and the other thing, and it had everyone all just totally excited. Then they reveal it was a joke. He-he, ha-ha. Hilarious. Our real territory would be, drumroll please, exciting North Carolina! For our specifics, we had to go to see our big sales manager, who was actually employed by The Southwestern Company. In my case, that was Mr. Rusty Branch. He told me who my roommate would be for the summer. Then he told me we would be based in Rockingham, NC. We would have two counties to cover.

At some point, I inquired about being able to go to church on Sundays, to which I was told absolutely, we were free to do that. Sundays were our free day (we were expected to work the other six). The big surprise, though, once you are in the field is that Sundays are days off from door-knocking, but they are reserved for meetings with your sales manager. Everyone has to travel to the town (usually city) where your sales manager has been placed (in the primo locations), eat at some nasty buffet, and maybe go to a movie, in addition to the stupid chants and things called Executive Exercises. I guarantee you Donald Trump never did one of these ridiculous things. Long story short: church does not fit into the plan. We might crack a Bible for some 15-minute sort of devotion, but no church. One Sunday out of the whole summer I skipped the Sunday meeting to go to church with some wonderful folks I had met. I was berated for missing the meeting. And my skipping was used as a reason for my having done do badly. Funny, I did just as badly when I went to the meetings.

Back in Nashville at Sales School. Rusty did something that would cement this as the worst summer of my life. He asked me to give my word that, no matter how bad it was, no matter how poorly I did, no matter how much I wanted to go home, that I would not give up and go home before the summer was over. And I agreed. He asked me to give my word. And I gave him my word. [Are you getting the point that that meant something to me?]

In North Carolina

So then the group from OSU caravanned to North Carolina from Nashville, losing a couple every so often as they pealed off into their territory. Jimmy, my roommate, and I eventually ended up in Rockingham, NC. It was too late to look for a permanent place to stay that night, so we stayed at a cheap motel that smelled very strongly of curry. Early next morning, we set out to locate us a summer pad. They key to this was first trying a very short contact list (I believe it contained one name) provided by our benevolent company (of which we are not employees but only independent contractors) of persons who had housed some Southwestern vagabonds in previous summers. We located that place, to discover no one at home. Failing the contact list, we were supposed to begin knocking door-to-door inquiring as to whether the residents who had the misfortune to answer might have a room to let for the summer. Of course, most normal folks not being in the boarding house business these days, there were not many yeses. In fact, there were none. But a no on the room just gave us the opportunity to whip out our trusty Student Handbook and get in one of our 30 Demos a Day. Eventually, Jimmy caught up to me (pre-cell-phone-popularity days) to tell me he had located us a place to stay. And I have to admit, it was a pretty nice place. A family had a garage apartment they were willing to rent to us for the summer. Decent setup. So we took it, and got all settled in.

Next, we had to divide our sales territory. We had been given Anson and Rockingham counties. We were staying in the city of Rockingham in the county of Rockingham. Somehow we decided Jimmy would take Rockingham County and I would take Anson, probably because I had a more reliable car, though they both had made it to North Carolina from Oklahoma, via Nashville.

And then our summer began in earnest. It was day after day of cold calling door to door. We had been taught in Sales School to look for yards full of toys as an indicator of the presence of children. Make initial contact during the day. Get those 30 Demos a Day in. Either make the sale, literally lodging your foot in the door to keep it open, or get an appointment to come back in the evening to demonstrate the products to the whole family, or at least Dad if he is the decision maker in the family, plus if you were really good, you could schedule your last demo of the day to coincide with the dinner hour at a particularly promising house and probably get yourself invited to stay for dinner, successfully saving the cost of that meal. Cha-ching!

In all, the summer consisted of many crudely drawn maps on legal pads, with squares representing the houses. We were to make ourselves into private eyes to determine the comings and goings so we could catch people at home. Hopefully, we would make some early sales so that we would have some influential names in our sales book that we could flip through and show potential new clients. If we could make the sale, we were to get at least half the payment upon ordering, if not all of it. [Now that I am an adult, I would not even consider giving a "student salesman" who showed up at my door one thin dime.]

And here’s the big news: I was horrible at selling. There are several reasons. I think the mainest one is that the area had been literally saturated previously. I can’t tell you how many people would be more than glad to go get me their previously purchased Student Handbook so that I could see they had bought one. Then they would be glad to point out that they had not been cracked since they were delivered by the last poor sucker to come by, though he was fortunate enough to have made a sale. And that leads to another reason for my lackluster sales. The products. As far as I could tell, the Handbooks didn’t contain any information that could not be obtained by looking in the average student’s textbooks. It may have been in there, and we were certainly trained to profess the wonders of the product, but in the end, it was not a product I believed in. And before you say that I should have known that before I committed to The Southwestern Experience, let me state that we did not even see the products until we arrived in Nashville for Sales School. And once we did have our sample book, it was a condensed version of highlights from all five books. We were directed to focus on its superior craftsmanship, like stitched pages rather than glued. In fact, one of our favorite demonstrations was to flip the handbook open to a center page, place the palm of either hand on each side of a single page, and lift the entire book in the air suspended by just one of our quality pages. The trick here was that is was wise to not use the same page more than once. I actually witnessed Kurt do this demo just to have the page rip out of the book as he looked helplessly at the potential customer. Can you say, “No sale?”

My concern, and it turned out to be a huge concern for potential buyers, was why should they buy these huge handbooks when computers and the Internet were just becoming so popular? We were given counter responses to these concerns at sales school, but none were very convincing.

So we worked the plan. We did the research. We did our 30 Demos a Day. And Jimmy and I sold very little. And you see, selling was our only means of supporting ourselves. That was why it was so important to get as many of our sales to pre-pay as possible. We needed that money to pay for our expenses, e.g., rent, telephone, gas, food. And additionally, we had to remit, remit, remit. That means we were supposed to be sending every dime we could spare after expenses to The Southwestern Company to the credit of our account. As independent contractors, we were not selling Southwestern’s books. We were demoing their product, but—as independent contractors—we were then to buy the books from Southwestern and sell to the customers. The difference in our cost and the price of sale was ours. It was that that was supposed to provide the big profits and self confidence of the summer work program. After a summer of selling and remitting, the company would ship your books to you (and of course, as an independent contractor, you would also be billed for shipping) so that your last week (or two if you sold enough) would be devoted to delivering the summer’s sales right before you headed home to start school.

Returning Home

Of course, before you could go home, you had to go back to HQ in Nashville and settle up accounts with the company. Once you were there, you had to get a motel, and go to HQ where they could evaluate your accomplishments and settle your accounts with them. And this is why remitting was so important. The Southwestern Company would ship your orders whether you had remitted enough to cover them or not. And surprise of all surprises, I had not remitted enough money to cover my shipment. The most embarrassed and pitiful I have ever been in my life was the day I had to call my Mom from The Southwestern Company’s HQ and ask for $800 I knew they did not have to get me home. It shames me to this day. But my folks had some credit and graciously used it to bring their stupid son home. It sure wasn’t easy for any of us. And they never said they told me so.

Now, as far as the summer goes, it was the worst of my life. Before or after, I have never known the loneliness I experienced that summer. I mean it was seriously like being totally forsaken. I was alone. I was far from home. I knew I was doing badly. My brains told me to go home and work with my dad or anything to get out of the mess I was in. But I believed in what I had been fed by Mort Utley and The Southwestern Company crew. If I gave up and went home, I would be cheating myself out of all I could be if I was just persistent. If I would just memorize the sales talks and do my 30 Demos a Day, I would eventually see a swing in things, and I would be a selling machine. I would go home with lots of cash. I would win wonderful prizes throughout the summer (the price of which would be conveniently billed to your Southwestern Company Account). But most of all, I had given my word that I would not quit. I, being a strange little weird romantic type, had a deep-seated belief that a man’s word is his bond, so I refused to even really consider going home.

And as I think on this, I have two comments. First, The Southwestern Company should never ask anyone to give their word they will not leave. If you are failing at something in life, it might be a hint that you need to look elsewhere for success. It’s one thing to be persistent. It’s another to beat a dead horse while you starve to death. The second comment is that I learned a very valuable lesson. I will never, ever give my word flighty or in passing again. I haven’t changed my belief that a man’s word means something. It’s just that very few things are worth my word since then.

And, as bad as the summer was, and I really mean bad, it was also valuable to me. I learned many lessons that summer. Lessons that stick with me to this day. No doubt, some of The Southwestern Company apologists out there would grasp upon that point to say, “See, we told you you’d love the experience!” To which I reply, “YOu really know how to miss the point!”

Lessons

The Bible says that he who increases wisdom increases suffering. I think I gained a little wisdom that summer. Some random things I learned:

1. I love my family. From the depths of my utter loneliness, I realized how much I indeed loved my entire family. There were very few friends that contacted me that summer. I am remembering one right now that I think of very fondly. I got a letter from that friend, and it made my day. Heck, it made my summer. Absence indeed made my heart grow fonder for those who were the most important to me. There are very few days in my life that can compare to the day I returned home to see them all. When you are at your most forsaken moments in life, it becomes clear that family is just about all you can count on.

2. I love Oklahoma, specifically Welch, Oklahoma. It’s my hometown, what can I say? It always will be. And since then, I was effectively run out of it, but it’s still home, and there may be a triumphant return someday. And even if there is not, the few individuals who are responsible for a big mess will never, ever steal my fondest memories of my hometown.

3. I can see through salesmen like you wouldn’t believe. I learned a lot about it, and how unscrupulous people will talk up worthless products. Makes for really getting down to brass tacks when I buy things.

4. I will never sell a product I don’t really believe in again. We were sent to an extremely poor part of North Carolina. There were actually times when I knew for a fact that if I had made a sale, I would be taking money these people desperately needed for food, and I could not do that. Even if it made me a bad salesman.

5. Fight the system. Believe what my gut tells me. Go with my instincts. Falling in line and doing what is prescribed may work for some people. I have always been different, even odd, and it’s folks like me that make the world interesting. :) What I am saying, is that the world is looking for the one magic formula, and I can tell you that it doesn’t exist. Had I felt like I was allowed to do my own thing, or give up this for something else, I could have been very successful. But I believed what I was told, and I will never do that uncritically again.

6. Tell the story. I always knew I needed to do something to warn people to look at The Southwestern Company and its claims very carefully. I never knew what it was. Then this thing called the internet came about. So, here it is in black and white: my awful experience with The Southwestern Company. I am not saying that everyone associated with them is evil, but I think some were. I think they prey on the natural passions of college freshmen, and from the looks of the HQ in Nashville, it’s been very profitable. I am not even saying my experience is typical. But I think The Southwestern Company’s claims bear very careful scrutiny.

To this day, I see a road or a house that reminds me of that summer. I really think I was traumatized by the ordeal. I have moved on, and life is pretty good for me now. But, I have to think that there are others who had an awful summer at the hands of The Southwestern Company that might like to comment here. Mostly, I hope students who are recruited and their parents will find this through a Google search and be more informed about this one person’s Southwestern Experience. Be very, very careful!

I have no idea why I chose to share this now. But it was very cathartic. :)

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