EPISODE 37

Bosco not only owned a chain of hair replacement studios, he was also a well-paid motivational speaker.  His clients were all of the other studio owners in the US and Canada who wanted to learn the secrets that had made him one of the most successful retailers in the industry.  At one time during the mid-80s, Bosco had either held title to or had sold the franchise for 89 locations throughout North America.  He had bought his product directly from a manufacturer in India and had made millions setting up people in business, selling them the raw goods, and then training them to sell as a well organized force, even though all of his franchisees held no secret that they each considered all of the others to be his or her competition. 

It’s a strange dynamic in small businesses.  The owners tend to fall for the old line that “a dollar you make is a dollar that I’ve lost”.  That parochial view of capitalism held a lot of these folks back and so Bosco had tried to get them all to see that they were part of one large corporate entity.  In essence, his message to them was that success for individuals was predicated on the success of the whole organization.  But entrepreneurs are rugged individualists.  They hate being told what to do and even more importantly, they dislike feeling like they are cogs in someone else’s machine.  Most started out their careers working for other people and eventually they either discovered that they had learned everything that their bosses knew and were ready to strike out on their own, or that they had decided that their bosses were simply full of crap.  Regardless of how they came to where they were, these small business owners bristled at being told what to do, even if they coveted the success that someone like Bosco had achieved and repeatedly told themselves that they would do damn near anything to replicate his formula. 

When Bosco sold the last of his franchises, he’d gone into the consulting business.  His code of ethics to his former clients was crystal clear: ‘I will sell you my services, unless you say you don’t want them.  Then I will solicit the people you see as your competition’.  I have to admit that this kind of strong-arming was what I always loved about him the most.  His feeling was that if you truly didn’t feel his advice was worth what he wanted you to pay him, then maybe you were right.  Perhaps he was wrong.  In which case, anything he told the guy down the street would just kill off one of your competitors.  He didn’t care.  It was up to the business owner to decide which way he thought it was going to fall.

Bosco would run 3-day seminars every 6-8 weeks at various locations around the country.  He’d book a conference room someplace like Vegas, Chicago, LA or New York and then he would get on the phone and sell.  To make the whole enterprise worthwhile, he needed 12 people, each paying $1600 to attend.  He figured I might get something out of his class and so one week in late October of that year, the two of us flew down to Orlando where he was set to lay some education on 17 studio owners from the southeast.

He structured the classes around the particular studios that chose to show up, or so it seemed on the surface.  The first rule to successful selling has always been drawing the prospect into the process by discovering what he desires most. 

“If I can get you to tell me what you want,” Bosco would say, “then all I have to do is to get it for you and you will give me anything I want in return.”

This sales axiom was paramount to his success at the studio level and it was also key to how he approached his students.  While he covered essentially the same topics every time he taught these seminars, Bosco would spend most of the first day getting the studio owners to tell him and the rest of the group about their businesses.  Bosco would ask questions that forced them to think carefully about the problems that they faced.  If he got someone in the class to disclose that he or she wasn’t meeting their sales goals, or that they weren’t running at a profit, or better yet – that they were considering closing the whole operation entirely; Bosco would seize on it.  He would ask the poor owner who had confessed his sins to elaborate, often in great detail, in an attempt discover to why the guy figured he was failing.  Then Bosco would ask the other studio owners in attendance if they had experienced the same thing, or whether their own failings were even worse. The results were often devastating.

“How many of you here think that you’re good salespeople?” he bellowed.  A few hands went up, but the majority of the group remained motionless.  In fact, some of them even began to look a little pissed off.

“Okay,” Bosco would continue.  “How many of you even consider yourselves to be salespeople?”

“I’m not a salesman, Bosco!  I’m a goddamn artist!  People drive from as far away as Georgia to have me do their hair.  I don’t have to ‘sell’ myself to anyone.  I’m good.  No, I’m fucking great!  I don’t need gimmicks to make my business work.”

There was no way to ignore this outburst, particularly when it came from a very striking looking woman in her late thirties.  She was maybe five feet tall and she sported a beautifully cut mane of dirty blonde hair that brushed her shoulders.  She was dressed casually in a black t-shirt and black jeans, but she made that simple outfit look glamorous nonetheless.  She was stood in front of her chair, glowering at Bosco.  Her name was Sasha Haskins and she owned a studio in Sarasota, Florida.  And I can promise you that it was all I could do to keep from gaping like a little kid.  She was as angry and as lovely a woman as I could imagine.  I also had the definite feeling that she could beat the hell out of anyone who got in her way.  I was always attracted to women like that.  I guess I was just some kind of an S&M mama’s boy at heart.

“That true, Sasha?” Bosco asked with a smile.

“Damn right!”

“Anyone else feel like Sasha?”

Several hands went up at once.  From the look of it, Sasha was rapidly mounting an insurrection against the instructor.  Several of the attendees who had initially admitted to being salespeople now piled on, protesting that they too were creative geniuses.  In a matter of seconds, almost everyone in the room was against Bosco and this was when he turned a disorganized room of individuals into a focused group.  He grinned at his students, who by then were a mix of confused, agitated, and downright pissed off.  They slowly grew quiet and he finished the first day of his sales seminar with a challenge.

“Then what in the hell are you doing here?  I mean it.  I don’t know why you’d waste your time unless you were a salesperson.  In fact, you’re just wasting everyone else’s time here too.  So after we break up today, I want you to think very carefully about one thing.  If you’re not the main salesperson at your studio, then exactly who is?”

This process did a lot to get the owners to examine their strengths and weaknesses.  It also made them feel lousy and that was the whole point of that first day.  After Bosco had broken the class by beating them down, he would begin to build them back up on the morning of the second day.  Usually one or two people had decided that they had had enough and so they had withdrawn from the class.  Bosco had a very clever guarantee that stipulated that anyone could leave and then they were allowed to take the class again at another time, for no additional charge.  Similarly, he also said that if someone felt that the class had not produced the results that he or she had hoped for, then that person could also take the class again, free.  The number of clients who came back, particularly after the abuse that had been heaped on them that first day always fascinated me.  But the point was that all of the attendees wanted to learn how Bosco had made so much damned money selling hair!

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on May 19th.

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