How Success Clicked for


Kevin HaRrington HEATHER BALDWIN But wait, there’s more!


How Infomercial Creator Kevin Harrington Is Bringing Back the Zig Ziglar magic.


If you want to hang around Kevin Harrington, you have to be fast – move fast, think fast, talk fast. The man Entrepreneur magazine once called one of the top entrepreneurs of our time is constantly going places, juggling calls, juggling ideas. Most people know him as one of the original “sharks” on the hit TV show Shark Tank. But Harrington has one of those “that was him?” backgrounds, which means you know more about him than you think. For instance, this is the man who created the infomercial. That’s right – those late-night, 30-minute product pitches we all love to hate? That was Harrington’s brainchild. He also pioneered the As Seen on TV brand. His work behind the scenes of business ventures has launched more than 500 products – many of which, like Ginsu Knives, are household names. Twenty of his companies have topped $100 million in revenue. You get the picture. Speaker, consultant, investor – this is a man who oozes success. He’s also a man who gives credit where credit is due. He is quick to point out that he never would have achieved his current level of suc- cess without the wisdom of many advisors to guide him over the years. At any given time, he has about five mentors on his payroll in or- der to keep improving himself. And he credits sales guru Zig Ziglar, who he first encountered as a teen, with the ideas that drove some of his most successful business ventures. Two Ziglar ideas have been foundational for Harrington over his more than four decades in sales. In See You at the Top, Ziglar observed: “People who fail reaching their dream, fail not


from lack of ability – but from lack of com- mitment.” In Secrets of Closing the Sale, he wrote: “You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” When Harrington read those phrases, something clicked. He put them to- gether, deciding he would be fully committed to helping other people get what they want. And, just as Ziglar promised, Harrington has gotten everything he wanted as a result of it.


Early Lessons in Selling Harrington, the son of an entrepreneur and the fourth of six children, learned early on that, if he wanted things, he needed to earn the money to pay for them. He started selling newspapers on the streets of Cincinnati at age 9. At 11, he started reading business books, attending restaurant trade shows with his dad, and learning everything he could about busi- ness. At 15, he started his own company – an asphalt sealing operation that fixed cracked driveways. He didn’t know anything about as- phalt sealing but he knew a thing or two about numbers – and these looked good. “You could buy the sealer for 50 cents a gallon and charge $100 a driveway. So, just $10 for the cost of goods, plus labor,” says Harrington. “I had to hire someone who was 16 to drive the truck because I was too young to drive.”


This is where Harrington started learning


real-world sales skills. He’d knock on doors and face homeowners who were skeptical that a 15-year-old could do anything worth pay- ing him $100. “So I’d tell them how I did the


SELLING POWER JUNE 2018 | 15 © 2018 SELLING POWER. CALL 1-800-752-7355 FOR REPRINT PERMISSION.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32