THE INTERVIEW
“I knew a lot of the people working in the company and their kids,” he adds. “We all knew their families and we helped provide for them, and they had become part of the company’s long history, its heritage, and we knew that if we sold it then some of those breadwinners would have to find new jobs. It really pulled on the heartstrings. So, it was a personal choice for me, as well as a professional thing.”
His first job was in packaged goods sales,
where he was responsible for the equipment that the company did not manufacture, but provided on a resale basis. Selling hoists and jibs to clients in the Illinois market might seem like a great fit for a natural salesman, and Marks certainly saw success quickly. In just over 18 months, he grew the value of that team’s annual sales from almost nothing to more than $1.5m. So, surely he must have felt right at home? Not at all. “At first I could not stand it,” he remarks. “I knew nothing about the business.” Marks, however, is not the kind of person who is put off by a challenge. Rather than bluff his way through the job, he instead enrolled in community college to learn the kind of skills that lie at the heart of the company. He learnt AutoCAD, welding and many more manual skills. “I had never worked with my hands,” he says. “I had been a salesman from my first job as a teenager, which was selling subscriptions to
newspapers. I had to learn mechanical things so that I could know what we do, especially if I was going to run the company one day. I never wanted to be someone who had to take people’s word for what they have done – I need to understand it.”
Climbing the corporate ladder Having transformed the performance of the
packaged goods department and developed his own skill set, Marks was looking for other parts of the business that might benefit from a fresh pair of eyes. The parts department stood out as a business unit ripe for change, but his success in revamping it came at a cost. “That next rung on the ladder was a big
mistake,” he says. “We were coming into 2008, when things were going badly for the economy. I made a lot of changes and some were good, but it was not the right place for me. Managing a couple of people and trying to turn order-takers into people who would go out and get business, that was not really my strength. It worked in some ways, but it was very stressful.” Soon, he moved on to become a regional sales manager responsible for five states in the eastern territory – Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky – working with a dozen or so of the company’s distributors. Once again, he had a dramatic impact on the team. In four years, he grew its annual turnover from $1.5m annually to more than $6m and added eight more distributors. “I upset my future wife because I was gone constantly,” he says. “I was putting 50,000–60,000 miles on a car each year. But I could spot companies that would make good distributors, and we sell everything through distributors.” That success led to the next step up the ladder – national sales manager. That role had been
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