Humble Beginnings

Everyone starts somewhere, usually somewhere humble. Some of the greatest leaders in business started from the lowest rung on the ladder. The four people profiled in this article started with nothing and rose to the very top. Now you can learn their secrets.

How do you get to the top from the absolute bottom? Do what you love. Believe in yourself. Trust your instincts. Keep at it.

Sounds simple – until you hear the stories of hard work and struggle behind the sage advice. They worked newspaper routes. They dropped out of school. They took menial jobs that paid next to nothing, just to get a foot in the door. They failed, then tried again. And again.

Salespeople are used to starting from scratch. No matter how big the deal you just landed, next month’s quota is right around the corner – and so is the competition. That’s when the advice of the super successful can bolster your own efforts. Believe in yourself. Keep at it. You’ll be surprised how far such simple concepts can take you.

Russ Berrie – Bear Market
Gift-market mogul Russ Berrie grew up listening to his two older brothers discuss sales with their father, who ran a wholesale jewelry business. “I wanted very badly to be a success and to show my father and my brothers that I could do as well as they could,” Berrie told Selling Power in 1997.

At age 10, Berrie delivered newspapers, which he pushed around in a borrowed baby carriage. He also started collecting discarded scorecards from the grounds at Yankee stadium. He smoothed out the wrinkles, erased all their markings, and resold them for 10 cents apiece.

His efforts left an impression on his father, who took 17-year-old Berrie with him on sales calls one day. Berrie spent the morning going door-to-door and racking up rejections. At lunchtime, Berrie’s father said he was sending him to a large department store that he had been courting for years to no avail. Berrie made a $1,000 sale.

“[I] was absolutely thrilled,” Berrie said. Years later, he was touched to find out his father had set up the sale to help build his son’s confidence.

Impatient to start earning a living, Berrie left college at age 23 and began selling toys for a Chicago-based company. After six years, he approached manufacturers with his own ideas for new products. They weren’t interested. So, with an investment of $500, Berrie rented a converted garage and launched Russ Berrie and Company. Within two years, Berrie was pulling in $750,000 in sales, enough to quit his rep job.

Berrie focused on developing and
acquiring products with a broad appeal. He also kept a close eye on what customers wanted and market trends. If Berrie believed in an idea, however, he was willing to take a risk.

In 2002, Berrie passed away at the age of 69. The previous year, his company had pulled in $300 million in sales.

“My dream is, when I’m 92 years old, I’m down on my showroom floor writing an order,” Berrie said. “And, as I’m going down with a heart attack, I’m handing the order to an associate and saying, ‘Make sure it ships on Monday.’” In fact, the night before he died, Berrie had appeared on television, promoting his company’s line of Christmas products.

Quincy Jones – Musical Midas
“Anyone who says he can figure out what kind of music will sell 40 million albums is lying.” So said Quincy Jones in a 1990 interview in Ebony magazine. The producer of Michael Jackson’s Thriller (the biggest-selling album of all time), Jones has won 26 Grammy awards for his legendary collaborations with everyone from Miles Davis to Barbra Streisand. He’s also won seven Oscars for his film scores (including The Wiz). He founded Quincy Jones Entertainment in 1990, which produced the hit sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Jones is also the power behind both Vibe and Spin magazines.

How has he sustained his platinum-level success for 60 years?

“Make what you’d like to hear,” Jones told Ebony, “because you can’t figure out what people are going to like.”

Following your instincts is vital in an industry where you’re only as good as your last hit. “You gotta keep doing it,” Jones said. “And you’d better be burning every time.”

Jones’ father worked as a carpenter, and his mother battled mental illness. Eventually, she was hospitalized permanently, and Jones’ father remarried a woman who had children of her own. The 10 of them lived together in a one-bedroom apartment. Jones often saw shootings and knifings on his way to school.

During the summers, Jones and his brother were sent to Louisville, KY, to live with their grandmother. A former slave, she lived in a shack with no electricity or running water. They boiled pots of water and left them overnight in a tin tub, so they could take baths. Jones recalls that she used to send them down to the river to capture rats. “She would cook those suckers, man, with greens out of the backyard,” Jones said. “Nobody is going to tell me about being poor and hungry.”

Although he grew up “raggedy,” he stresses that fame and fortune don’t guarantee happiness. “I’ve seen the casualties,” he said. “You must have a purpose bigger than [money].”

His early struggles set the stage for a lifetime of hard work and enterprise. When he was 10 years old, his father moved the family to Washington state. Jones delivered newspapers, shined shoes and held jobs at a bowling alley and dry-cleaner. Jones remembers falling in love with music around age 12, when he joined a gospel group. “I could never get enough music of all kinds,” he said. Jones learned to play the trumpet and joined his school band. At 13, he earned $7 playing a gig at a YMCA dance.

In 1947, Jones’s family moved to Seattle, where he started playing professionally in local clubs. He met Ray Charles, who taught him how to write and arrange music. Soon Jones found himself working with Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie and Duke Ellington.

As his resumé expanded from musician and composer to mega mogul, Jones found that making successful projects required faith and vision in the face of uncertainty. “Whether you’re doing a script or a song or an arrangement, you start out with nothing there,” he observed in 1995, in Interview magazine. “All you have to do is visualize it, and if you believe it’s there, it’s there. I think that’s what keeps you young – always being in deep water, and not becoming complacent.”

Sherry Lansing – Hollywood Honcho
When she was 35 years old, Sherry Lansing was hired as president of production at 20th Century Fox and became the first woman to run a major motion-picture company. She never considered herself a trailblazer, however. She was simply getting down to business.

“After that initial moment of walking into my office, I just thought, ‘Boy, I have a lot of work to do,’” she told Newsweek in 2005, the same year she decided to retire from Paramount Pictures, which she ran as chairman for 12 years.

It had been a long climb to the top. Born in 1944 on Chicago’s South Side, Lansing loved going to movies with her father, a film and opera buff who invested in commercial real estate. When Lansing was just nine years old, her father died of a heart attack. Her mother, who had come to America at age 17 to escape Nazi Germany, turned away two men who offered to take over the business. She insisted she would learn how to run it herself.

Lansing dreamed of being a movie star, but her friends scoffed that no girl from the South Side could make it in Hollywood. The day Lansing graduated from Northwestern University, she moved to Los Angeles. During the day, she taught English and math at an inner-city high school. After work, she changed clothes in gas station bathrooms and went on auditions for acting and modeling jobs.

Although she had some success, she soon realized she didn’t enjoy acting. So she switched gears and took a five-dollar-an-hour job reading scripts. After proving herself by arriving early and working late, she was promoted to head script reader at MGM Studios.

Eventually, she moved to Columbia Pictures as senior vice president of production. She asked the head of the studio for a raise to make her salary equal to a man with the same job. The studio head told Lansing she was earning enough for a single woman; the man had a family to support.

“I have to say, at the time, I accepted that,” Lansing said in Newsweek. “I was raised at a time when a woman wasn’t supposed to have a career. I needed to think that I was worth equal money before I could ask somebody to give me equal money. ” With her knack for spotting winners, Lansing proved that she was well worth the investment. One of her first home runs was Fatal Attraction, which had been rejected 36 times. “Every studio turned it down. Twice.” Forrest Gump languished in Hollywood for 10 years before Lansing decided to option it. Known widely as one of the most respected and powerful executives in the movie business, Lansing tells young people to be true to themselves. “Don’t copy other people,” Lansing told the Horatio Alger Association. “Trust your instincts and keep going even when everyone else tells you you’re wrong.”

John Mackey – Grocery Go-Getter
A dropout of two Texas colleges, John Mackey has no formal business training, but that hasn’t stopped him from creating a grocery chain that did more than $3.9 billion in sales in 2004.

Supermarket News recently named him the seventh most influential person in the food industry, and his unconventional business approach has made Whole Foods the fastest-growing grocery chain in a highly competitive market. While a typical grocery store sells just under $400 per square foot, Whole Foods tops $800. The Food Marketing Institute estimates that supermarkets are shrinking their square footage to cut costs. In the next four years, Mackey, on the other hand, is planning to roll out 58 new stores that will measure 50,000 square feet.
When Mackey and his girlfriend borrowed $45,000 from family and friends in 1978 and transformed a garage into a modest health-food store, he had no idea he would one day be running a supermarket empire and projecting $10 billion in sales by 2010. Back then, hippie bakers supplied bran muffins, and local farmers delivered fresh produce from battered pickups to the strictly vegetarian store, called SaferWay.

Mackey remembers being evicted when his landlord discovered bags of flour and rice stored in his living room. So he and his girlfriend packed up and moved to the third floor of SaferWay. “We didn’t have a shower,” Mackey told Texas Monthly Talks. “It was zoned commercial. So we used to take baths in the Hobart dishwasher.”

Their first year was full of learning lessons about inventory, markups and management. They lost money. But in the second year, profits started to
look up, and Mackey began to consider opening another store. To compete, he realized he’d have to go beyond the vegetarian market.
“We made a decision to sell products that I didn’t think were healthy for people – meat, seafood, beer, wine, coffee,” Mackey told Grist magazine. “But we were a whole food store, not a ‘holy food’ store. We’re in business not to fulfill some type of ideology, but to service our customers.”

Mackey was attracted to natural foods as an alternative to the TV dinners he grew up eating. “It seemed like plastic food,” he said. “I was attracted to natural food because it was real. And then I became aware that what you ate affected your health and well-being.”
When Mackey opened his first Whole Foods store in 1980, he sold pesticide-free produce, hormone-free meats and ice cream and candy with no preservatives. Eight months into his venture, a Texas flood swept through. Refrigerators were overturned as the store filled with eight feet of water. Mackey was prepared to shut down, but help arrived in the form of customers who appeared unbidden with mops and buckets. Mackey was able to reopen in 30 days.

That kind of customer loyalty is hard to come by, and Mackey works hard to keep it by striving to please local communities. In 1985 his mission statement included a commitment to donate 5 percent of the company’s net profits to philanthropy. He lets local tastes dictate how shelves are stocked, by giving $100,000 discretionary spending to each store manager or regional director. “We want them to try different things,” Mackey told Fortune. “Whole Foods has a policy that it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Try experiments. If it doesn’t work, get rid of it.”
– Lisa Gschwandtner