Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs Part 9

I'm twenty-two and time's pa.s.sed and I can safely say I'm glad to be done with those crazy mushrooms and the whole hallucinogenic scene. Even though I miss the crazy money, there's really too much that can go wrong with that. The reason why I started selling bud is because people can hold real jobs and smoke bud every day. People who have real jobs, they don't take mushrooms every single day. I just want to deal with people who have more to lose than I do. You know? It's much safer. My target market is models, actors, and doctors and their friends. Doctors are great clients because they have more to lose than I do. [Laughs] Way more. Like ten years of school. And a license.

I learn a lot from the people I deal with. I mean, these are people who own galleries, people who make movies, and I can sit there and I can have an intelligent conversation with all of them. Just hang out, smoke a J, you know, whatever. It's very cool. Basically I just like walk around and just chill out all the time. [Laughs]

And I can handle myself in any position. Because first of all they're calling me, all right? They could buy from anybody, but they know I'm on the level. You know, it's like I'm the real deal-just from the way I do things, people see that. Plus, the first time I ever smoked a kind, kind, kind bud-it's like when you smoke the kind bud you think of the person who brings it to you as, holy s.h.i.t, who the f.u.c.k is this person? [Laughs] What's he about? And you automatically put him, you know, like somewhere. So I can sit there and talk to, say, the head of MCA, and I'm not just some f.u.c.king punk little kid that's talking to the head of MCA. He could buy and tell me to leave, but he's sitting with me for company. He sees me for what I am.

Envelope manufacturers are horrible.

ADHESIVES COMPANY SALES REPRESENTATIVE.

Traci Jensen.

During my senior year of college I interviewed with a bunch of different places. All these companies came to campus-this was at the University of Indiana-and I just went to interviews like crazy. [Laughs] And I got exactly one job offer- National Starch and Chemical.

I'd never heard of the company before. Didn't know what it did, nothing. They were just the only people who wanted me, so I signed on. It turns out National is a two-and-a-half-billion-dollar company that sells glue-or adhesive, as it's called in our industry-for a lot of different products. And it's a very good company. I mean, I'm sure you've never heard of us either, but our adhesives are sticking labels on the bottles of your beverages, they hold your cases and envelopes and cartons together. They're used in your toilet paper to stick the paper to the tube, they're used in the tubes themselves. They're pretty much everywhere.

I know this is gonna sound like a clich, but I definitely think it's true-you can't sell anything if you don't truly believe in it. And I truly believe that National is the best company out there in the adhesives business. Our whole package is better. Because we don't just sell glue. We consult with and take care of our clients. We look at how and where they're applying the glue and how that fits into their whole production system. For instance, Ritz Crackers-we look at the way they're sealing their cartons, how fast the lines are running, how much glue they're applying, where they're applying it, and we try to sell them what fits their operation best. We have over two thousand products. It's the widest line out there. And with all of them-our glue is real clean machining. It doesn't char. Most hot melts start to smoke and burn and brown. Ours is easier on the equipment, and doesn't clog the nozzle. Plant managers love us.

We're just the best. If I ever changed jobs, I could never go to work for another adhesives company. I would have to change industries, just because I just couldn't do it. Even-I mean, non-compete clauses and all that stuff aside-I couldn't personally go to our compet.i.tion and sell their adhesive. Because I truly believe that we have the better one.

So anyway, I'm a sales rep here. Did you guess? [Laughs] I didn't start out this way, though. I actually began as a technical service chemist-which I didn't really want to do. I was really interviewing for a sales position. Sales has always been my, like, thing. My goal. But as soon as they saw that I was a chemistry major they were like, "Wow, how about going into technical service?" And they just totally took over the interview. They spent the whole time selling me on this job which I'd never heard of, had no idea what it was about. But, you know, since it was like [laughs] the only offer I had, I kept agreeing with them.

So my first job was in technical service, which is kind of a liaison between a lot of different technical departments and the salespeople. I knew there would be potential to move over to sales at a later date. But it wasn't sales.

What it was, was I started in Chicago with two sales reps a.s.signed to me. If they needed somebody to do trouble-shooting with an adhesive from a chemical perspective, or recommend one of our adhesives over a compet.i.tor's, that's what I would do. If a particular adhesive was having problems-like one time a client switched from gla.s.s bottles to plastic bottles and his labels were popping off, well, I went into the lab with a bunch of his plastic bottles and I found another adhesive of ours that worked on them. And then we figured out how to run that product through his machines. We solved the problem. That was the job, in a nutsh.e.l.l.

Starting out was kind of weird. [Laughs] Because adhesives is a very male-dominated industry. It's not like horrible s.e.xism by any means, it's just mostly, you know, guys. And I didn't know that, but I found out pretty fast. The first sales rep I got a.s.signed to was a couple of years older than I was, and before I even really started working with him, he decided that he didn't want a female chemist as technical service rep, so he went in to my boss and said that he didn't want me. He wanted to be a.s.signed somebody else. And my boss said no. So he went to my boss's boss, and asked to not be a.s.signed me, and my boss's boss said no, too, and so we started out in this kind of ugly way. He never said anything to me, but I heard lots of rumors about this. And it was clear, you know, from his att.i.tude that he didn't want to work with me. I mean, the first time we traveled together to visit a client, he says he'll pick me up at five o'clock in the morning. I'm sure he did that just to see-will this chick get up at five o'clock in the morning? He was trying to break me. Because there's absolutely no reason we needed to be up that early.

But I wasn't about to be broken. He said he'd pick me up at five. I said fine. I think I even kind of smiled like I was happy about it. Then he says, "You better have coffee for me." Well, I don't drink coffee. But I said fine again. And so I'm trying to make coffee at like fourthirty in the morning. And somehow the filter [laughs] like backed up, so I had coffee all over the kitchen. Because I left it brewing while I was getting ready. Then I hear him down in the street honking the horn in his car-and I just couldn't clean up all this coffee fast enough. So he comes up to the apartment, and I mean I have coffee everywhere. Yet I'm like, "Well, I don't have a cup for you." And he just acts like he never asked for it, you know? He says, "That's all right. I got one on the way over." [Laughs] He was testing me.

See, the thing is, when you come out of college, people take a look at you. First impressions are critical. I think the reputation that you build, especially in a bigger company, you have to build it immediately. Because if you do anything wrong, or even anything that seems wrong, there's people that start in on you. And if you're a woman, I think it's kind of like a double-whammy. You're young, you're female, they look at you twice as hard. Maybe you just do one thing-like this one girl who started in technical service after me, she got this reputation for catching the earlier flight home-you know, when she'd go on the road, she'd catch maybe the four o'clock flight instead of the six o'clock. I'll bet she only did that once or twice, but that reputation stayed with her. People didn't take her seriously. And I wasn't about to let that happen to me.

I was in technical service for four and a half years. I did it for as many as five sales reps in our district at a time. And that first sales rep I had, the guy who was all over me, it ends up, he's actually one of my really good friends now. [Laughs] He left National a few years ago to start his own company that distributes our adhesives. And when he went away he asked me to go into business with him. I said no, but we-obviously-we got to be buddies working together. Because I made him respect me. I was really into it.

But at the same time, it was always my goal to move over to sales. And after a couple of years in Chicago, they promoted me out to Buffalo where I had this sales manager who was very emotional, very into his job. You could just follow him and he was-you could sit in a room and just listen to him. Once he found out that I had originally interviewed for a sales rep job, and when he saw how I was, how I worked, he would talk to me about going into sales, and say I would do so good in sales and all that kind of stuff. It was very exciting to me. I mean, here was this great guy really encouraging me to do what I really wanted to do.

So I started asking to go into sales. I just badgered the h.e.l.l out of my district manager and finally after a year and a half of continually asking, the company put me into a sales territory in Kansas City. And I've been a sales rep here for two and a half years now.

I love it. What you do is you start out with a set of customers who are already buying from the previous sales rep that was in your territory. So with them, you're pretty much just continuing to service their plants, making sure they don't have any problems with your adhesive, introducing them to maybe new products that you have, taking their orders and looking at their inventory. Things of that nature.

Then you have a list of businesses in the territory that are buying their adhesive from your compet.i.tors. So you go after them. That's the tough part of sales-getting new clients. I probably call on four different potential customers a day. I try to see the production manager or plant manager or purchasing agent, and try to get into his operation and see what he's doing with his current adhesive, see if there are any opportunities for improvement-if there's anything that's not going right.

Usually, people turn sales reps away. They don't want to deal with us. They don't care if our adhesive is better because it's just too much effort to switch over. But that's one [laughs]-I think that's the only big benefit of being a female in this industry. See, most of the sales force are men and almost all the clients are men. So being a woman in this, the customers are always-well, they just want to see what you look like. I've never had a problem getting in anywhere. Because I'm like this oddity. Like I'll call and say, "Well, hi, I want to make an appointment to see you." And these guys will almost-you can almost hear the gears turning. n.o.body says no. They're all like, "Okay, sure. Come on in."

So that's the easy part of it. What's hard is convincing them that you know what you're talking about. Whereas a salesguy in this has more of a tough time getting in to see the person, once they get in, they really don't have to prove their credibility as much as a female does.

But this doesn't bug me-I enjoy the challenge, absolutely, absolutely enjoy it. I love convincing these guys I know what I'm doing. Like there's this account I won recently. It's actually a CocaCola plant. They bottle Coca-Cola, and they were using adhesives to stick the labels onto the two-liter bottles and also to adhere all the twelve-packs in cases. When I contacted them, they were using a compet.i.tor's product that was causing them some problems.

I got in by talking to the operations manager, asking him what his issues were. Finally after a couple of calls, I got out onto the production floor and took a look at what they were doing. And I managed to convince the manager to let me have a demonstration trial of my adhesive. In order to do that we had to do it when they were shut down for cleaning-which is between midnight and four o'clock in the morning.

So I would come into this plant around two in the morning so we could drain their hot melt of the compet.i.tor's adhesive, put in our hot melt adhesive and have it up and running by five o'clock in the morning when they started production. I must have done this, I would say, probably five nights in a row.

And for this job, everybody wears a suit. That's maybe going to change soon, but for now my bosses insist that every sales rep wears a suit. So I was literally getting up at two o'clock in the morning, taking a shower, and putting on a skirt and suit jacket-you know, a matching suit outfit, and going into this dark, hot plant in the middle of the night and sticking my adhesive in their machines.

But I proved our product was superior. And that plant, we switched them over. All their lines.

I've been very successful at convincing people to go with us. Generally, if I can get into a plant and do a trial like that, I've won the account. And I've been even more successful-and this is really my forte, I think-at getting them to stay with us once they're on board. My technical background definitely helps me because I know the products really well. But what's more important, I think, is that I know what to do to service the client and make him happy. [Laughs]

That's another one of the harder parts of the job. The service aspect definitely gets to you. Because there's-I mean, there's a lot of going out and entertaining. And plenty of things happen, you know, because, again, this is a men's business. It takes a little getting used to. I mean, most of these guys are really great. But I've had plenty of customers. .h.i.tting on me and customers asking me out.

There are definitely industries that are worse than others. Envelopes, in particular, are just [laughs]-I mean, just so you know, envelope manufacturers are horrible. [Laughs] They're like the typical good-old-boys network. Every supplier they have takes them out for dinner. I'll bet they eat these fourand five-course meals four out of five nights of the week.

One of our envelope accounts is in the middle of nowhere-and I'm always going there because it's a huge account for us. And when I go out, the nights are always the same. They start at a bar drinking a couple of drinks before dinner. Then we go to dinner. And we have, like, you know a salad. An appetizer. Then always a steak. And then you're drinking beers all the way through dinner. And then you top it off with Sambuca, which is an after-dinner drink. I'd never even had after-dinner drinks before I met these guys. But there I am, slugging down Sambuca with three coffee beans. And then these guys want to go back to the hotel and go to the bar again and have beers after the dinner.

So this ordeal lasts-we start probably at about five o'clock, right when the day is over, and I'm still with these people at midnight, one o'clock in the morning. And I'm working my a.s.s off. I mean, these guys are the worst, you know-it's funny to talk about-but they are awful. I mean, they tell dirty jokes all the time. And half of them I don't get. So after a while [laughs] I just started faking it and I just laugh when everybody else is laughing. But unfortunately, they've caught onto that, so sometimes they'll turn to me and say, "Okay, well, Traci, so you get that one. Why don't you explain it to us?" And, of course, I didn't really get the joke, so I can't explain it to them. So that's become an ongoing joke in itself.

And then like just-I mean, there's one guy in particular-he definitely a couple of nights has tried to give me his hotel room key and stuff like that.

But you know what? I don't care. You just kind of live with that stuff. Sometimes you feel like, "Oh! I'm so disgusted by this person!" There's definitely these guys you would not be introducing your friends to or your daughters to, you know? But it doesn't get to me. I don't even really think about it. It's just kind of there. It's part of my obstacle course.

And nothing really ever-I mean, I've never had anything happen. It's just kind of innuendoes and flirting and that kind of stuff. And I don't mind. Most of the time, I find a way to have fun. And most of the people I deal with are not envelope guys, they're very goodhearted midwesterners. [Laughs] I like them. By and large, I've formed friendships with them. I just try and stay away from the allnight parties. The male sales reps will sometimes take an entire plant out on a Friday night or whatever. I just try to do other things to stay involved with my clients-maybe a little bit more like subtle things or just odd things.

Like there was this one that-I had an account I was trying to get. And the guy mentioned that he plays something called underwater hockey on Friday nights. And, of course, just being a good sales rep, if you find that somebody is interested in something, you ask a lot about it, you know? Ask them all about it. So I'm like, "What's underwater hockey?" And he tells me about it and he invites me to play with him. So I went one Friday night. I didn't want to. But then there came a time where I just couldn't turn him down anymore, because I had kind of blown it off a couple of Friday nights. And so I went. And I [laughs] played underwater hockey, where you have to wear a snorkel and a mask and fins. And you have this stick-this hockey stick that's like eight inches long. And you move a puck around the bottom of a pool, and you try to score goals. And you do this-your stick is eight inches long, so you're almost touching the bottom of the pool with your face-you actually swim along the bottom of the pool. So you're swimming along the bottom of the pool and you're pushing the puck out in front of you. And there's four to five people to a team. And now I play on Friday nights from eightthirty to ten at least once a month.

I've been doing it for probably a year. We started getting his account immediately. [Laughs] And we've hung on to it, even after they signed a contract with our largest compet.i.tor, which came in and tried to undersell me. And the reason they still kept buying from us is because this guy, my friend, he convinced the plant manager that we were better quality. Which we were. I mean, I definitely-this-me playing hockey with him did not change the fact that we really were better quality. But it did change the fact that he felt that he had to fight for me, whereas I don't think he would have before.

So, you know, that's the kind of thing I'll do to service a client. Underwater hockey. [Laughs] Or pinochle. [Laughs] I'm serious-I have another client I play pinochle with-him and his wife and their pinochle group. He's a plant manager in this small, little town way up in Kansas. He's probably sixty years old, and I go up there and spend the night at his house. And he and his wife started talking about this pinochle group that they have, so just like-again, you ask them about things that interest them-and I started asking about pinochle, which I had never played before in my life. Pretty soon I was in their pinochle group. For a while I was playing up there once every three weeks. I would travel up to this town and spend the night there. And I got invited to their daughter's wedding. I know all of their grandkids. Went to their grandkids' soccer games. Everything.

Some people would see this as like this horrible sacrifice for business. But I, you know, I'm really interested in these people. I've gotten to know them so well. It's really been a pleasure, by and large. I think for some sales reps, their driving factor is money. They get these jobs because there's unlimited income potential. And to me, I've never really cared about the money. I mean, I care about it, it's great to make money, but I've always just figured that if I did a good job the money would be there. And it has been there. And that's satisfying. But the greater satisfaction is knowing that somebody's relying on you and putting their faith and trust in you. And that you earned that. That the odds were against you, but they-you know, because of the way you dealt with them-they took a step back and said, "You know, she's different from everybody else that calls on us. And, you know, we really-she really helps our operation or our plant or our whatever." You know? I add a lot more than just the product I bring.

If I could live my life over, I'd do this again. I mean, I don't think that I could really ever say that I'd choose this exact occupation again-you know, adhesives. [Laughs] Just because n.o.body ever knows about it. But I definitely-I've loved it.

And it's weird now, because I've recently been offered a promotion out of sales into marketing. And I have kind of mixed feelings about it. The vice president of our division called me up, and he's, like-this guy is a no-nonsense guy-and he immediately says, "What would you think of moving to Bridgewater, New Jersey, and going into marketing?" I was just floored. Because I hadn't even thought about leaving sales. I really like it and I really like Kansas City, you know? I have a good house, I'm dating somebody-for once in my life. [Laughs] Things couldn't be better. I'm not thinking of anything different. And here this guy calls me out of the blue and wants to know if I want to move to Bridgewater, New Jersey. Well, I panicked and said I needed to think about it. I couldn't give him an answer right away.

But this guy, you know, he's serious. He flew me out and talked to me about the job. And I have to say it sounds very exciting. If I take it, I'll be marketing all our food and consumer packaging lines- all the adhesives used to seal cereal boxes, stick labels on bottles, anything to do with food or consumer packaging. It's considered a big step up. Not very many people here go into marketing. And that's what everybody wants to go into. It's a really small group-like only ten people in the whole adhesives department, and only one of them is a woman. And, like, I'll actually be taking over for somebody who's twenty years older than I am.

I'll get a big raise. It's a big promotion. And it's more of a power position. I'll be setting prices. Because in sales, in order to get a price for a customer, you have to go to your district manager and say, "I need to sell this product at this price." And if it's a big discount you want to offer, and your district manager doesn't have the authority to do that, then they have to go to the marketing manager to get approval. So I'll be jumping a whole level going from a sales rep to a marketing manager. All these district managers across the country who've been above me are now going to have to call me up to get approval for a price. I'll be able to cut the deals however I best see fit. It'll be totally up to me.

So, you know, I don't see how I can say no. And I'm not gonna say no. This is a huge step up for me. I'm ten years young for it. It's a no-brainer. But still, I'm gonna miss sales. I'll definitely miss it. Because, I mean, so many things-it's fun, I love it, I love the people, the hands-on stuff, you know? And because, well, just because I kicked a.s.s.

Everybody thinks the American public

is dumb. Time and time again, that

idea is driven into my head.

ADVERTISING EXECUTIVE.

Josh Williams.

I was in graduate school studying comparative education, which for me was the study of how ethnic conflicts could be resolved via education in Nigeria. This was three years ago. At the time, I wanted to get a job with the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, but then I realized that I really didn't want to lead that kind of life-going from job to job and place to place every eight months, constantly writing grants, living hand to mouth.

I had always been told-and always thought-that I would be good at advertising, because it's one of the few professions with a real, direct creative outlet. I also thought advertising would be a good way to make some money, as opposed to teaching, which seemed to be my only other option.

So I sent out my resume and pounded the pavement and s.h.i.t, and nothing really came of it. I just didn't have the right background, or whatever. Advertising is a tough field to break into cold when you're twenty-nine years old. In fact, I probably wouldn't have made it at all except this old friend of mine eventually set me up with a guy he knew from college. This guy was at a very small firm-just two people-but he was willing to take a chance on me. So now, for two years, I've been a senior account executive at this place. But my t.i.tle is actually a bit of a misnomer. It was given to me more as a way to get new clients into the agency, you know, so when I talk to people I sound more important than I actually am. Basically, what I do is I write copy and discuss concepts relating to our various campaigns. So I'm really more of a creative guy than an account guy, but so what, right?

When I started here, I didn't know anything about advertising except what I had seen on TV. I was an education guy. I was talking about postmodernism, and, like, the good feelings engendered by education. [Laughs] And now I'm a "businessman." It's been a huge transition for me. I've lost all my idealism. I mean, whatever shreds of idealism I had left, after having been in Nigeria and graduate school, were lost. I've become jaded. I'm, like, telling people to go f.u.c.k themselves on a daily basis. And that's because being in this job, you realize that money is the bottom line in almost everything. In almost all affairs. I think it's a message driven home to me every day. You know-what's the bottom line? How much does it cost? How can we produce it? It's just really serious. And maybe it explains why there's a lot of really bad, s.h.i.tty advertising.

It's amazing if you just look at ads, and then you see how people talk about them in the meetings. Amazing. There are actually guys in meetings sitting around, going, "Well, Jim, I think the reason she should hold the scrubbing brush at this angle is-yada, yada, yada." They're so careful about everything, like is this woman a couple of years too old? Or is she too fat? Or too thin? They worry and they worry and they worry, and they get it f.u.c.king wrong every time. Every time.

The meticulous inspection and dissection of every ad means that everything gets watered down. A good idea, a funny idea, an idea with the slightest bit of a new way of thinking about something, or just a little twist, gets dumbed down and killed. Because everybody thinks the American public is dumb. Time and time again, that idea is driven into my head. It's because people are scared. "The American public is dumb"-that is the overriding thing, the overriding law of advertising, as far as I can tell. And as a result, everybody involved in this business is scared. Everybody is scared about their job. Everybody is scared that Tom in the front office is, like, looking over them. [Laughs] And they're right, too. I mean, Tom will take away the job if the profits aren't there.

But there is so much bulls.h.i.t that goes on.

We've been doing a print ad for a credit card company. In the course of three weeks, this ad has gone through two hundred different revisions. Half the time you're just trying to find out where you were last week on it. We're talking about the thickness of an underline-it's been changed twenty times. Should it be an underline? Should it be a box? Should it be a black box? Should it be a gray box? Should it be white type on a black box or should it be yellow type on a black box? This is a print ad, okay? It's going to be in a stupid bathroom-type national magazine. [Laughs] It's absurd. I mean, the saddest part of it all is that our first idea-the first way it looked-was the best. But we didn't go back to that first idea because the guy that's managing the ad at our client, the guy who makes the ultimate decisions, he has his own view.

So maybe those two hundred revisions were really just a fight between a client and an ad company. Who's to say? There's just so much bulls.h.i.t.

You know those brochures that come with your credit card statement? Well, they are called "statement stuffers" in the advertising industry. And that statement stuffer is something we design. And it is an extraordinarily rigorous process, too. The amount of work that goes into one of those d.a.m.n things that you simply look at and immediately throw away-it's scandalous.

I've never seen somebody hang on to one of them. Never. And we've put hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars and stress and suffering and pain into them. [Laughs] And I don't even know what the client spent. I mean, I don't have any clue. But a lot of money. For a statement stuffer. It's absurd. And you know, it's somewhat disappointing in terms of feeling good about your job.

Another disappointing thing is the incentive stuff that we do for consumer electronics companies. This is not really advertising in the strictest sense of the word, it's more like promotion. Or, to tell the truth, it's more like a very organized and regimented and legal type of kickback. What we do is help electronics companies convince retail salespeople across the country to sell their products, as opposed to the products of their compet.i.tors. So we're not advertising to the general public, we're only targeting salespeople at these big retail stores-Circuit City, for instance, or n.o.body Beats the Wiz. And we're not really telling these salespeople that our client's stuff is so great or anything, we're just offering them money to push the products.

When you buy a stereo, or a camcorder, or whatever, the salesguy that sells it to you is getting an incentive payment-say ten bucks-from the manufacturer as a result of that sale. And the reason the salesguy knows he's gonna get that money is that we sent him a brochure saying, "Hey, you sell our client's camcorder, we'll give you ten bucks." That's how an incentive program goes.

Do these programs work? Of course they work. And everybody has to do it. The guy that isn't doing it will not be selling. A lot of these salespeople in these stores are counting on these incentives. They're called SPIFs, which stands for Special Incentive Fund. It's a kickback, like a real questionable, sc.u.mmy thing, but it's totally legal. A hundred percent.

Is it worse than anything else? Probably not. But the next time you go into, like, an electronics store and the salesman says, "You should get the Toshiba or a whatever," well, that salesman is probably getting money from Toshiba for selling it.

Anyway, I'm running the SPIF programs for our clients, which means that I write the brochures that we send to these salespeople. The brochures are very simple-they explain the product a little bit and then they say how much the incentives are-and that's pretty much it. Really basic, simple stuff. And it's a side of the job that I don't love so much. But for our agency, it's the most profitable thing we do. This SPIFing is like the core element of our business, really. These sort of unseen things are sort of the cogs of the machine down in the engine room. [Laughs] And running these programs has given me this very bottom-up education in the business. You know, this is advertising-bare-knuckle advertising. Because, you see, if our client is offering a ten-dollar incentive on camcorders and then another company starts offering a twelve-dollar incentive, well, we gotta get a brochure out with like a fifteen-dollar incentive ASAP. So, it can get pretty down and dirty, you know?

Now, these incentive campaigns, they aren't all bad-they're giving people nice Christmases and stuff. They are very good for the manufacturers and the salespeople and the advertising companies like us. But they're also, like, lying to the public. I mean, you're sort of encouraging salespeople to lie and not really do their job correctly and not be honest. And if you really take it to an extreme, this is definitely helping to break down American society, and you could start going nuts thinking about it. I sometimes really worry about what I'm doing. I mean, like, what values do I have? Values is a stupid word sometimes, and it's a word that annoys me. But when you start doing incentive campaigns and statement stuffers and it starts causing stress in your life, that can be kind of upsetting. To go to work every day and think about that-it sort of brings me down.

But in two years of work, I've never missed a day. I've been sick, but I've never taken a sick day, and I probably will never take one. There's nothing worse than when you have something that you need done, no matter what it is, and the person that you need to speak to is out sick. That kills me. That's something I feel very strongly about. I can't miss work. If I have a job to do, if I have to lay out an ad, or get pictures, or put a campaign together, I'll stay as late as it takes. I'll do whatever needs to be done. We're just a three-man company, and I'm the junior guy, so I work hard for the other two. They're paying me for nine-to-five, but I work much longer than that. And maybe they don't pay me exactly for what I do. But it goes beyond that for me. I mean, I can't just, like, walk away from something. I'm very devoted to my job. I'm very loyal to the other two guys at my firm.

And of course we also laugh a lot here. There are a lot of good times. I mean, we have this joke that goes, "You know the first rule of business is-Who do I have to f.u.c.k so I can kill her baby to get this job?" [Laughs] They make me say that over and over again. [Laughs]

I'm Ricardo Blanco. Forget about

Merrill Lynch.

FINANCIAL ADVISOR.

Ricardo Blanco.

My name is Ricardo Blanco. I'm forty-five, and I live in Miami. For the past twelve years, I've been a financial advisor for high-net-worth Latin American clients. By high net worth I mean at least they must have half a million to a million in investable a.s.sets. I speak Spanish with all of my clients. This is the first time in a year that I've spoken so much in English.

I'm originally from Cuba. A year after the revolution, my father took us on a "vacation" to Puerto Rico, which turned out to be exile. We lived there for six years; then when I was twelve, we moved to Spain. That's where I was mostly educated. And that's where, when I was twenty-one, I got married to a Cuban I met while I was studying business at the University of Madrid.

My wife's parents were from the Bacardi family. The rum family. And my wife's father said I couldn't marry her if I didn't have a job. So I finished school and worked for an insurance company. Then four years later, the Bacardi family, they decided to create a second-tier level of executive positions for people who were married to Bacardis, so I started with Bacardi in Mexico.

Now, no one knows this about the Bacardi family, but they're a very closed family. They don't want anybody from the outside to be more than them. I mean, many people who were married to a Bacardi usually ended up adding the name to their name just to fit in. It was very hard being a young guy married to one of the Bacardi princesses, wanting to make a name for yourself. If Ricardo Blanco wanted to have a name in that company, they tried to say no, no, no, you belong to us. You have to forget your name.

I was told don't bother trying to work your way up, because they'll never let you. And if I'd listened to that, I'd never be where I am now. Bacardi was a learning experience, let me just say that. It was a very important moment in my life, because I learned how to deal with a major corporation.

They tried to break me. They sent me to work in the poorest slums of Mexico City-to go to sell to the liquor stores there and work on their Bacardi displays and make them more prominent, and maybe get them to clean up the stores a little. But it was so dangerous-because poor people are angry, and angry people drink. I mean, at eight in the morning, bars, cantinas, crowded with people drinking. I needed a bodyguard to go with me. But I was young, so I just did it. They gave me this job to try to break me, but I ended up doing well. So then they gave me an almost worse job in Chiapas! There were all these problems with people buying stuff there and taking it to Guatemala. So they moved me in to set up a better distribution system and systematize things and I did that, too.

After that, they didn't want me to stay in Mexico anymore because I was a threat to the way everyone outside the Bacardi family was handled. So they sent me to Panama. There was more of the same there. And in '87, when the war started in Panama-the U.S. against Noriega-Bacardi wanted us to stay. They didn't care about our safety. I thought that was too much, so finally I left.

My brother was working in the Merrill Lynch office in New York, and he said, hey, you should go to Miami and get a job with Merrill Lynch there. At that point they were starting the international division. I knew the manager of the office, because we used to play golf in Panama. They needed rookies, which is the word they honored me with, so that's when I entered into this wonderful world of investments and deals and acquisitions and options and trading called Merrill Lynch-in December of '87.

At that point, not many people in Latin America knew what Merrill Lynch was, so we had to go around and inform them, "Merrill Lynch is one of the biggest brokers from the United States, and we offer this, this, this, and this." Da-da-da-da-da, you know? All I did was travel, go out, meet people, gather a.s.sets, bring them back to Merrill Lynch, invest them, and then leave and travel again.

Let's say I wanted to go to Guatemala. Maybe one of my friends from Panama gave me a list of his friends in Guatemala. Businessmen and bankers-high-net-worth types of people who might need the knowledge of what to do with their money. I called each one of the people on the list and I said, "Look, I'm from Merrill Lynch." And they say, "Who?" I say, "I'm from Merrill Lynch, and I-" "Who?" So then I say, "I'm Ricardo Blanco. Forget about Merrill Lynch. Your friend so-and-so gave me your name and I'm in Miami and he said you might want to talk to me." And usually, through the phone, they don't want to talk about it, so usually, their answer was, "When you're here in Guatemala, we'll have a talk." So you send them information, and then you go down there, you call them up, and you meet with them.

It was like talking to little kids. For example, in Guatemala, they loved silver. Even though silver hadn't moved for ten years. You'd explain to them that it was a bad investment, and they'd argue with you, "No, no, it's good, it's a very rare metal." [Laughs] It was a very lengthy process to educate people about the types of options they had and explain the types of risks they might have. Most of them had their money in local banks, earning two to three percent interest. So you could tell them, "Hey, we can put your money in an insured money market fund in an offsh.o.r.e bank with eight percent interest." That would get their yo-yo going. Then you'd explain corporate bonds using corporations that they knew about, like Pepsi, McDonald's. Or you'd explain things like buying a three-month Treasury bond, how at the end, they really truly get their money back. [Laughs] So you did your best. But many times, in the end, they would be very confused and they would just ask, "So I'm not going to lose money?" And you'd say, "No, you're not going to lose your money." And they would say okay.

It was mainly a trust situation. People would get to know you, and you would get to know them, get to know their family, and it became more a relationship type of thing. Especially because instead of doing my thing in the capital cities, where all the other guys like me were, I went to the rural areas. And just like with Bacardi, I went winning them one by one. In Guatemala, there are four main ways to make money-sugar, coffee, flowers, and textiles. So the high-networth people were businessmen and farmers. People who made their money in their own industries. So sometimes that meant going to remote areas, areas where no one else would go, up into the mountains, or into dangerous areas. So sometimes Ricardo Blanco would go there. I went to Guatemala, during the time of the guerrillas, up into the north, to Huehuetenango, where they were. Everyone said I was crazy for going there. But I would think [laughs] you know, it's eleven in the morning, what could possibly happen to me? Nothing. And then you had machine guns in your face, pointing at you!

You couldn't dress up too nicely, and you couldn't carry a lot of money. I got stopped twice on the road. They'd ask you what you were doing. And you'd say, "Well, I'm going to visit some friends." As soon as they knew you were a foreigner, they always asked you if you had money. And you'd say, "Uhh, just enough for the trip." And they'd look in your wallet and they'd see the credit cards. And they'd ask you if you had a lot of money on the credit cards. And you'd say no. Then once they saw my books, they realized you were working, and if you were just a working guy, you couldn't have any money, so they let you go.