AFTER MY INTERNSHIP WITH Dr. Kopits in Baltimore, I returned to New York, packed up whatever belongings I still had in my ex-girlfriend’s East Village apartment, and moved back to Mom’s house in Port Jefferson. It was time to find a career. Most graduates with a degree in biology in the mid-1990s looked to the pharmaceutical industry, which was exactly what I did.
I sent my CV to every single pharmaceutical company out there—Bayer, Bristol Myers Squibb, Abbott Labs, Forrest Labs, Wyatt, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer, Zeneca, SmithKline Beecham, and so on, hoping to land a career in pharmaceutical sales. Besides a BA in biology from New York University, my clinical experience with Dr. Kopits that past summer was enhanced by a junior year internship at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The lab was one of the top research institutions in the world in the fields of genetics and molecular biology, and I had the privilege of working with the best scientists out there. I was working in the live animal laboratory, drawing blood from rats, mice, and rabbits, cleaning their cages, and feeding them. I was also assisting the scientists in performing laboratory experiments and dissections.
Once my resumes were out, I looked around for temporary employment while I waited for calls from potential employers. My father had a friend who owned a private security company, and he offered me a job as a security guard, working the midnight shift at an abandoned warehouse in Riverhead. A small aside, this friend, Jay, was a former police officer who had worked with my father and had been my childhood jiujitsu instructor growing up. Anyway, the pay wasn’t very good, but the hours guaranteed that I would be available during the day for interviews for permanent jobs.
I was pretty excited when I got my first couple of requests for interviews. I got a few callbacks, but nothing materialized. At first, I wasn’t surprised to not get a second interview—it happens to a lot of applicants who are starting out with little or no sales experience. But after ten or so interviews, optimistic patience became realistic disappointment. Although I looked great on paper, my in-person meetings ranged from bland and very uncomfortable interactions to blatant prejudice.
One particular interview at a publicly traded pharmaceutical company blew me away. I pulled out one of my new outfits, a gray pinstripe suit, white shirt, and power tie. I drove from my house on Long Island all the way to the company’s corporate headquarters in New Jersey, at least a two-hour drive without traffic from Port Jeff.
My interviewer met me in the lobby and almost immediately I could read by his face that he wasn’t going to give me much time. He was a bottom-tier sales manager with an outwardly cocky manner. From his expression, I could tell he would rather be showing me to the exit door. Nonetheless, he dutifully led me past the elevators and down a long hallway to an in-service classroom, where he administered his version of an interview—a few basic questions that had no relevance to the job for which I was applying. He didn’t ask me anything about myself, or why I wanted to get into pharmaceutical sales, just a couple of offhanded generic questions about the company’s products, and even these questions came out totally flat. I didn’t even get the often recycled “Sell me this pen” sales question. Then he abruptly rose to show me the door. “Unfortunately, you don’t have the look we are looking for,” he told me as he escorted me out of the building. THE LOOK!
His remarked floored me. I was totally groomed and dressed in a fancy, never-been-wrinkled gray pinstripe suit, just like everybody else I had passed on the way to the “interview.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, acting completely baffled.
He glanced around, as if he was suggesting that I observe all these guys around me, who were six feet tall, in snappy suits and polished shoes, maybe off to model for the cover of GQ after work. The girls, too, were gorgeous. In retrospect, it looked more like a fashion show runway than a hallway in a corporate office. You had to be cookie-cutter good looking was what he was suggesting, and I didn’t fit that bill. The “corporate look” the firm was looking for did not look like me. He didn’t say it, but his insinuation was that I was of lesser value than my resume conveyed due to my appearance. This creep didn’t even want to know what I could bring to the table. It was one of the most outwardly prejudicial acts with relation to my stature I had ever encountered. I was infuriated that, in a professional environment such as this, and in the grander world of medicine, it could be conceivable, let alone condoned and encouraged, to filter prospects based on their physical disability.
As appalled as I was, I didn’t let it deter me. This would not be my last disappointing experience, and why would I want to work for a bunch of ignorant fools, anyway? In another gem of an interview, the hiring manager told me he was afraid I might not be capable of the heavy lifting the job required when dropping off sample boxes to doctors’ offices. And my all-time favorite excuse anyone gave me was that there was concern that I might not be noticed in the waiting room, which perplexed me.
“What do you mean I might not be noticed?” I asked, thinking he must be kidding.
“How are you going to get noticed by the receptionist?” he asked, as if my size made me invisible. He added, “People might assume you’re a patient.” As if every man who goes into an OB/GYN office that is short in stature must be there for treatment. While I was certainly frustrated with these idiotic comments, I accepted that these people weren’t for me, and just kept looking. If this was the caliber of individuals I would be working with in this industry, the industry I wanted to be in, I realized I had better get used to this stuff . . . or start looking at other options.
About fifty interviews later, I finally met with success. I faxed my resume over to an ad I saw in Newsday, our local newspaper, and to my delight, I got a call from a man named Michael Sperduti at a company called Triad Medical, Inc., a national distributor of infusion products, devices, and pharmaceuticals to the home infusion marketplace. He wanted to begin with a cursory interview with me over the phone before he took it to a face-to-face.
“Tell me what you are looking to do,” he began, and satisfied with that, he went next to, “Tell me about college.” After thirty minutes of in-depth dialogue, we finally arrived at the end, at which point he set up an interview. “I would love you to come in tomorrow at eleven o’clock to meet with me. Does that work?”
It worked for me. The next day, I hopped in my car, a Cold War–era 1987 Pontiac 6000 SE station wagon with a few dents and a touch of “spy hunter”–like smoke coming out of the tailpipe. I hadn’t needed a car at NYU, so this was a legacy vehicle my dad had provided me while I was back from college and looking for a career. This was the beast I drove all over the tristate to my many interviews. And it was the vehicle I drove to Deer Park, about forty minutes from Port Jefferson, for my interview with Michael.
“Hi, my name is Bill Klein,” I told the receptionist at precisely 10:52 a.m. “I have an eleven o’clock interview with Michael Sperduti.”
She handed me a clipboard with the application and a pen and directed me to fill out everything. As I was sitting down in a chair to do just that, she was disappearing into a back office to alert Mike that his eleven o’clock interview had arrived. I only learned later what she had really told him. She had come running into his office in total confusion and said, “You are not going to believe this. There is a midget in the waiting room filling out an application!” Apparently, this was the first time she had interacted with a person short in stature. She seemed a bit more nervous than me, and I was the one applying for the job!
When she came back to her desk, I could see that she wasn’t as bubbly or exaggerated in her motions as she had been initially, although she wasn’t rude. “Come this way,” she directed, motioning for me to follow her to Michael’s office.
Michael was a stout, dark-haired guy, standing just under six feet tall, well-groomed, with wire-rimmed glasses and a firm handshake. “Let’s talk,” he said, signaling for me to have a seat across from him. We talked about everything from football to college, from health care to personal goals and aspirations.
“I hired you on the phone, because your phone presence was phenomenal,” he told me. “That’s what you need in this job in order to succeed.” I appreciated Michael’s candor. He had been impressed by my personality and my presence, my ability to “sell” myself over the phone. He wasn’t going to object to my height. After all, he was hiring me based on my qualifications and his confidence that I could do the job well. Not to mention that this job was an inside sales position, so while appearance and professionalism were important internally, no one cared or knew how tall I stood on the other end of the phone.
At the end of our interview, Michael offered me the job, and then invited me to lunch at Pace’s Steak House to celebrate. It was where he took all his new hires.
With the business of the day out of the way, we headed to lunch. Mike asked me to drive, which was my pleasure—since I loved being behind the wheel of any car, even mine. We walked over to my big maroon wagon in the parking lot. He looked surprised that I had chosen this size vehicle, and even though I hadn’t necessarily chosen it, the wagon did the job well for me.
I opened the door for him and ran around to my side of the car to hop in. He was a bit stunned at the acrobatic, fluid motion I made to hop into the car. He put on his seatbelt and sat, with anticipation, wondering how this was all going to work. He didn’t seem to mind the antiquity of my car, but was excited like a kid getting on a roller coaster for the first time. I was beginning to see that this was my kind of guy, someone who didn’t judge things or people on nonsense criteria, like height or make and model!
Now, I mentioned previously that I had learned to drive with hand controls, as I wasn’t all too confident my legs were trustworthy enough to depend on while behind the wheel. What I didn’t mention was that by virtue of driving with hand controls, my ability to multitask was limited—or so you would think. My left hand operated the wheel spinner, like the one found on the steering wheel of big rigs. My right hand was for the hand control, which had two functions, depending on which direction I moved in. The gas pedal was depressed, and the car accelerated when I pulled it toward me, and the brake would engage when I pushed the hand control toward the dash. You would think that with both hands occupied, there was very little I could do other than drive. But that was only if you were a mere mortal!
I smoked cigarettes back then, and lighting up meant abandoning the wheel or the gas/brake to grab my smokes and lighter. It got a bit crazier when I abandoned the wheel and the gas/brake to light up. And who didn’t like coffee with a smoke on the way to work? Yup, the average morning ride in the car involved this juggling act between coffee, cigarettes, and driving. (Why I always tell this story with driving being the last thing I mention is still oddly funny to me.)
With Mike belted into the passenger seat, I eased the car onto the Sagtikos Parkway, one of those little snake-thin north-south corridors all over Long Island that were designed before the concept of traffic. Mike was terrified and mesmerized.
“You stop and go with that stick?” he commented.
“I control the wheel with the hand spinner,” I explained, trying to point out all the different functions on my control. It was fun to explain to someone who had never seen this sort of equipment in operation before, and Michael couldn’t have been more impressed. I could do turns in that car that I can’t do today using two hands. He truly was fascinated with my driving. But what blew him away even more was everything else I did while driving.
“You smoke while you drive,” he said more than once in awe. “How do you do that?” He then proceeded to grab a cigarette from my box of Marlboros, which was sliding from side to side on the dashboard. “How do you drink coffee, smoke, and drive at the same time?” To which I answered, “Same as you, carefully!”
Michael was a wonderful boss and a great man (still is). He started defending me from some of my soon-to-be-coworkers before I even started, saying their jobs were on the line if they had a problem with my stature. The firm was a big medical device distributor that received orders from big umbrella home health care agencies like Gentiva, which served tens of thousands of homebound patients a day as well as many of the hospitals across the country. We’d supply things such as home infusion supplies, tubing, needles and syringes, medication and infusion pumps—anything ordered by the supervising agency. When I started out, I was a sales rep for the south. Specifically, I was responsible for all alternate care (home) infusion companies throughout Alabama, Georgia, and northern Florida. Most of my days were spent speaking with pharmacy owners, pharmacists, and purchasing managers about their business needs, products, and the services we offered. I would ask for orders and help expedite requests when patients were being discharged to my clients’ care. They would rely on me to save them from service failures (an inability to care for the patient). I was good at what I did, too. I grew revenue in that territory by double digits in just months. I was moved to another struggling region, the Midwest, including Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and parts of Missouri, Nebraska, and Iowa. There, I really did well. After six months in the territory, I had signed major contracts with big home infusion pharmacies and grew the revenue and profitability by 200 percent.
Thanks to my motivation and execution, the growth in my territories afforded me promotions two or three times within a couple of years. First I became a regional sales manager and then a director of sales, which was the job Michael had when he hired me. He was doing well, too, enjoying a couple of promotions of his own—first vice president and then president of the division.
It was a good, healthy firm, and a lot of fun to work for. But with the world of home care exploding and changing as fast as it was, mergers and acquisitions were the next logical progression for our company. My company soon merged with a few other corporations to make one larger organization that had a diverse range of products and services, manufacturing, and distribution. That company conglomerate of nonsynergistic divisions was soon broken apart and sold to other companies. Two of the divisions went in a different direction, and the two home care divisions (of which I was still a part) were sold to a New Jersey–based company. The acquiring company had been on the acquisition trail for years, and we were the final purchase before the fall. We should have seen it coming. The integration of our business, a mere $60 million in revenue, into this company of a quarter billion was done terribly. After thirty days, we saw our revenues trending at 50 percent of what they once were. Then the news came down that the parent company was filing for bankruptcy, which meant we were filing for bankruptcy, too.
When we emerged from bankruptcy six months later, my team, which included Mike, took over the parent company. Since we had filed for bankruptcy, and the bank technically owned the company, we had to sell. We broke it back into two pieces and sold the main corporation to one firm and our division to another.
For the smaller sale, I was part of the deal team, which made me some money. I did well enough to buy a house, an eighteen-hundred-square foot ranch in Port Jefferson with a lovely outdoor deck and pool, which was perfect for summer nights. It needed a little updating, but I was handy and could do a lot of the work myself. My friends and I tackled some of the electrical, plumbing, and cosmetic stuff. When it got crazy, I let my paycheck do the work and hired professionals for the bathroom revisions, hardwood flooring, and replacement of the oil burner.
My increased compensation finally afforded me the ability to purchase some custom-made suits. Buying clothes, especially suits, had always been a challenge. My dimensions are not exactly “off the rack.” My chest at its widest is forty inches, and my waist (at its narrowest), twenty-four inches. I have a waist, one that has been ever expanding and contracting over the years, but I am more like a big barrel in the chest. Combine that with my height, and a suit coat has no choice but to drape on me.
The first place I used to go to buy suits was Macy’s. They had a decent selection, so I’d pick one or two in the men’s department and have them altered. The tailoring was where I spent an arm and a leg, not the suit itself. Sometimes the pants were too baggy, or the crotch was too low. Or the jacket was cut so short that the pockets were barely over the hem, and the jacket looked as if I had gotten it caught on something. If I raised my arm, the sleeve would pull all the way up the elbow. For dress shirts, I’d buy a dress shirt with a seventeen-and-a-half-inch or eighteen-inch neck and the shortest sleeves possible for a guy with an eighteen-inch neck. Normally a 30/31 was the shortest I could find. To make sure the cuff was correct, the tailor would have to cut away six to ten inches of sleeve, and when they reattached the cuff, it was sewn onto a much wider part of the sleeve, up toward the bicep and shoulder. The “poofy” arms looked like something a pirate would wear. Sometimes, the person altering would want to shorten the sleeve at the end closest to the shoulder, thereby leaving the cuff intact, but this made for awfully narrow sleeves.
Once I had a little money, I started going to Giliberto Designs, Inc., in the garment district of Manhattan. The clothes were fully custom, with nothing off the rack. Giliberto dressed President George W. Bush for his first inauguration, so to say he had distinguished clients was an understatement. He dressed many players for the New York Giants, Knicks, Yankees, Mets, and Jets—all the guys who don’t fit into a “regular” suit and want top quality.
In his shop, photos of famous people wearing their Giliberto suits covered the walls. I was starstruck that I was buying suits from the same tailor as Bill Parcells and President Bush. One day years later I looked up, and by gosh, Bill Klein was hanging on that wall, wearing blue pinstripes, looking only slightly more subdued than a hit man.
Giliberto made a template for me on my first visit. This template, completely unique and specific for me, wasn’t just a pre-existing pattern he altered for me—it was my template, for Bill Klein and only Bill Klein. The suits were two thousand dollars, and that was ten years ago, but worth every penny.
I’m not going to lie—I’ve become accustomed to getting only custom fits. When I first started to be able to afford it, I would buy everything custom. My shirts were from the Custom Shop. When their business consolidated and closed all of the locations in the tristate area, I’d drive the six hours to Washington, D.C., their only location in the mid-Atlantic/Northeast, to get my shirts. I’d get to town and stay in a hotel overnight. In the morning, I’d get measured, order five or six shirts, have lunch, and drive the six hours home. Once, I decided to take my friend Andria with me, which was great, as I loved the company. She thought I was a bit crazy to go to such lengths for some shirts, but considering my options, she understood. My assortment of shirts was usually ready in three to four weeks.
More recently, I discovered a place in Beverly Hills called Jimmy Au’s For Men 5'8" & Under. Jimmy sells to all the height-challenged stars—Tom Cruise, Jason Alexander, Danny DeVito. He also has dress and casual shirts that are made specifically for people who are short (which, incidentally, seems to include much of Hollywood—even the big guys are topping out at six feet), and he can get them to me in three to four days. I was concerned that the price in Beverly Hills was going to scare me away. But in the end, Jimmy’s clothing is made small enough that normal tailoring is all that is required to take an off-the-rack shirt and make it fit perfectly. This was a great find, and like Jennifer, once I find a brand that works, I don’t let it go.
Getting nice clothes as a Little Person has become easier in the past twenty years, thanks to children’s clothes becoming a lot more stylish. When I was growing up, the only shoes that fit me, men’s or boys, looked like Keds. When I reached adult age, the last thing I wanted to buy was kids’ dress shoes, with rubber soles and big, ugly stitching. They had no arch support—and they were just embarrassing to wear. So I used to buy Allen Edmonds shoes in size six, because that was the smallest adult size—$225 a pop. My true size was four and a half, wide, but at least I wasn’t in “big kids” shoes. My ostrich leather shoes were my favorites—so very nice. I’d suck it up in the wrong size, even if it meant tripping on the carpet from time to time.
• • •
BACK TO BUSINESS. Once the divestiture of the companies was complete, Michael elected to move on. I stayed behind and did the wind-down of the Deer Park office. Upon closing the office in June 2005, I left the company, too. That July, I was back in business, with Michael as my partner. Together, we opened our own lead generation and business-consulting firm that catered to companies in the health care industry. The model was fairly simple. Our clients were medical device manufacturers, distributors, and providers. We would offer a variety of services, including lead generation, whereby we would contact our clients’ target customer base and identify those with an interest and need to do business with our client, and forward the key contact and prospect information to the client for follow-up. We would also work with clients to develop their internal sales teams, help with product and sales training, and consult with executive management on direction and vision of companies, operational efficiencies, and adoption of technology. Our clients included Fortune 500 companies in the health-care sector, as well as start-up companies with innovative products. We had our first sale the very first month we were in business.
We had our ups and downs, but we did pretty well. Like many start-ups, we started our business out of my house. Within months, our business was doing pretty well. We had nine employees working out of the home office—an odd-shaped twelve-by-twenty-five-foot room that I had turned into two twelve-by-twelve shared offices with desks, computers, and phones in every corner. The commute was great for me, but I knew it was time to find a commercial space when I found one of our employees on my living room sofa, watching my television, and enjoying some cheese he had found in my refrigerator during his lunch break.