To be born a black woman on a Mississippi Delta plantation in the 1860s was a curse, and for her first thirty-seven years, Sarah Breedlove battled the predictable horrors of poverty, prejudice, and physical abuse. Orphaned at seven, married at fourteen, widowed at twenty, she worked as a cotton picker, cook, and washerwoman. It took her until she was thirty-seven years old, and bending over a laundry bucket one day, to realize she made so little money that she had no chance of ever being able to retire. Something had to change.
For several years, she had been battling hair loss with an array of tonics and potions. The one that impressed her was sold by a black woman entrepreneur, Annie Malone. So Breedlove moved to Denver to work as a sales agent for Malone. Remarried to a newspaper reporter named Charles James Walker, she quickly left Malone, adopted the title “Madam,” and struck out on her own, selling Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower, a scalp tonic, which she said had been revealed to her in a dream. Over the next few years, she went door-to-door to black households across the American South, pitching her product in any church or club that would host her. She refined her sales pitch through her encounters with customers. Since many of them, like her, had grown up on farms, she described the scalp as if it were soil. “Do you realize that it is as necessary to cultivate the scalp to grow hair as it is to cultivate the soil to grow a garden?” she would say. Scrape away the dandruff clogging up the scalp as you would aerate soil and hair will grow, she claimed. No scalp was beyond saving. “Every woman who wants hair can have it, no matter how short, how stubby, or what the condition of the scalp may be,” she told her agents.
By 1912, Madam C. J. Walker had become a wealthy, prominent, and influential member of the black business community. She was also starting to make a name for herself as a fund-raiser and donor to black causes. As A’lelia Bundles describes it in On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker, that summer, when Walker arrived in her chauffeur-driven car at the National Negro Business League convention in Chicago, she was expecting to be heard. The event was chaired by the NNBL’s founder, Booker T. Washington, who believed in entrepreneurship as vital to the progress of African Americans. As the convention wore on, Washington called on a succession of bank managers and business owners to talk. Walker and her friends had made it clear that she wished to speak. But Washington repeatedly overlooked her. On the third and final day of the convention, Walker decided she had had enough, rose from the floor, and interrupted Washington as he prepared to introduce another speaker. “Surely you are not going to shut the door in my face,” she said to the audience in South Side Chicago’s Institutional Church. “I feel that I am in a business that is a credit to the womanhood of our race. I went into a business that is despised, that is criticized and talked about by everybody—the business of growing hair. They did not believe such a thing could be done, but I have proven beyond the question of a doubt that I do grow hair!” She said that she had been frustrated in her efforts to get the attention of Washington and his peers. “I am a woman that came from the cotton fields of the South. I was promoted from there to the wash-tub. Then I was promoted to the cook kitchen, and from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations. I am not ashamed of my past. I am not ashamed of my humble beginning. Don’t think because you have to go down in the wash-tub that you are any less a lady! Everybody told me I was making a mistake by going into this business, but I know how to grow hair as I well as I know how to grow cotton.”
Her success supported her claims. By this time, she had started an institute in Pittsburgh, named Leila College, after her only daughter, to train a team of Madam Walker “hair culturists.” She owned her own factory and salon in Indianapolis, and had expanded her business into the Caribbean and Central America. She employed more than one thousand sales agents, women like her seeking a way out of poverty and the harsh position society had assigned them. She would soon be spending $10,000 every year (close to $250,000 today) to educate young black men and women in southern colleges. But when she finished her speech at the convention, Washington carried on as if she were not there, quickly introducing a speech by Mr. W. W. Hadnott of the Prudential Savings Bank of Birmingham, Alabama.
Starting in 1917, Walker would gather her sales agents from all over the country at an annual convention. Since hair was the subject, hats were forbidden. But Walker talked not only about her products, but also about the opportunities for self-advancement and self-confidence offered by a life of entrepreneurship. She also used her position to campaign against the injustices done to African Americans, and was constantly lobbying politicians and newspaper editors to end the lynchings and mob violence against blacks that still bedeviled the country. Her success as a saleswoman eventually brought the ultimate trophy of her times, a mansion she called Villa Lewaro, twenty miles north of Manhattan along the Hudson River. She hired an Italian gardener to create gardens to rival those of her neighbors, the Rockefellers, Morgans, Vanderbilts, and Astors. When she died, in 1919, the New York Post wrote that her success in business was a rare but vital example: “Mrs. Walker demonstrated that [Negroes] may rise to the most distinctive heights of American achievement. Men who do nothing but sneer at what Coleridge-Tayler composed, Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote or Booker T. Washington built will be all respect when the Negroes have their full quota of millionaires.” Once asked the secret of her success, Walker said it came down to nothing but hard work. “There is no royal, flower-strewn path to success,” she said.
Estée Lauder had a similar view of her own success. She was born Josephine Mentzer in Corona, Queens, one of nine children of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. Her father ran a struggling hardware store. But as an adult she was Estée, the glamorous peddler of eternal youth, friend of the rich and royalty, a philanthropist and saleswoman extraordinaire. From the time she was building her business in the 1930s and 1940s to her death, at the age of 97, she would descend on the stores that sold her products to meet her customers and touch them, a dab of cream on the cheek, a spritz of perfume on the wrist, insisting on physical contact with the women who made her rich. These were lessons she taught all her sales staff. Don’t just stand there. Touch the customer. Keep talking to them and never turn your back. It went back to her early days in business when she was told she didn’t have enough money to fund a serious marketing campaign and she decided to “go viral,” long before marketers seized on that term. “Telegraph, telephone, tell a woman,” she would say, as she used word of mouth to build her brand. She pioneered handing out free samples or “gifts with purchase,” as they came to be known, as they were more intimate, and much cheaper, than buying advertising. Like Madam C. J. Walker, she used her gift for selling to flatten every business and social obstacle in her way.
Mary Kay Inc., The cosmetics firm, founded by the late Mary Kay Ash, a self-made Texas businesswoman, hands out a diamond bumblebee pin to the saleswoman who best symbolizes a triumph over impossible odds. Given the size of its body compared with its wings, there is no way a bumblebee should be able to fly. But it does. In her autobiography, Ash wrote: “We’re not only in the cosmetics business, we’re in the people business. And, as a people-oriented company, our goal is to offer women opportunity. And these women, in turn, fulfill the needs of other women by teaching them good skin care. In other words, our whole reason for existence is to give people the opportunity to enrich their lives.” Those who sell Mary Kay products are not just selling lipsticks and mascara. They have committed to a broader philosophy about how entrepreneurship can change lives and flatten social barriers.
Direct-selling companies have now taken this message around the world. Avon opened in Russia in the early 1990s and immediately attracted thousands of women trained in science and engineering who craved the chance to make some money independently of their husbands by running their own business. As one of Avon’s sales directors put it at the time, “They come to us like mice and we turn them into firebirds.” In Hindustan, India, Unilever’s Project Shakti offered village women the chance to buy soaps and shampoos that they could sell on to customers. Like any direct-selling company, Unilever offered sales training and claimed it was creating “micro-entrepreneurs” where none had previously existed. In its promotional material, it boasted of how Shakti was erasing social stigmas. A single mother was quoted saying: “When my husband left me I had nothing. Today everyone knows me. I am someone.”
What each of these individuals and companies has done is provide an alternative to the more hidebound, bureaucratic forms of capitalist organization. While most companies are tightly managed with strict rules and controls, direct-selling companies are distributed and loose, and rely on the promotion of a powerful shared culture to keep people in line. Where other companies pay you for your time, in direct selling you eat what you kill. Where other companies demand you put work over family and friends, direct-selling companies encourage you to make work and family inextricable. And the hiring standards are so low, anyone can have a go. Direct selling has proved to be a powerful antithesis to the norm, a very different means of balancing the routines of working life with our hunger to retain some sense of individuality. To sell Mary Kay cosmetics is to choose a distinct and well-defined alternative to traditional corporate life.
The prejudices we find against salespeople are characteristic of resistance to a challenge from below. For generations, the English aristocracy belittled anyone in “trade,” out of the reasonable fear that given time these new moneyed classes would soon be buying them out of their stately homes and usurping their hold on public life. Salespeople are the “trade” class in business, disparaged and threatening in exactly the same way. Managers are dependent on them, but fear their power, which seems an uncontrollable, Dionysian force, overwhelming to those in the neater world of financial spreadsheets and strategic plans. Madam C. J. Walker and Estée Lauder succeeded because they could sell other women on the benefits of their products. This was not a talent that had to be acquired at an expensive school, or deployed according to certain professional rules when they reached a certain age. It was a sharp weapon to use as and when they wished, to carve through a society that granted women few opportunities to become independently rich and powerful. Avon and Mary Kay used the promise of advancement through selling to attract ever more saleswomen to their ranks. Their experience proves that the ability to sell, in the right hands, can be an extraordinary social leveler.
William James, the brother of the novelist Henry, and a psychology professor at Harvard, wrote a chapter in his book The Principles of Psychology titled “Habit.” It was seized on by the sales industry. Salesmanship magazine called it the “greatest ginger [pep] talk ever written.” James argued that the way to develop excellent habits was through constant repetition of thought and action. The moment you resolve to do something, you should do it. And these habits are best formed young, as after the age of thirty, your will and ability to change is grossly weakened. “The greatest thing in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy,” he wrote, and the way to do this was to train it in the direction you wanted it to go, so that your life formed a fixed and unbending pattern, rigidly espaliered against the brick wall of self-discipline.
This idea and its derivations appear throughout the sales literature of the past one hundred years. It goes back to Aristotle, who said that we are what we repeatedly do, and thus “excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” John H. Patterson, the founder of the National Cash Register Company, which was the model for IBM, was a pioneer in developing a large, homogeneous sales force to address the new mass market of the United States. He believed, like James, in molding a salesman’s habits, from his dress to his behavior to his competitive instincts. At one point, Patterson became obsessed with numerology and especially the power of the number five. He had letters drafted to salesmen listing the five things they should and should not do. In his 1913 book Scientific Sales Management: A Practical Application of the Principles of Scientific Management to Selling, Charles Wilson Hoyt wrote that the proper training of the salesman “even goes down to the individual motions and work of the salesman. It goes so far as to insist upon the substitution of exact methods of work by the individual salesman for scattered efforts.” Everything a salesman said or did was now codified. The larger-than-life peddlers of the nineteenth century, who would barge into a rural home and fiddle, joke, and yarn their way to sales, were replaced by men in blue suits, clean-cut and orderly, capable, as Patterson’s NCR put it, of letting “the light of reason into dark places.”
This emphasis on habit and self-discipline, bordering on superstition, occurs in many fields. We see All-Star baseball players stepping into the batter’s box, then stepping out again, fastening and unfastening their gloves, and tapping their helmet before readying themselves to swing, following the same quirky pattern before every pitch. Nelson Mandela makes his own bed each morning—even when he stays in hotels. It is an act of control and self-respect that he developed during his years in jail. Ritual and habit provide the smooth craft in which to navigate the turbulence of life, whether it’s a hitter’s poor hitting streak or the effort to build postapartheid South Africa. For the salesperson trying to build a business against difficult odds, economic, ethnic, or social, it is no less important.
It is four thirty in the morning and I’m running up a hill in Roland Park, one of the ritzier suburbs of Baltimore. Beside me, breathing lightly, bouncing on his toes so effortlessly it’s as if he is being worked by a celestial yo-yo, is a man some call the Termite. Ten minutes earlier, he had rapped on my door to roust me from bed. This is how every day begins for him, whether in frigid winter or humid summer, forty-five minutes up and down the streets of his neighborhood, clearing his mind and preparing himself for the day ahead. “It is important to get my energy right,” he says. As we run, he has a story to tell about every house and street. That’s where the quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens used to live. Over there is a partner at Morgan Stanley. That brick mansion burned down a couple of years ago, killing two teenagers. This street is full of young families and artists. The hardest part of the run is the first five minutes, grinding steeply upward past the brick walls of the Baltimore Country Club. Seeing me wince, the Termite told me: “You do this first thing in the morning and the rest of the day is easy.”
For Guillermo Ramirez—or Memo, as he is known to his family, friends, and many customers—energy is everything. He hews to William James’s advice to make his nervous system his friend instead of his foe, and his habits have served him well, helping him to flatten a world tilted against him. He arrived in America at the age of nineteen with nothing and now owns twelve properties around Baltimore and runs a general contracting business with fifty employees with sales of $8 million a year, even in the darkest days of 2008–9. Each time I mentioned to his friends or customers that I was studying his sales skills, they laughed or rolled their eyes, as if to say, “You’ve got a live one.” He earned his nickname the Termite because once he gets inside a house, he is all but impossible to displace, burrowing through the walls until everything is repaired or upgraded. His energy, recharged on these early-morning runs, propels him through his long days and keeps him alert to the fantasies and weaknesses of everyone he meets. It is the source of his self-efficacy, his belief in his own mastery of life. He believes he controls his own fate.
Motivation has been described as a desire to maximize one’s rewards by attaining a “cognitive mastery of the causal structure of your environment.” You want to know how the world around you works and to control it to your own advantage. It is the kind of desire rarely sought for in tests of ability. But the strength of that desire, that motivation, is what feeds persistence, resilience, and optimism, the coping mechanisms to help you through life’s inevitable defeats. Memo has made a routine of his early-morning run, a superstition even, because he worries that the slightest lapse in control could lead to disaster. His motivation is doubtless more robust than he fears, but by worrying for its fragility, he makes nurturing it the center of his life.
Once we get back home, he pours out two glasses of carrot juice. We down them and he instructs me to be ready to leave in twenty minutes. It is still dark when we climb into the front seats of his gray Lincoln Navigator and his phone begins to ring. All across Baltimore and its outlying suburbs, his men are stirring: Mexicans, Ecuadorians, Hondurans, Guatemalans, Chinese, even a couple of native-born Americans. As we drive to the nearest Starbucks, Memo begins a paean to his car. It is indestructible, comfortable, capacious, American, unlike the Prius he had for a couple of years, a nod to fuel efficiency that ended on the side of the road with two bags of concrete, three Mexican laborers, and a blown battery. “A reliable car is key. If I lose a day because of a car, it’s a big deal.”
All day long, the phone rang and Memo talked, an uncontainable flow of thoughts and emphatic declarations studded with an explosive laugh, like a flock of tropical birds hurtling skyward. At Starbucks, he bought the largest size possible of straight, black coffee and a multigrain bagel. The coffee is nothing like the good stuff he drank back home in Oaxaca, but it serves its purpose. We drove on, pulling up at bus stops and building sites, loading and unloading workers dressed in paint-splashed jeans and T-shirts, sending them off with flurries of Spanish profanity.
More than two hundred years later and ninety miles south of Philadelphia, where Benjamin Franklin established the code of the American salesman, Memo, a first-generation Mexican immigrant, is keeping it alive. He has never read a sales book in his life, but if you spend a day with him, you see why he doesn’t need to. He has energy, discipline, optimism, and resilience, and these have taken him a very long way.
I first met Memo in 2005, when he was painting a set of bookshelves in a terraced house in the Hampden section of Baltimore. Or, rather, he was arranging to have them painted. It has been a while since he did much handyman work himself, though none of it is beyond him. He was dating a friend of mine at the time, and now they live together and have a daughter. He made an indelible impression on me then, as he does on everyone he meets. He is of medium height, slim, with a ponytail of black hair hanging down between his shoulder blades. His dark face slopes up and back and his teeth flash a brilliant white. He carries himself with absolute confidence, shoulders back, his hands darting ceaselessly to touch an arm, a shoulder, to make contact with whomever he is talking to. The contrast is even more apparent when he has two or three workmen stand around him, slope-shouldered and snickering like teenagers, huddled behind the leader of their gang. He keeps himself fastidiously clean. Every day he wears the same uniform: Levi’s 501s, leather boots from Nordstrom, shirt and V-neck sweater from Joseph A. Bank. And he is fanatical about control. He keeps only one telephone number in the contacts section of his phone: “Mama,” his mother in Oaxaca. If anything was to happen to him, whoever found the phone would know whom to call. Every other number, for his scores of clients and workers, he keeps in his head. “This way, I can afford to lose my phone,” he says. He keeps his hair long, he says, so he can cut his own hair without needing a barber. His entire personal and professional life in Baltimore is contained in twelve square miles, which means he is never more than fifteen minutes away from any situation. During meetings, he writes nothing down, however complex the discussion, because it forces him to deal with issues as they arise. William James advised us all to “seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make,” and Memo compels himself to do exactly this. Except for his accounts, which are meticulous, he never files anything for later. He has no “to do” list, because everything is taken care of the moment it crops up. For all that Memo has acquired in life, he still believes that all you can control is yourself, that nothing else is certain. This attitude propels him out onto the streets at 4:30 A.M., and onward through his day.
Memo was born in Oaxaca. His father ran a junkyard for cars and buses and his mother ran a restaurant. From his parents, Memo learned the two key elements of his eventual line of business: fixing things and sales. When a customer arrived half-tipsy at his mother’s restaurant, she would tell the chef to add a little extra salt and spice into the customer’s dish, to crank up the heat in his body so he would order more beer. His father would take broken-down machinery and bring it back to usable, profitable life. Memo also developed a view of business as problem solving for others. When he was seventeen, he was sitting in a bar around midnight when the bar ran out of beer. He had an idea. He would buy a tricycle and deliver beer to bars in central Oaxaca after midnight. The tricycle became motorbikes with coolers, and thus was born his first business. “I learned the basics, selling what people need and realizing they were ready to pay more for beer in the middle of the night than they were during normal delivery hours.”
His girlfriend at the time was his English teacher, an American ten years his senior. She became pregnant and decided she wanted to return home to Maryland to have the baby. Memo chose to follow her. “I quickly found that Americans aren’t as friendly when you move to the U.S. as they are when you’re just visiting.” After two days living at his girlfriend’s parents’ house near Baltimore, he began looking for a job. He read the help wanted ads in the newspaper and found one for a car mechanic. His girlfriend and her father both offered to drive him to the interview, six miles away. He declined. “If I get the job,” he told them, “I’m going to need to get there myself.” This was classic self-efficacy. Memo believed then and now that he has the means to control his own destiny. Asserting that he could walk the six miles to work was both an expression of his self-belief and a means of strengthening it.
So he woke up early the next day and walked. He found the garage, an untidy, unloved operation, and its owners, a father and son who had long since stopped communicating. Memo held up a copy of the newspaper ad and said: “I want to work.” “I told them in my bad English, I can clean, I know the measurements of the tools, I can take things apart and put them back together. I was young and I could see the father looking at me and thinking ‘He can be my little bitch.’ He asked me when I could start, and I said right now, and I just began tidying up the garage, figuring out these American pneumatic tools. Over time, the owner began to trust me and I began to fix brakes and shocks and deal with customers. After several months, the son was basically working for me, because I could deal with his father. Then I went to this party and met a contractor who was talking about plastering and how you can make a lot of money doing that: $80 an hour.”
Memo told him that he could work Saturdays and Sundays, at least to start with, and recruited the son of the garage owner to drive him around in his truck. Within a few weeks, Memo had left the garage and was working for the contractor full-time, soaking up every piece of advice and information he could. When the contractor’s wife began an affair with another man, Memo found himself picking up ever more pieces of the business from his distracted boss. “I became the front man and began to understand what it was the customer needed. The customers began to give me the checks for his company and they began to see me as the business.”
We pulled up at the home of Memo’s ex-wife to pick up his teenage daughter. He does this every morning, to spend twenty minutes driving her to her $25,000-a-year private school, which he pays for. The American woman he came to America for is no longer his wife, but remains his business manager. He rolled his eyes at the complication of it all. Our next stop was the first customer of the day, a couple in their late thirties, both bankers. Memo explained that the husband was always traveling and the wife was left at home with her own high-powered job and an adopted child. They had overspent on their house, but could not stop spending on making it just so. The wife, in particular, was fussing over every detail and then fussing over the bill. “When people can’t afford what they want, they become rude,” said Memo. When we arrived, the wife was dressed for work and the nanny had not arrived yet. The wife took us straight up to the bathroom. There was a tiny splash of paint in the sink she wanted scrubbed off. She wanted the electrician to rewire the lights so that the shower light would come on separately from the lights above the vanity. There was something not quite right about the way the drawers were sliding, but at least she was happy about the new door handles. “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” said Memo at every turn. “Let me take care of it.” He listened with his head slightly bowed, his ears cocked toward her, his face serious.
We stepped outside. There was an issue with the back porch light. It pointed outward when it should have pointed down. Memo looked up and explained in detail the various issues around lighting the back porch, showing where the wire ran, where it would have to run to have the light on the other side, offering up various colors and options for the light, moving from place to place and extending his arms in a broad arc to show the area a new light would illuminate. Finally he turned to the woman and asked what she would like. She hesitated, clearly baffled by the number of choices, her fingers held to her lips. Memo broke the moment with his own suggestion, a dark fixture to match the trim, motion-sensitive, so it wouldn’t blaze into the house all night long, pointing at an angle down the steps. The wife tilted her head and agreed. Memo turned to the electrician who was standing in the garden and nodded. “We’ll take care of it today,” he said, and then we were off.
“It’s always one more thing, one more thing,” he said once we were back in the car. “It’s hard to be effective selling to people who don’t know what they’re looking for, who keep coming up with all these small things.” The phone kept ringing. Wally was installing an air-conditioning unit on the third floor of one house. Arturo was painting the exterior of another. It was payday the next day, so he had to make sure any outstanding accounts were settled. Memo’s momentum was unrelenting. He was always moving, calling, selling.
The next house we visited belonged to an older, retired couple who were rehabbing a garage into an art studio and redecorating the top floor of their house for their children. The wife went upstairs with Memo and looked despairingly at the piles of boxes on the floor. “Would you like me to clear all this out? Put it in the basement?” he asked. “Yes, please!” she replied. The husband was trying to figure out how to get more light into his new art studio. Memo suggested cutting panels out of the existing door and replacing them with glass. The more expensive option would be to put in a new glass door. The husband went for the latter.
“It’s why I go to all my sites every day,” said Memo as we left. “The sale doesn’t stop when you get the order. It keeps on going all the way through the job. I never send someone else to check on the work. I go myself and then once I’m inside the house, there’s always something else. That’s why they call me the Termite. Once I’m inside, I’m hard to get out.”
“In and out, in and out” is how Memo describes his day, constantly seeing people, always thinking about the next meeting, maintaining a busy schedule. Sometimes the projects are large, such as buying a house and remodeling it, but when the economy is down, it could be just fixing a leaky faucet or caulking a window. But staying busy is vital. “It’s good for my health to stay busy. I feel like I’m doing something good for myself, my family, my customers. Even if I’m broke, as long as I’m busy, I know something eventually will come.”
Memo has a clear idea of the house he will one day build for himself in Oaxaca with the fortune he has made in America. He has imagined it fully in his own mind. It will be in the center of the old town, around a courtyard. The floors will be of thick stone, the walls plaster, ideally suited to the weather. He will close the shutters in high summer to stay cool and light fires on the dampest days of winter. There will be no air-conditioning or central heating. He will do the roof so no one has to think about it for at least a century. The wiring and plumbing will be simple and accessible, no fancy dimmer switches or built-in stereos. He will eat fresh food bought each day from the market, so no need for a vast refrigerator. It will be the opposite of the fussy, fragile houses he spends his time fixing in Baltimore. His will require almost no maintenance.
We found ourselves on the top floor of a brick mansion with a trim blonde in her sixties who was wearing workout clothes and talking to Memo with her hands on her hips, as if she were about to teach a gym class. Until a couple of weeks ago, the top floor of her home was a warren of former servants’ rooms, tucked into eaves and dormers just beneath the slate roof. The woman’s two sons liked it up there, so she had called in Memo to fix up one of the bathrooms. “It started with a toilet,” she said. Now the entire floor had been opened up and was being remodeled and repainted. Today’s issue was lighting. The electrician had proposed a few ideas that the client hadn’t liked. So Memo picked up a pencil and began to draw circles on the ceiling where he envisioned installing spotlights. “We could have one here, and here,” he said. The woman looked up and nodded. “And then perhaps another one here and here,” he went on. “I think this would brighten that side of the room.” Then he passed the woman the pencil to make her own marks, pointing to the spot in the center of the ceiling where he thought she needed another light. She reached up and marked a cross.
“I was making the point that she was the boss,” he said back in the car. “She’s alone in a big house and her family is not there very often. This is one area where she has control. Her husband doesn’t question the bills for this work. If I just solved every problem for her, it wouldn’t be so satisfying for her.” So he gave her the pencil.
We made a quick stop at a small ranch house where a young man greeted us at the door in his pajamas. There was something the matter with his sump pump. The house was built over a spring and the basement often flooded. The man explained that he had been online and reckoned he needed a new pump. Memo rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and sweater, took a hammer, and gave the pump a thwack. Nothing. “I’ll have someone come to replace it,” he said. Before he left, he spotted a dartboard, picked up a dart, and threw a 17. “Pretty good,” said the man.
If that were your own sump pump, what would you have done? I asked once we had left. “I’d have spent half an hour unscrewing it, cleaning it out, and putting it back.” Why didn’t you do that back there? “That’s not what he wanted. He wanted a new pump. When you add up the plumber’s time to install rather than repair, and the cost of the new pump, it’s not a big difference. But this guy had looked online, tried to figure out the problem, and he wanted peace of mind. So that’s what he’s getting. It’s a big show, man. Keeping everything going, everyone busy, everyone happy. A big show.”
It was 10:40 A.M., and Memo did a quick tally of his sales so far. A door, seven lights, and a sump pump: $2,000. The cost of the materials would be $1,000, then there would be taxes, permits, and labor. Memo himself would make around $300. It’s nothing like what he was making a couple of years ago when the real estate market was still booming and he was able to make several hundred thousand dollars on every house he flipped, but it’s work, and he’ll take it. “People who want to work can find it even in a recession. You just have to get your prices right and adjust your expectations. But you have to keep working, to keep the energy levels around you, to attract more work.”
He picked up a water bottle cap and rested it in the palm of his hand. “I live in constant fear that someone is going to come and snatch it all away. You think you have it, and then”—with his other hand, he took the bottle cap—“suddenly you don’t. That’s why I keep doing everything face-to-face, to make sure I still have the customers and work I think I do. For me the sale is not selling one thing. It’s selling the second and third thing. When you make your first sale, it isn’t complete until you’ve made your second, and so on and so on. The best salesman is the one who gets the same customer over and over. Then you get their friends, brothers, grandmothers, and finally you’re buying their sister’s house. Once you have word of mouth, it’s a multiplier. It’s everything.”
For a man so self-possessed, I wonder how he can look so deferential in the presence of his customers. “I am their servant,” he says. “I am the punching bag. To be a good salesman, you have to be good at taking the blows, dealing with other people’s problems. Customers don’t like big egos.” But they do like energy. Meeting an older man, a retired businessman, Memo played the hardworking immigrant. The man pulled me aside at one point to say that compared with all the American contractors he has used, Memo and his team work twice as hard for less money. With a younger wife fixing up her first family home, Memo was more flirtatious, the supercompetent handyman who is going to make everything right with his smile and his jokes, brightening up the midmorning blues and creating a different kind of bond. “You have to be very careful about what you give of yourself in different situations, but in every one, when you’re selling, it’s about attraction.” Whenever he does have time to read or watch movies, his favorite subject is love, the history of love, how it changes across time, place, and people. “Countries fall apart for lack of love. We need it in everything we do.”
As the day rolled on, Memo’s energy did not flag. At a large Victorian house, a woman was fussing over three new bathrooms even while the rest of her house could have used work, from the peeling paint and worn carpets to the roof. According to Memo, the woman’s husband had decided to try renovating the bathrooms himself. But after weeks stretched into months, and tile and grout lay in the hallway and toilets backed up, the wife, who earned more than her husband, had decided to punish him by spending $70,000 on three new professionally installed bathrooms. “She is trying to make her husband feel guilty,” said Memo. “She makes the money, so even though the rest of the house needs help, she is using the bathroom project to tell her husband how useless he is. He doesn’t make much money and he can’t even do a simple renovation. As long as the handyman husband exists, we are in business.”
We arrived at another house to look at a wiring problem in the bathroom. The wife told me the wonderful thing about Memo was that he didn’t give her very many choices. He made it easy for her to decide what to do. During our visit, the husband emerged and asked Memo to look at a fence several hundred feet away on the road. Memo scampered over the rocky garden to look. He then offered to fix a rotting beam next to the garage. After we left, he told me, “My purpose in going over to the fence was to make the husband feel powerful. If he asks me to look at his fence, I go do it. Did you see how he told his wife to go inside?” At one point during our conversation, the wife had come out only to be told by her husband that what we were discussing would be of no interest to her. We were discussing the state of the U.S. economy. “He likes to be in control, so I encourage that feeling. I try to hear what the customer is saying and then I interpret it back to them in my words and my behavior.”
After we had been at the house for twenty minutes, I noticed Memo was conspicuously looking at his watch. “When I create the feeling that I’m leaving and ask ‘Anything else?’ the problems start pouring out. I’ll be coming back to fix that beam and the fence, and there’s a problem with the swimming pool heater. It’s all to get the next sale, and the next one. A salesman is like a fish, always swimming, moving, never resting in case you get gobbled up. I am like a fit fish.”
Memo has never studied selling formally, but is bubbling over with ideas about what it takes. It takes preparation and good health, the contagious power of a sunny disposition, and great mental alertness. It takes an early-morning run and carrot juice to keep the mind and body fresh and resilient against all the slings and confusion the day will inevitably bring. It takes organizational discipline and serious acting chops. It requires charm and quick thinking, the ability to apply pressure in the moment and yet keep in mind the larger picture. It also requires a dose of cynicism. Throughout our day, Memo kept returning to the subject of Bernie Madoff. Every day, Memo feels he sees people ignoring reality, striving to create an environment for themselves as if it will somehow eradicate all the other problems in their life. Sometimes a leaky toilet is just a leaky toilet. But other times, a bathroom renovation is revenge or a substitute for affection. The salesman’s job is not to solve these issues but to feed them, to let these fantasies flourish, to allow the psychological need to be satisfied, however briefly. “Madoff gave everyone a reality check, but when you think about it, it’s amazing that it took so long for reality to catch up with him. For decades, people were ready to buy what he was selling because they so wanted it to be true. He woke the country up to what was going on everywhere, people avoiding reality and buying fantasies.”
As a boy in Oaxaca, Memo used to accompany his mother to the local market. One day, she was shopping for tomatoes. She saw what she wanted at one stall, but the vendor had to move several boxes to get to them, which he did. She then asked the price. It was too high, she thought. So she kept going around the market. None of the other tomatoes were as good, so she returned to the first stall. But the vendor was cross and refused to sell her the tomatoes, saying she had been rude to walk away after he had gone to so much effort to get them for her. She stared at him and said, “I came back. Isn’t that enough?”
To be a decent salesman, he is saying, nothing can be personal. If someone wishes to buy, that’s enough. The insults, the efforts, the suppression of self, it all becomes nothing. “I used to take things personally,” says Memo. “If someone bullied me, I’d spend time worrying why these guys were messing with me. Until I learned to stand up to them.” The simple act of taking action freed his mind. It gave him control.
That’s not to say managing his ego doesn’t still take work. At one point, a former customer called to see if Memo could come to repair the shoddy work done by a cheaper rival. The customer suggested that Memo come around the next Tuesday. Memo offered Thursday. After he hung up, he told me that he could easily have done it Tuesday. But for his own sense of self, he had to show the customer who was boss. If he can do this sometimes, it helps him keep his pride in check during the periods when he is nodding, bowing, and serving.
The longer I spent with Memo the greater my regard grew for his skills. He has a knack for dropping ideas into conversations with clients and leaving them bouncing, as he put it, like a basketball dropped from a great height, bounce, bounce, bounce, long after he leaves their house. He would come in to fix a door and mention in passing that the kitchen might need a fresh coat of paint. A week later, the customer would call: Do you have time to paint the kitchen? He approaches selling like a tennis player would a match. “You never want to get figured out. You never want to be off-balance, but you want everyone else to be.” And yet everything is done with an easy charm, a sense that he and his customer are playing one of those elaborate games that make life worth living, to-ing and fro-ing around a commercial transaction much as you would in a romantic or intellectual one. It is a game with lures and snares, but to play it well is part of living fully. To be able to sell well for Memo is also a great source of personal strength. “What a recession does is create confusion. But once you have built something from scratch, you know you can do it anywhere, anytime again.”
The most venerated of all Oaxacans, he told me, was Mexico’s nineteenth-century president Benito Juarez. His parents were peasants and he was orphaned at the age of four. He did not attend school until he moved to Oaxaca at the age of twelve. He worked as a domestic servant, but his employer was so impressed by his intelligence that he paid for him to attend a seminary and later study law. During his career, Juarez confronted the Church, the great European powers of the time, and powerful business interests. He was the first Mexican president without a military background and the first full-blooded indigenous Mexican to hold the highest political office. But to Memo, his most remarkable attribute was his willingness to act, not to wallow in his past and his traditions, but to try to do something for himself and for others, to pursue a romantic ideal of Mexican nationalism by the most pragmatic means. To level out an unfair system so that he and others could flourish. Had Juarez and Benjamin Franklin, both daring optimists and vigorous men of action, been alive today, they would have understood Memo, the ponytailed figure running hard through the Baltimore night, along a path that, as Madam C. J. Walker observed, is never strewn with flowers.