The Salesman: A Biography of Paul J. Meyer

By Jim Moore

Along the river of American enterprise, leaders are born and die and their businesses rise and fade away.  Paul J. Meyer's enterprise is of more than passing interest because fifty years later, it's easy to see that the company Meyer started created an industry … something that happens only once or twice in a generation.

Success Motivation Institute, which Meyer started in January, 1960, was the world's first self-improvement company.  SMI was the first to condense and record the handful of self-help books available at the time.  The personal development industry we take for granted today did not exist in 1960; Meyer and his legion of imitators literally created an industry from the ground up.

Meyer, who died in late October, 2009, became known worldwide for the goal-setting and time management programs he authored.  Meanwhile, his company became known for the sheer number of failed distributors across the United States.  These were people who bought into Meyer's dream (with investments ranging up to $30,000) and then found the going too rough.  They probably number in the tens of thousands.  During the years when Meyer's success philosophy spread to virtually every corner of the globe, almost every American town had at least one failed SMI business.  Most cities had several; in larger metropolitan areas, there were literally dozens of failed success merchants.

In The Salesman, bestselling author Jim Moore separates Meyer from the excesses of his empire – and shows how the two were also inexorably linked.   Moore knows whereof he writes; he was Meyer's corporate archivist for a decade, one of the few standout SMI franchisees, an SMI home office executive, and Meyer's close friend.

If enterprise is a river, the success industry Meyer started has become a raging torrent.  Most of today's standout motivators – people like Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy and John Maxwell – owe Meyer a tremendous debt.  As bestselling management author Ken Blanchard noted, "Paul paved the way for all of us."  

Meyer combined his success philosophy with a well-crafted marketing appeal that endeared him to hundreds of thousands around the world.  During his lifetime, Meyer carefully controlled what was written and printed about him; he owned one of the largest printing operations in the United States and ran the presses with abandon.  This book pulls away Meyer's carefully-created veneer, allowing us to see the raw essence of a quintessential American entrepreneur and innovator.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Protecting Time LLC
• Release date: May 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9781513634876

Jim Moore

Jim Moore came from a home where reading was encouraged. His parents both enjoyed books so the house was filled with reading material, which he took advantage of from a young age.Along the highway from his family ranch near Two Dot, Montana to Bozeman, the old Jawbone road bed is visible at places. In passing by, it often occurred to him that a good yarn could be wrapped around the story of the railroad. About twelve years ago, he decided to see if he could write it. Thus came into being Ride the Jawbone.Other published titles by Jim Moore include: Election Day, The Body on the Floor of the Rotunda, and The Whole Nine Yarn, a compilation of nine of his short stories, and The Jenny. Another legal thriller, 8 Seconds, is slated for publication in 2017.Jim Moore has spent his life as a cattle rancher and a lawyer. He was raised and spent most of his life on the Moore ranch near Two Dot, Montana. His father brought a World War I airplane—a Curtis JN4 Jenny—to the family ranch in 1920 and barnstormed the state. Those experiences, as told to his son, seemed a proper basis for a legal murder mystery. An attractive young woman as the one with the flying machine made for a better yarn.Now retired, Jim lives quietly with his wife, Kay, on their farm south of Bozeman, Montana. He continues to write legal murder mysteries.

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The Salesman

Copyright © 2018 Protecting Time LLC.  All Rights Reserved.

ISBN:  978-1-5136-3487-6

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Books by Jim Moore

Conspiracy of One:  The Definitive Book on the Kennedy Assassination

Clinton:  Young Man in a Hurry

Rampage:  America’s Largest Family Mass Murder

Growing Up Clinton (with Roger C. Clinton)

The CEO Challenge (with Patrick J. Below)

Wired for Greed (with Joe Seeber)

The Salesman

Acknowledgements

My deepest appreciation to Gladys Hudson, for helping me see the early history of the Meyer enterprises as she lived it.

Appreciation to Joe and Bessie Baxter, Gene Franklin, Karon Freeman, Bill Garner, Buddy and Joan Haney, Tonette Holle, Rex Houze, Ferrell Hunter, Terry and Brenda Irwin, Stuart and Patty Lindner, Vicki Lofton, Jane Meyer, Bill and Rose Moyer, Linda Peterson, Kevin and Leslie Meyer-Rhea, Steve Rose, Jim and Judy Sirbasku, Randy and Janna Slechta, and all my former colleagues within the Meyer Family Companies.

Heartfelt thanks to my wife and Dr. Barbara Chesser. 

If I could touch the Elysian Fields with the written word, I would thank Paul Meyer.  All that I am, I owe to him.  Paul made me; I hope he knew.

For all those

in whose hearts he still lives ...                                                           

The master motivator

who does not sleep.

And for Gigi,

My love, my wife, my life.

prologue

Prologue: The Arms of a Friend

  Every time I opened the door to Paul J. Meyer’s home office, I saw the sign on the wall:

Welcome!  The arms of a friend await!

I availed myself of those arms on many occasions; not all of them were uplifting moments.  Paul hugged the way he lived: Full bore.  His were not the embarrassed, ass-out front porch hugs customary in the South; he hugged with intensity and genuine feeling.  When Paul Meyer hugged you, you felt something.

My wife and I spent a week in the Caymans with Paul and Jane Meyer about eight months before Paul’s death.  Their opulent condo dominates a resort called Water’s Edge; the original Meyer homestead on Grand Cayman had occupied the property before Paul sold it to developers.

Our week was idyllic. We shared lunches, dinners, beachside strolls and dance lessons.  My wife and I borrowed Paul’s minivan and drove the length of the island.  We enjoyed the Meyer’s guest condo, which was spacious, accommodating and beautifully restful.

I would sit on the patio, eating a late breakfast, and hear Paul already on the phone next door.  I’d walk into his screened porch and sit down in one of the comfortable chairs, listening. I remember we spent much of an afternoon talking about a friend who had taken some liberties with Paul’s seminal thinking. I knew the etymology, but I didn’t know the friend.  As always, I tried to offer the best advice I could; in the end, Paul’s anger subsided and he did nothing.

One afternoon, we joined two of Paul’s friends for a two-hour excursion on Attitude, the canopied motorboat reserved for residents of Water’s Edge.  Paul’s friend asked me: How do you know Paul?  Paul and I looked at each other; we both started laughing.  How did I not know Paul?  That would have been the better question.

  In truth, I knew Paul Meyer for more than a quarter-century.  I met him when I was just 24, a new SMI distributor in awe of his very presence.  I became a member of Meyer’s home office staff two years later, and in the mid 1990s became Corporate Archivist for the Meyer Family Companies.  I had made the history of Paul’s businesses my hobby.  Meyer hired me to make my hobby into a business.  The task of building a museum to his enterprises occupied me for a decade.  I worked with him daily, listened to the stories he told me, and treasured the intimacy.

Paul (left) and the author aboard Attitude.

All of that lay behind me by the time of our Cayman visit; by then, I had been off the payroll for several months.  As a non-employee, my relationship with Meyer finally approached something of a comfortable equilibrium; I felt as at-ease with him as I ever had, and our week in his island paradise was too short.

Paul and Jane took my wife and I to lunch on Saturday and then drove us to the airport.  We got out on the sidewalk in front of the terminal, and I lugged our suitcase from the back of the minivan.  Paul hugged me and kissed me on the cheek. 

That’s the way I prefer to remember Paul J. Meyer ... standing in the sunshine, alive and vibrant, with not the slightest idea that his time had nearly run out.  The affection I felt that afternoon will sustain me for years to come, and the embrace will live in my memory forever.

      –  Spring, 2018

Chapter 1

Who Owns the Stars?

Entrepreneurs are never born; they are created.  Most phenomenally successful business people are the products of their environment, their attitudes, and the contributions of those who influenced them.  To that end, Paul Meyer was probably destined for success in the success industry he created; the result of his parents' marriage could have been nothing so much as extraordinarily powerful human soup.

Paul’s father was August Carl Meyer.  Even as a young man, Carl had a talent for discerning the winds of change.  He immigrated to the United States from Germany while he was still in his early 20s, at a time in life when most young men are content to settle down and raise a family.  The social unrest that was sweeping the pieces from Europe's political chessboard showed no signs of abating.  Hard though it was, Meyer left his family and his heritage to seek a new life in a new world.  Carl never looked back.

As an apprentice, Meyer had learned the art of cabinet making from a skilled Black Forest artisan.  Before leaving Colmar, the young man spent hundreds of hours carving an elaborate headboard of rosebuds and wreaths.  He sold the piece to earn the money to go abroad.  He arrived on Ellis Island in that tense interlude between the ragtime era and the outbreak of World War I.

Years later, Carl’s younger son and several of his grandchildren would stand at the same Ellis Island portal Carl Meyer had passed through more than seven decades before.  I can only imagine what this experience was like for him, Paul Meyer said, crying openly.  My father was one of the fortunate ones ... his skills helped him pass through the immigration process.  Many immigrants were turned away at Ellis Island, but Paul's father made it through.  Carl Meyer knew no one in America, and he spoke little English.  He went to work in the Brooklyn shipyards, but found it difficult to communicate with his coworkers.  They responded to this strange, self-confident young man by teasing him and making practical jokes at his expense.  One time, Meyer's coworkers filled his milk thermos with white paint, which made for a rather chalky surprise.

Searching for other opportunities, young Meyer made his way down the East coast.  He worked for a time as a carpenter in the South Carolina shipyards.  Carl found life on the eastern shore was too predictable, too mundane and, perhaps, too settled. By 1922, Meyer had heard the California call, just as millions of Americans had been hearing it since the heady Gold Rush days of the 1840s.  Carl headed west, working odd jobs en route to the promised land.  The trip took him a year; he ended up in California working as a carpenter for a man named Fred Rinkert. 

Meyer applied himself to his new job; he brought along his own unique creativity and standards of craftsmanship.  Rinkert quickly found that young Meyer could turn his hand to almost anything.  When Mrs. Rinkert's sister came for a visit, her brother-in-law introduced Isabelle to the rather intense fellow with the faltering English and the strong German brogue.

Isabelle Rutherford had lived a somewhat less checkered existence.  Her mother – Paul's grandmother – had exported herself from the Scottish highlands.  Because she and her family could not obtain entrance visas to the United States during the massive immigrations of the late 1880s, they settled first in Canada.  Seven months after their arrival, Margaret Weems Dow was married to another child of the heather, Adam Rutherford.  The happy couple moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan, where Rutherford cleared forty acres of hardscrabble hillside just outside town. 

The land had a deceptive fertility;¹ the Rutherfords lived there for half a century.  They grew corn and raised livestock within the confines of a six-foot tall rock fence that Adam Rutherford built from native stones.  The fence encircled the entire property – all forty acres of it – and was nothing less than a tribute to old-world tradition.

  Isabelle Rutherford first saw light on a bright winter's day in 1892.  Her parents were determined to raise their daughter in the same conscientious, devout mold in which they themselves had grown up; Margaret Rutherford became something of a role model for Isabelle.  To those in need, Isabelle recalled, my mother gave.  She ministered to those who were ill.  She was the midwife for every child born within twenty miles!  She headed the congregational church, ran the school, and was respected by farmers and wives alike.

With her mother the de facto matriarch for their Michigan county, Isabelle Rutherford grew to adulthood and began searching for a way to make her own contribution.  She became a nurse, eventually serving as head nurse of Michigan's Bronson Hospital, about thirty miles south of Battle Creek. 

Another love was growing inside Isabelle Rutherford – a love for children and education.  While nursing had allowed her to help heal bodies, teaching would allow her to help mold and guide young minds.  World War I had just ended in Europe, and a sense of renewal and optimism was sweeping across the United States.  In that heady climate, Isabelle made her decision: Teaching was the field in which she could make her greatest contribution.  She left the nursing profession and went back to school.  One mid-term vacation was spent visiting her sister and brother-in-law in California.   

From the start, Isabelle felt a common bond with Carl Meyer. The two young people shared a hardworking and conscientious heritage, and had a mutual love for developing their talents and abilities to better themselves and improve the lives of others.  The blooming romance had a series of mitigating factors: Isabelle was a Congregationalist, while Carl was Lutheran.  Isabelle's evangelical upbringing found little in common with Carl's rather austere religious practices. And there was something else; at age 30, Isabelle was still very nearly a stranger to romance.  She had always been too dedicated to her nursing career to give much thought to marriage and a family.

  Even in the early 1920s, Californians lived life at a somewhat faster pace. Isabelle and Carl seemed determined not to let the grass grow beneath their feet. Three weeks after their initial meeting in 1923, the couple were married.  The newlyweds set up housekeeping in a tent.

The tent was their home for six weeks, because no houses were available to rent or buy in Campbell, California.  Although the tent wasn't much, it was enough.  One of Paul Meyer's most prized possessions was a picture of his parents in front of that tent. 

The Meyers worked hard; Isabelle taught school and Carl practiced his art of carpentry and made money from odd mechanical jobs.  Their first son, Carl, was born in 1924.  The succeeding years brought two more children into the family – Elizabeth, in 1925, and Paul in 1928.²

By the time Paul Meyer was old enough to begin attending public school, he and his family were caught up in the Great Depression, just like most families across the country.  The lack of material possessions didn't seem to bother Paul and his siblings; instead of material things, both Carl and Isabelle passed along bits of their own personalities and philosophies.  In that way, Paul later said, I inherited a fortune from my parents.

That kind of fortune wasn't something most children would expect or appreciate, but most children were not Paul Meyer.  Paul vividly recalled riding his bicycle seven miles to the largest nearby town, San Jose, California, to buy grocery items like powdered milk and day-old bread.  Fresh milk and fresh bread were luxuries when times were good; they were bought at a grocery store nearer home.  Despite the harshness of the era, Paul considered his family rich.

Isabelle worked to instill that attitude of abundance in her children early on.  The habit of thought manifested itself in Paul's rather excitable nature.  As a child, everything was new and wonderful to him ... each day was an exciting adventure.  School was never boring or routine; Cambrian Grammar School was a wonderful place filled with possibility and potential.

Wanda McCormack was Paul's teacher for his first three years in school.  Rather than discouraging Paul's sense of wonderment, she helped the boy use it to the fullest.  One day, Paul stood at the chalkboard, excited and captivated by some new learning experience.  Rather than disrupt Mrs. McCormack's lesson, young Meyer wet his pants!

Even that didn't phase Wanda McCormack.  Paul, she told him gently, I appreciate your uniqueness, your free spirit, and your great gusto for living.  But there is one thing I want you to do just like everyone else:  When you have to, please go to the bathroom!

In his book, I Inherited a Fortune!, Paul painted a vivid picture of Mrs. McCormack.  The portrait was that of a young woman in love with the process of molding young minds.  Mrs. McCormack, by Paul's account, was a teacher who could be a stern disciplinarian when times demanded, but who preferred to share her achievement philosophy and zest for living with the children she taught.

Through Mrs. McCormack, in particular, Paul learned that any plan to reach the stars must be grounded in firm stair-steps toward achievement.  She taught us a can-do attitude, remembered Paul, and we learned to take responsibility for our actions.  Mrs. McCormack taught us that we could change the future by changing our attitudes and our actions.

Though Paul's parents always encouraged learning, Mrs. McCormack doubtless helped shape Paul's thirst for knowledge.  Even at age 80, Paul could gather and assimilate information at an astounding rate.  He never seemed too busy or too preoccupied to learn something new. 

  Meyer’s desire to learn swept him through grammar school.  His fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Keesley, and his fifth- and sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. James, both helped accentuate and sharpen Paul's unique curiosity and his willingness to exchange effort for information.

If Paul worked hard to excel in school, he worked even harder to prove himself at home and in the world of work.  As a youngster of ten or eleven, Paul earned spending money by selling magazine subscriptions.  Young Meyer broke national records selling Ladies’ Home Journal and Liberty.  Of course, such work demanded a way to transport magazines, order forms and sales material, so Paul fitted a basket on the front of his bicycle. He added two more baskets astride the rear wheel.    The baskets came in handy when Paul was grocery shopping for his mother. 

Meyer recalled one particular trip when his mother told him to buy a watermelon if he had money left over.  Paul did; he loaded the groceries into his bicycle baskets and pedaled for home.  The sun was shining, the wind was just right, Paul remembered, the blue sky sparkled above me, spring flowers were everywhere, the birds were singing.  The world was his on the downhill pull.  The youngster began whistling exuberantly; he reveled in happiness from his toenails to his eyeballs.  I saw people in their yards and on their porches, Meyer recalled, and I wished they could be happy and rich and have a watermelon just like me.

Paul's parents encouraged their children to view the world and the universe as their cornucopia.  This attitude of abundance was probably the most basic element of Meyer's business and personal success; he always believed that the world was an oyster ready to be opened and enjoyed.  Once, when Paul was contemplating nature, he asked his mother, Who owns all these things ... the birds, the flowers, the trees?

Isabelle replied that Paul owned them ... provided he was wise enough to enjoy them.  This sort of titular ownership, by extension, also applied to the stars and the planets in their orbits.  I'll just own them, Meyer thought to himself.  Then I'll have something to share with others – something that will never be used up.

Next time you find yourself outside looking up at the night sky, kindly remember you are looking at Paul J. Meyer's stars.  Now he numbers among them, but ownership remains unchanged.

  Both Paul’s parents worked hard to make certain their children understood the value of hard work.  When Paul or his siblings would bemoan the lack of something in their lives, their mother had a ready reply: Sitting there wishing makes no one great.  The good Lord sends the fishing, but you must dig the bait.³

Unusual passions or events often propel would-be entrepreneurs into the world of commerce.  Strangely enough, the joys of two-wheeled locomotion were the proving ground for Paul's first foray into the world of entrepreneurship.  When the young man told his father he wanted a better bicycle, the elder Meyer responded in true self-sufficient fashion: he took his son to the city dump, found a broken, discarded bicycle, and brought it home. 

  Together, father and son straightened the wheels and bent spokes, then stripped and repainted the frame.  Paul was jubilant.  Not only did he own a fine bicycle; he had helped build it!

Then the thought struck young Meyer: He could buy or salvage other bikes, fix them up as he had this first one, then sell them to neighborhood youngsters for a profit.  From the time he was about twelve years old until his teenage years, Paul did just that.  He planted a Bicycle Repair sign in his parents' front yard, and even persuaded his mother to take in bikes at the family's back door. 

The small business assumed traction, then gathered speed.  With his father's help, Paul built a lye bath.  Paul would carefully lower the bicycle frame into the lye, then wait while the caustic stripped off the old paint.  Repainted, the bike looked good as new.  In four years, Paul Meyer rebuilt and sold more than 300 bicycles. 

  Then, the automobile bug bit – hard.  Paul's older brother, Carl, already had a 1936 Ford.  Carl adopted a brilliant strategy to insure his car was carefully maintained: He allowed Paul to call the car half his in exchange for keeping the vehicle washed and waxed.  The brilliance of Carl’s idea lay in the fact that Paul could not yet drive; therefore, he couldn't possibly harm what