The Briefcase

By PAT COLE

The Briefcase is based on facts as the author recalls them. The Author has taken the literary license to embellish some of the facts and change the names of people and companies. This novel is a story about a young man growing up and facing some of the challenges faced in business and in life.....and what a ride it's been!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503586673

PAT COLE

Pat Cole was born and raised in a quaint little coastal town in North Carolina. He was lucky in that both his Mother and his Father were in sales. They always encouraged their son to go forward and achieve as much as possible. Pat has an enthusium for life, which fueled his need for learning. His business adventures were not only rewarding, but some very exciting. He was always looking for the "next" opportunity.

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Copyright © 2015 by PAT COLE.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 07/30/2015

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CONTENTS

Foreword

Chapter 1:  Earned Money

Chapter 2:  The Gift of a Lifetime

Chapter 3:  Up, Up and Away

Chapter 4:  Senior Year & Who’s Who

Chapter 5:  Saluting the Ninety Day Wonder

Chapter 6:  The Long, Long Wait

Chapter 7:  Full Bird and His Aide

Chapter 8:  Tokoyo

Chapter 9:  The Next Phase

Chapter 10:  The Watering Hole

Chapter 11:  New York, New York

Chapter 12:  Welcome Aboard

Chapter 13:  Would You Mind Elaborating?

Chapter 14:  A New Day

Afterword

FOREWORD

This book is a novel based on my experience as a salesman, but it is not just about selling. This book is based on my life as a young man growing up, and also about the challenges we sometimes face in the business world. Most of the story is my recalled accounts as they happened. I have, however, taken literary license to embellish some of the facts and have changed names of individuals and companies.

I learned many lessons about selling from people I met along the way. Some of what I learned is that:

1) Most all buying is emotion. People buy what they want, not necessarily what they need.

2) People rarely buy from someone they don’t like.

3) It is a natural tendency to resist buying for fear of making a mistake.

4) Some people get ‘buyer’s remorse’, so it is important to know how to lock-in the deal.

5) Buyers get accustomed to buying from a certain salesperson or company and they feel a loyalty to them and resist changing to someone else.

6) You can’t sell anything to someone who doesn’t have the money or the credit. If you do, the sale will come back to haunt you.

7. Life is very simple. You act to avoid pain and to experience pleasure.

8) You have to live by this tried and true axiom I learned from Zig Ziglar:

‘Some will…Some won’t…So what…. NEXT’.

CHAPTER 1

Earned Money

I have been selling since I was a young boy. My first real job I created myself by selling things I found in my mother’s attic, at a little stand I sat up in front of my house in North Carolina. This was way before garage sales or rummage sales, and passersby thought this was cute to see a ten year old kid pricing odd pieces of old furniture and what-nots. My Mother let me keep whatever I sold as long as she approved in advance the items I was selling. I liked the idea of having my own money, this way I didn’t have to get my parents approval on what I was buying, mostly at the five and dime.

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One day I ran across an article in the local paper that said The Grit Newpaper was looking to hire a young man to start a route in my home town. I wrote them and they told me I could be the local rep, along with my dad’s promise to underwrite my new venture.

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No one in our town had ever seen a The Grit Newspaper before, so when I went to my neighbor’s door, I had to show them the kind of human interest stories the Grit printed like the pictures and story about desperate times in 1942 were harvesters were hitchhiking en route to a wheat harvesting in the Dust-Bowl ravaged state of Oklahoma and stories about Cowgirls and horses, and children….. so much their families could learn of what’s going on in the world

None of the articles were about anything local, but I told them that we already had that in our own town newspaper. It only cost a nickel a week, so most of people I called on said they would try it.

A year after I started I had over 200 customers. I kept two cents out of the nickel so I was doing alright for a ten year old. I sold the route for fifty dollars when I was starting another sales business. I had noticed that a lot of homes had empty soft drink bottles and empty milk bottles piled up on their back porches or in their free standing garages. All of these bottles had a deposit on them which would be redeemed where they had bought them. The deposit wasn’t very much, so they just didn’t bother to return them to the stores until the accumulation got in the way. I made a deal with them that I would come by once a month (winter and summer) and take them back to the stores. I told them I would split 50/50. They liked the idea because they made a little money and cleared off their back porches and garages. I pretty much had all the folks in town who bought soft drinks. After a while I had to hire my cousin to help me. I did that until I was twelve, which made me old enough to go to work in the downtown stores, delivering groceries on my bike and later clerking. Later I also became a soda jerk at one of the downtown drug stores. I did these jobs after school, on Saturdays and six days a week during summer vacations.

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I didn’t need the money I was making for any essentials. My Mother and Father made good money for those times. We weren’t rich, but we were far from being poor. Both of them sold life insurance, and my Mother won all kinds of awards for her sales volume. I’m sure my creative thinking and sales abilities came from my Mother. When the company my Dad was working for tried to promote him and move him to another sales territory, he quit. He then started helping my Mother with her business and took a part time job with a man who owned a funeral home.

Both my Mother and Dad were reared in families that had ten children, so I had a lot of cousins, aunts and uncles. My favorite uncle was one of my Dad’s brothers. He was a well known lightweight boxer. They would set up rings during certain times of the year at the American Legion hut, or in the high school gym, and in the spring and summer outside on the courthouse square where he would box. His opponents were from other little towns in Eastern North Carolina. His name was Durwood. I never saw him lose a boxing match. Uncle Dur, as we called him, was a no nonsense kind of fellow. He was abrupt in his manners and did not tolerate well what he called dumb questions.

Uncle Dur lived about a block from where we lived. I could stand in our back yard and see the home made boxing ring he had set up in his yard where he worked out mostly shadow boxing and punching in improvised full-body bag. When I saw him I would go over and watch him. One day he asked me if I was interested in boxing. He said his son, my first cousin, was a ‘sissy’ and did not like boxing. I told him that I would like for him to teach me to box.

Now I can teach you some fundamentals about boxing, but I can’t teach you how to not be afraid. That is something you are born with or can develop. If you are afraid you should never go into a boxing ring, because your opponent can sense you are afraid of getting hurt, and he will master you, Uncle Dur said.

"Mostly, being afraid is because you are unprepared. If you are unprepared you don’t know what your opponent is going to do to you. I can show you how to prepare to box, but you are going to be the one who shows you are not afraid of the one you are boxing. Now, don’t get me wrong, Pat. There have been plenty of times when I knew I was fighting a man who was better than me. He had either more experience or better moves and skills. But I was never afraid of him. I knew I might get my butt kicked, but I was not afraid. I was prepared to take a licking rather than to show him I was afraid of him. If you never learn anything else from my working with you, always remember this; It is better to get beat than to back away like a coward. I can tell you something else and always keep this in mind. There are a lot of men who talk like they are tough, but when it comes to putting up their dukes, they will back down."

That was great advice. I remembered it and lived by that code. I didn’t provoke a fight but when someone else did, I made it clear that if fighting a man seemed inevitable I was ready to put up my dukes’. One thing I can say without any exception. I was not afraid of anyone, regardless of his size or reputation, and I could take good care of myself.

I was a very good athlete, and