What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography (13 page)

'Robuck? Who are they?' he said.

'The tape recorder company.'

'Oh yes,' he said. 'I'm so pleased to see you. I've heard about you and I've been wanting to see you. Tell me what you've got to offer.'

I showed him a tape recorder and he said, 'Excellent.'

He bought six. This was the easiest sale I'd had so far. I was very naive.

I called on him a week or so later to see how he was getting on. 'Great,' he said. 'I've sold a few of them already. In fact, I'd like to order another four.'

A month later, I was asked by Robuck's credit controller to go down to the shop and chase payment. When I got there it was closed. Empty. I went to the shop next door and asked, 'What's happened to them?'

The chap told me, 'They've done an LF, son.'

'LF? What's an LF?'

'Long firm, mate, long firm.'

'What's a long firm?'

A long firm turned out to be an organisation that buys loads of stuff on credit then sells it very quickly and cheaply with no intention at all of paying the supplier. At Robuck's expense, I'd learned a tremendous lesson in life.

When I looked at my payslip that month, I was shocked to see my commission was not what I was expecting. Fair enough, the long firm sales were deducted, but on the upside I'd sold fifty-odd units to Currys.

I called up Robinson and said, 'What's going on?'

He told me he'd cut the commission on Currys as their head office had cottoned on to the fact that I was selling to them. They wanted a lower price, which Robinson had to give them. And because of that, he decided he would reduce my commission to a quarter of what I was getting when I sold to small retailers.

I told him it was bang out of order, since I'd spent the whole of the month plundering these Currys stores. Had I known there was no money in it for me, I wouldn't have bothered spending my time talking to all these branch managers. I had effectively opened the door to Currys for Robuck, especially bearing in mind the problems caused by selling stuff to Gamages.

I was quite angry. 'I'm not working for you any more,' I said as I walked out of the office. 'You've cheated me.'

Mum told me that Robinson had called a few hours after I'd stormed off, wanting to speak to me urgently. I got hold of him and he asked me to meet with Mr Korobuck the following morning. We went to the factory just around the corner from the office. This was the first time I'd met Mr Korobuck, a quiet-spoken gentleman, about fifty years old, with a slight stoop. After greeting me, he told me that he was very pleased to have heard how well I'd done in such a short time and he let me know that I'd become their top salesman, something that Robinson hadn't told me.

Mr Korobuck had heard I was quitting and, in an effort to change my
mind, he shared his plans with me and showed me some new models. They looked a bit more compact, but still used the same old tape deck mechanism. Essentially, they were rehashed versions of the same machine presented in a different cosmetic.

I told him that I would think about it, but I reiterated my disappointment at not being paid the full commission on the Currys deal. He sympathised with me, but told me this was a matter to take up with Robinson, who stood resolute on the issue.

A week or so passed. I happened to notice an advert in the
Evening Standard
placed by the electrical wholesalers R. Henson & Co. in Finchley They were looking for salesmen to sell electrical goods, and the job came with a car. I contacted them and went up to north Finchley for an interview with Mr Henson Senior and his two sons, John and Peter, who were also in the business. Henson's product range was vast, with items such as miniature tape recorders, transistor radios, record-players, electric lamps and loads of other things - all under brands I'd never heard of. If I got the job, I wouldn't have to concentrate on selling just one product.

Mr Henson Senior explained that John and Peter would go out in a very large vehicle laden with stuff and sell it, literally, off the lorry to the retailers. Some would pay there and then; others, whom Henson had a relationship with, would pay on account.

I told Mr Henson I wasn't interested in working for peanuts. I wanted a minimum of PS20 a week, clear of tax, as a basic, plus some commission structure. Twenty quid a week clear was a lot of money in those days. The trio stepped out of the meeting for a few minutes. When they returned, Mr Henson said he was prepared to give me a trial.

My next question was, 'What car have you got for me?'

He told me he had a Wolseley.

Wow, a Wolseley! That was a great car, real quality. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I had visions of pulling up at my flats and parking the Wolseley out the front in Upper Clapton Road. It would look out of place amidst the Ford Populars and Ford Anglias. I grabbed the job. It turned out that the Wolseley was a Baby Wolseley, an oddball of a car - it looked a bit like a Beetle with an elongated bonnet -
and
it was second hand. Still, it was better than a minivan.

I duly resigned from Robuck, much to the disappointment of Mr Korobuck. Time to explain to my dad that I was about to change my job yet again. I had a good patter by now - it was all about career advancement and being paid a fair amount for the job I was doing. I told him that I'd been
diddled by Robuck and that this new firm was paying me much more money. Thus the transition to my fourth job in two years came without the usual recriminations.

I spent the first couple of weeks out on the road with John Henson, learning the ropes. Then, on the Friday of the second week, I collected a bunch of samples to put in the boot of the Wolseley so I could be off and running the following Monday morning.

The storeman there told me, on the quiet, that the Hensons were the most suspicious people you could ever come across. They assumed that everyone was going to nick stuff off them. Indeed, Peter Henson was rather hesitant in giving me the samples and told me I should bring them back at the end of each day. I told him this was totally impractical. If I was selling in Streatham at five o'clock in the afternoon, I wasn't going to drag myself all the way across London to Finchley to deposit the samples with them. I said, 'If you don't trust me, then I don't think I should take the job.' It was a bit of a gamble, but I stood my ground. I also suggested: 'If you list down every sample I've got, then once a week, when I come in, you can do a spot check to see that they are still there.' To me it was a no-brainer, and he finally conceded.

Working for Henson was a great eye-opener. Naively, I had believed that their products were stock items which I could continue to sell. I soon found out that this was not the case when I successfully sold some Remington razors to Gamages - I ended up getting a rucking from Henson Senior! He called me into his office and told me that I shouldn't have made promises of being able to supply 200.

That's when I learned that Henson did not manufacture anything. They simply bought parcels of items from various places; there was no consistency in the product range. This was not a problem for me, but, as I said to old man Henson, it would have been nice to have been told about the business model when I joined.

In a way it was interesting because there were always different products coming along. Some weeks we had electric fans, transistor radios, mini tape recorders and loudspeakers; other weeks we'd get a parcel of Hoover toasters or Remington razors.

As time went by, I could easily identify which customers would be interested in the new items. One day I was told there was a parcel of 250 Hoover toasters coming in. A company called Avon Electric in Hanwell, Ealing were one of the first firms to break the mould by selling things at discount prices. As I've mentioned, in those days almost everything was sold at the
recommended retail price. Avon Electric got round this by claiming that they were a 'wholesale club' which offered discounts to its members. You became a member by paying PS1 which, of course, was knocked off the item you were buying.

I called the boss at Avon Electric and told him that I had 250 Hoover toasters.

'What price are they? What's the model number?' he asked.

I told him to hold on, asked Henson senior and relayed the details down the phone. I sold the toasters on the spot, in front of the boss, hung up the phone and said, 'There you are, they're sold.'

Do you think I got any thanks? No. Not even a 'well done'. Instead it was just 'Okay followed by, 'You didn't offer him any settlement discount, did you?'

I said, 'That's a matter you'll have to sort out with him when you deliver the goods.'

Henson and sons were not very complimentary. As with S. J. Robinson, you never got a pat on the back for selling, and sometimes you'd receive bollockings when you'd done well!

Who knows? Maybe I picked up
my
traits from them. Perhaps that's what you do as a boss. It's certainly miles away from the schmooze culture which exists nowadays, with bosses or managers spending half their time dishing out insincere compliments. I certainly missed out on that. Information on this
is
available, for those interested, in the Harvard Business School manual.

Working for Henson, sometimes I would literally do the deal, deliver the goods and collect the money. On one occasion, they'd bought thousands of seven-inch vinyl records under the Blue Beat label. Blue Beat was a kind of Jamaican music popular during the sixties, but the producers had overcooked it a bit and we had boxes and boxes of these records lying around waiting to be sold.

Fortunately, I'd had dealings with customers in Brixton's Coldharbour Lane. One of them, Clint Atkins, a big, burly black guy from Jamaica, was a real character. Clint couldn't consume the volume we had, but he liked the product. He gave me some tips on other places in Brixton and Streatham where I could sell them, and I did quite well.

Months later, I visited a customer and couldn't help noticing some Blue Beat boxes piled up in the corner of his shop. I'd had nightmares about those bloody boxes, so spotting them was easy. I asked the man, 'What are you doing with those records there?'

'Don't ask!' he said. 'I got lumbered with these things. I thought they were
a good idea, but basically it's Caribbean music and my clientele are not into it. Plus, I don't have the facilities to put them on display or play them, so they're the most useless commodity you can think of. I'd just like to get rid of the blooming things.'

'How many have you got?' I asked.

'About ten thousand.'

'How much do you want for them?'

'You can have them for a hundred quid.'

I asked him if I could use the phone in his office to call my boss. In fact, I called Clint, who was always asking me if I could get any more, and did a deal with him. The difference in price between what I bought them and sold them for was PS80. Now, considering I was earning PS20 a week plus commission and this transaction had been done in a quarter of an hour or so, I thought this was a fantastic bit of business.

The next day, I got Henson's storeman to come out with me in the van to pick up the records and deliver them to Clint. I told the bloke we purchased them from that my firm would send them a cheque tomorrow. We drove to Clint's, delivered the records and he duly paid up, which was unusual for him as he liked a bit of credit.

Back at Finchley, I proudly walked into the boss's office and said, 'Here's a cheque for a hundred and eighty pounds. You've got to write a cheque out to Mr So-and-so for a hundred.'

'Why's that?' he said.

I told him I'd found some records, bought them and sold them, and that PS80 was the profit. To my shock and amazement, he said, 'You should have sold them for much more.'

I was devastated. 'Mr Henson, I make twenty quid a week plus commission and I've just made you eighty pounds in the course of a day - is that all you've got to say?'

'But you knew the price of these records was much more, so why did you sell them so cheaply?'

I could not believe I was getting a bollocking. I walked out terribly upset at this situation.

My travels around retailers while working for Henson coincided with the dawning of the hire-purchase (HP) era, which made it easy for consumers to buy large assets such as television sets. At that time, there was a boom in TV sales, as people were converting from the 405-line system to the 625-line system in preparation for colour television (a bit like the switchover from analogue to digital). Also, a lot of people had TV sets capable of receiving the
BBC only, while others had a separate tuner on the side which enabled them to watch ITV as well. Now you could buy TV sets with combined tuners capable of picking up both.

The way the hire-purchase system worked was that the retailers would take the customer's old TV in part-exchange, which acted as the mandatory deposit needed to embark upon the HP agreement. The side-effect of this was that many small retailers were stockpiling old TVs.

On visiting a retailer in Holloway, I noticed he had all these TVs stacked up.

I asked him, 'What's all this stuff piled up everywhere?'

'I know,' he said. 'We can't swing a cat in here. We'd like to get rid of it all.'

I thought of my mate Malcolm, who was a TV engineer. He could fix the sets and I could flog them. I said, 'I'll take them.'