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Selling sandwiches may seem an unlikely beginning for a lifetime of entrepreneurship, but for me, that was exactly where it all started. It was the dizzying highlight of my first-ever business venture.
I had started work in my teens, complete with a speed typing course, and set to become the perfect PA. I was hired by a renowned PR firm to stuff envelopes and type occasional letters for one of the executives while they disappeared for liquid lunches. The mind-numbing boredom switched off my brain sufficiently for me to make some fatal errors and my secretarial career came to an abrupt end.
From those dizzying heights, I left marketing in favor of sales. Here, I was consigned to a training course in the back end of Hammersmith Broadway. Our training, sitting on a grubby floor (not easy in the obligatory pencil skirt and high heels of the time) while taping our sales patter onto an ancient cassette player.
Thereafter, we entered the exotic world of hard selling. You were given a list of phone numbers and no other information and told to get on with it. All these sorts of sales jobs, even the slightly less dodgy ones, were high turnover. Kicking out an employee in under twelve weeks of employment was risk-free in those days, and very few of us were with the hassle of keeping on.
By this time, I had a poor opinion of working life and a poorer opinion of those in power in corporations. The heady siren of self-employment called. Untrammeled by food regulations in those days, I started a business making sandwiches and toting them around smart offices in Kensington and Chelsea.
It might not have been the biggest business I ever had or even a mini-step up the empire-building ladder. But it was something much more valuable. It was the best possible business training.
Lesson One: Fiscal Control
I had zero money — I mean, zero. The idea of borrowing through official channels never crossed my mind.
I made an agreement with the corner shop that I would buy the ingredients I needed in the morning and pay off the debt in the afternoon. This meant I had to keep slogging on round the offices, however sore my feet and bruised my ego, till the debt could be paid off. Otherwise, no ingredients tomorrow, no business tomorrow.
It was a great lesson in cash flow and perseverance.
Lesson Two: Stock Control
Having no spare money, meant I lived on whatever was left over. While that might seem ok initially, trust me that after the seventh day of increasingly leathery bread, limp lettuce, and moldy cheese, you learn to manage stock.
You learn to work out what sells, and what doesn’t. You learn to measure and forecast what you are likely to sell more accurately and to keep all stocks to a bare minimum.
Lesson Three: Getting past gatekeepers
Getting past doorkeepers was a challenge. While offices weren’t as security conscious in those days, the smart Chelsea and Kensington doorkeepers were still there for a reason, and that reason definitely included keeping hot and dusty 20-year-olds with sore feet out of their elegant offices.
While they flexed their muscles and polished their brass, I learned that it is crucial to make friends with everyone you meet along the way and to understand that more people than decision-makers can hold the key to your success.
Lesson Four: Selling an experience
Persuading people that not going out into the sunshine but having something to eat for twice the price at their desk was a great idea was definitely a hard sell.
Even in those pre-Pret days, the sandwiches had to be good. But markets are way too crowded to rely on product alone. You have to offer much more than that.
It taught me that selling isn’t about the product but about the experience.
A visit from me had to be something that alleviated the tedium of their day. It had to be a bit of fun as well as something delicious to eat.
I learned how to communicate with people, and how to use a bit of charm, without going heavy-handed. I learned to put a concept forward in a positive light.
If it was sympathy for their job, or a bad date, or a laugh at some ridiculous news story, I learned that it isn’t about selling something. I learned the importance of building relationships.
Lesson Five: Building Relationships
While selling a low-value product such as a sandwich might not initially have seemed worth any effort other than clinching a sale, I quickly came to understand the value of repeat business.
I learned to read body language and understand that how things are said is so much more important than what is said.
I learned that a good name is worth more than an instant bit of cash and that if you push, you may be able to make a sale to someone of something they don’t want but you won’t ever be able to do it again.
I learned the value of customer retention and keeping churn low when you want to grow your business.
Lesson Six: Customer Feedback
When I think of customer feedback, I always think “meatloaf”.
At that time, my culinary palette had not been introduced to a meatloaf. I hadn’t even heard of one. However, as I continued to chat with the regulars, one reminisced about a meatloaf sandwich they had loved in New York.
I listened. I found a recipe and made a few to try out. That meatloaf sandwich became my best seller. I learned to find the gap in the market and meet the demand. So simple and such a colossal difference to your bottom line.
I also learned that while you might need the art of conversation to start one, the reality is that shutting up and listening will be of greater value still.
Lesson Seven: Rejection isn’t personal
It could be tough, walking those streets, charming your way through doors, a smile and a laugh permanently plastered on your face. And tougher still when someone told you what a pain in the backside you were, to get the hell out of their offices. It reduced me to the shakes initially.
But I learned to not take rejection personally. Some people won’t want a sandwich however good they are. Some will be having a bad day and take it out on you.
You won’t always win in business but you cannot afford to take the failures personally. Learn from them instead. Think about what could you do better next time and reframe the experience.
I survived, and more importantly, I learned. Humility is also a valuable business asset.
So how does selling sandwiches equip you as a founder?
You may be reading this dismissively, thinking this was all years ago (true) and you are perhaps a tech founder so it is irrelevant (not true).
Understanding customers is as vital today as it has ever been and so is a business’s good name. Having that ingrained is invaluable. Understanding customer retention will take you forward.
Your relationships with your team will flourish if you have become a people-reader and learned the art of listening, which is what people usually want most of all.
You will benefit from the ability to cope with knockbacks and the resilience and perspective that comes from selling.
But it is with all your stakeholders that the wins start to really come flying in. A founder has to become a leader, a visionary who can “sell” their vision and inspire their teams and their investors alike. It is not a con-quick sell skill, but a true sale, of communication, and relationship building for the long term.
And that is why in the same way, so many fabulously successful entrepreneurs started their careers with a humble market stall, from the founders of Boohoo to Amstrad.
Don’t sneer at humble beginnings — especially sales ones. Six months of early, very humbling graft could be the best business training you will ever receive.