Back when I was 18 I was working a telemarketing job selling bullshit to people at home. I read an ad in the paper looking for phone salesmen offering a fuckload of money. I eventually went to work with them and the owners story is one worth sharing...
Ok, so this company sold and still sales all kinds of herbal stuff just like you see around here. The owner was a pharmacist who quit his job to sell a diet pill that was big several years ago.
The stuff was sold as a MLM deal and this guy used to pack his trunk full of it and ride around to pharmacies in a 4 state area. He shot the shit with the pharmacists there and had the stuff put in all over. He made a whopping $5 or $6 a bottle.
He soon started calling pharmacies from all over and selling it to them from his house. He did great with this so decided to open a phone room. He hired a couple of people and went at it. Around 6 months later he had sold enough to make $100,000 his cut. Well the guy who invented the pill screwed him out of half of that because he decided $50,000 was enough.
He was of course pissed and immediately told him to blow it out his ass. He invented his own diet pill and started selling it to pharmacies COD. After having much success his friend who worked with him started pushing to get the stuff in the pharmaceutical warehouses. This is a huge deal, all the stuff you see in pharmacies like Tylenol etc are there and can be ordered by a computer at each pharmacy. Somehow this friend who was also a crackhead managed to get this shit into the biggest one. He soon wrapped up the other smaller warehouses and they had the whole setup covered.
Now these warehouses don't buy shit as they sell it, they place orders in the hundreds of thousands of $$$ at a time. So he takes in a chunk of money all at once but now there's the problem of this stuff just sitting on the shelf. They had bullshitted their way into warehouses that legetimate companies have a hard time getting in but nobody knew of this stuff to order it.
This is where he put his phone room to good use and is also around the time I got hired there. We started calling pharmacies and pitching them on products that were "in house" at their suppliers warehouse. This is a big deal because the products are billed along with all their other orders and it's an easy sale because it has a 30 day guarantee from the warehouse. Not only could we pitch it as being guaranteed from the supplier they trusted with all their biz, the stuff was often unnoticed as it came in on one huge bill with all their normal medicines and supplies. What's $400 on a $20,000 order?
Long story short, we sold the fuck out of this stuff. 4 Million bucks worth in under a year. Well, very few pharmacies could sell a damn bit of this expensive stuff that didn't work but this was no big deal. This shit was repackaged and resold to the same pharmacies over and over and over again. Total cost of production around $1 per bottle. Wholesale price $15 to $25 per bottle. Average order 12 to 24 bottles per pharmacy per product. He had 12 when I left and probably 10 times that now.
There's money everywhere folks, you just gotta want to grab it.
Cheers.
