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Small Customers Have Money Too

Written by: James Chan

Article Overview: How Stan Gross survived before he hit it big in his consultancy.

Small Customers Have Money Too

I am told that there is a Yiddish saying~{!*~}not so much a proverb as a cry of faithful exasperation~{!*~}that translates as ~{!0~}God will provide. If only He would provide until He provides.~{!1~}

That~{!/~}s a feeling most entrepreneurs have occasionally. We believe that things will come out all right. After all, we had the courage to start our own businesses. We are confident the breakthrough will come, if only we can live so long.

This thinking tends to undervalue the smaller customers, the ones who actually do provide our livelihoods until the breakthrough comes. Marketing guru Stan Gross spent years trying to get Madison Avenue and multinationals to pay attention. But he survived, and learned a lot, by working for small family-owned companies. When the multinationals were finally ready, Stan was prepared as well.

Stan believes that he was destined to be in business on his own. ~{!0~}I have always had the desire to call my own shots,~{!1~} he says. ~{!0~}I have always had the drive to greater rewards. I have always had to have more thrills than most people.~{!1~} Those three characteristics, says psychologist Gross, are part of the mental makeup of people who run their own businesses, or at least of those who keep at it.

But destiny is one thing, and survival is another. Stan, whose firm has helped Coca-Cola, McDonald~{!/~}s, DuPont and many other companies explore the ~{!0~}inner minds~{!1~} of consumers, had to keep at it for a long time. By his account, the lean years stretched from 1970 to 1986.

He began his career at a high level, rising quickly to a marketing executive position at a New York company, while at the same time consulting with large firms, and doing high profile pro bono work promoting President John F. Kennedy~{!/~}s physical fitness campaign. Among his mentors was the cosmetics magnate Charles Revson~{!*~}one of the founders of Revlon~{!*~}who advised him to get out of management and into a business of his own.

After he went back to school for advanced degrees in psychology and marketing, and a few years spent teaching, Stan finally did set up his own business. Friends and family advised him to keep teaching and to consult on the side, but he felt that it wouldn~{!/~}t be fair to his students to do so because his business needed all his energy. Yet he quickly found that the doors that had been open to him as a young man were closed to him now that he really had something good to offer.

~{!0~}When I would get interviews with people from big companies, it seemed as if they would just sit there, as if I hadn~{!/~}t spoken at all, as if I had lost my ability to communicate,~{!1~} he recalls. ~{!0~}Here I was trying to advise people on communication, and I wasn~{!/~}t getting through at all. More than once I finished one of these presentations, and just went back to my car and cried.~{!1~}

One day he went to New York, to the offices of Bristol-Meyers Squibb, and called executives whose names he had researched from the telephone booth in the lobby. He had papers spread all over the floor around the telephone, and at one point he thought he was going to be evicted from the building, not invited upstairs. But eventually, the director of market research agreed to see him.

When Stan had finished his pitch, the executive told him that his work was interesting, sensational even. But he said Stan would get no work from Bristol-Meyers Squibb because his work didn~{!/~}t fit into the way the company did things and as director of research, the executive wasn~{!/~}t about to go out on a limb to change things.

The clients who sustained Stan~{!/~}s business during the lean years weren~{!/~}t in New York but in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They were owners of small companies who were impressed by Stan~{!/~}s background, and didn~{!/~}t seem to understand how unusual his approach was. Marketing research was a new thing for these business people, most of whom had grown up in Amish families, about as far from the reach of Madison Avenue advertising culture as one can get in the US. Work for these small companies was his internship, Stan says. They kept food on the family table, and helped him learn how to work so that he could perform when opportunities came.

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Article Tags: charles revson, dupont, exasperation, executive position, founders, high profile, john f kennedy, lean years, livelihoods, madison avenue, magnate, mental makeup, mentors, multinationals, physical fitness, president john f kennedy, pro bono work, proverb, psychologist, revlon



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