In the days to come I had people from other branches and other supervisors come to help me run routes and to hire new route sales people. Before long we back to being a hundred percent with the people in place. Now at this point I must add that we hired enough people to be trained, however, you must hire the right kind of people not just bodies. That is what we did and that created another problem. Though these certain people wanted to do the job for a paycheck they were not ready to be sales people. For the most part at least with a couple of them they just wanted to have a paycheck.
I thought that everyone could be taught how to sell, how to present themselves and the product. I showed them and taught them all I could and even though I thought I was that good still a couple could not grasp or did not want to grasp the idea of selling. The job was commission and I was forced to ask the region for a base pay structure that was an amount that could hold people in place until they either learned or were replaced. The latter was to be my only option after trying to teach, train, and develop these individuals. I did get the right sales people in place but the branch suffered in sales numbers and some of my customers suffered too.
The next weeks to come I worked on fixing things. Service was the main concern and I concentrated on this as the number one priority. Service is always first. Issue was fixed, fixed the old fashion way, riding the routes and not spending as much time in the office and spending it in the territory. Now the numbers were starting to grow, but to our demise our business was shrinking and our plan was growing. Some of our small customers were closing and the larger stores were growing. We didn’t service the larger stores they were taken care of through there own warehouses that our company sold to separate from us. Our own company was our main competition. If they set up a hot deal on a product the chances of us being cut the product for our deliveries were going to be strong. So along with our smaller groceries being closed due to their customers going to the larger super markets and super centers and our company still expecting a growth the pressure was a lot to take.
I was working more hours and was trying to find business in a shrinking market. I had grown our customer count to larger levels than when I first came to Kentucky. The problem was it was almost all c-store business. We were the main supplier for the trade in these type of stores. I figured that the sheer numbers of stores would be enough to make our quota numbers. I was wrong. Most of these stores were credit traps. That means that because we guarantee our products would sell before the expiration date we would pick up the product and replace it with more product.
We kept trying to sell to wherever we could, produce markets, schools, c-stores and every small mom and pop store in Kentucky. We expanded our territory as much as we could. However I pleaded for relief with our planned number it was to no avail. For four years I tried to make the Louisville branch successful, but the pressure was too much. I quit.
