The Misadventures of Marty

I teach 9th grade CCD at St. Jude Church and this week’s lesson was on the eighth command­ment and honesty. Later at home, I thought of an old friend and what a train wreck his life became, his and others that is, over his lack of honesty. The following is essentially true; the names, locations, and some of the details have been massaged to protect every­one (especially me). I had to fill in a few details with hearsay and educated assumptions, but the framework is a true mess. Marty was one of my early distributors. He was not a strong technical salesman but instead used his personality and a bunch of contacts to build a very nice business. He was not an astute businessman, however.

I enjoyed traveling and working with him and his salespeople. Not only was it fun but it was very profitable, a wonderful combination. Our com­pany was very strong technically, so the marriage between Marty Controls and us was a perfect fit. As Marty grew his business he set up officesin two nearby cities, hired some people and his company continued to grow. Then greed reared its ugly head and his troubles began. Marty’s best salesman pulled a very sneaky, underhanded stunt with their largest customer, who accounted for 35% of Marty’s business. He knowingly sold them equipment which didn’t meet their specifications, reasoning that this was a benign application and that they would work fine. Also, they had them in stock and could sell them at a huge mark-up. Some months later the customer discovered the truth and called, madder than a wet hen. Mar­ty promised them he would retrofit the devices with the proper parts because after all, it was an honest mistake. He also promised to test all the units before shipping them back. Marty figured it would cost him about $50 per unit and that would wipe out his profit,so he falsely attested to testing the units and shipped them back to the customer.

The company caught this deception and called Marty in. He feigned any knowledge of this and fired his best salesman trying to deflect the blame and convince the customer it was Ed’s fault. Marty was suspended from doing business with the firmfor eighteen months and forced to take all the de­vices

back. Now as a result two things happened simultaneously: he lost 35% of his business; and because in this charade he fired his best salesman, he lost the two million dollars a year he was bring­ing in. Major league dumb. Marty was involved in another sleight of hand deal some months later with another customer and his reputation suffered even more. Marty had hired an attractive young lady to sell for him and she proved to be a natural, and after a short amount of time began booking orders at a very healthy rate. Before you knew it, she was the number two salesman in the company.

Rather than celebrate this, Marty began plot­ting. He fired her, saying her dresses were too short, her sweaters were too tight, and he implied that she was sleeping her way to success and by doing so she had given his company a bad name. (That is quite a stretch indeed, considering the stuff he had pulled.)

He took over her territory himself and rea­soned that he should get all the profits and not have to split them with her. After all, these were accounts that he had been dealing with for years and she just started getting “lucky.” as he put it. (He overlooked the fact that her hard work and pleasant upbeat personality might have had some­thing to do with it.)

Carol took the firing hard and the stories ap­parently stuck, because she couldn’t find another job and the last I heard she was a cocktail waitress in a gentleman’s club and was battling both booze and drugs. Marty then pulled some shenanigans with two of his salesmen, giving one guy all the best accounts and the other guy all the lousy accounts. The fel­low with the lousy accounts quit and months later died in a car wreck after spending many hours drinking in a bar. The salesman who got all the good accounts ran off with a bunch of Marty’s cash and the local preacher’s wife one night, and rumor has it he is now selling cars in Arkansas. The preacher com­mitted suicide a couple of weeks later. We parted ways with Marty when he started having trouble paying his bills. We then heard he had sold the business and was working on a com­mission basis for the new owner. A couple of years later I bumped into Marty at the big Maintenance show in Cleveland. He told me he had lost everything, his house, his retire­ment funds, and he was flat broke and starting all over again at the age of sixty. And speaking of his new boss, Leroy, he told me, “You know Bill, that S.O.B. is playing games, shorting me in my commission account.”

I looked at him and said, “Marty, you just nev­er know who you can trust these days, do you?” You know when the chickens come home to roost, they can make one heck of a mess, can’t they?

So for winners in this story, we have none. For losers, we have everyone chronicled in this tale plus the dozen or so loyal workers in his com­pany who were out of work when he crashed and burned the company. Not a pretty story at all. So, the next time you hear someone roll out the old cliché, “honesty is the best policy,” think of Marty and the one-man mess machine he be­came. And finally, as if this three-ring circus wasn’t hard enough to believe, here’s one more tidbit that didn’t really fit but it is too good to leave out. One of his inside sales guys, a very serious, quiet guy, who read the Bible during lunch breaks, was ar­rested and convicted of murdering his mother-in-law.