Dollars and Sense | Page 8

of detail he can handle. He has little lee-way in the matter of
salary, for thousands are faithful, thousands are neat and thousands can
perform great amounts of detail.
The young man just out of school should have for his ideal that he shall
be a producer first and a proprietor later on. To this end he should equip
himself by spending four or five years acquainting himself thoroughly
with all the phases and departments of the business and learning the
facts about the manufacture of the goods he expects to sell eventually.
All this understanding and preparation will be of great service when he
is a salesman, and greater service when he is a proprietor.
The writer started wholly dependent upon his own exertions for a
livelihood at fourteen years of age. At fifteen he learned shorthand by
evening study. At sixteen he attended to the correspondence and mail
order department for his employer. At eighteen he was getting $8.00 a
week in cash for his services, and many times that amount in valued
experience.

"One day he got a blank application for a $75.00 clerkship in the Post
Office. At that time appointments were made by political pull and not
through the civil service. The writer took the blank to a relative, who
was the leading politician of the State. He asked for the endorsement of
this senator and received this advice: "Young man, my signature to this
sheet would get you the job, but if you were my son I would not let you
take the place. I will give you some advice, which is this--never take a
political, railroad or bank job. In all these callings you are in
competition with thousands of others. The compensation is small, the
chance to better your position is remote, and you are a machine. If you
want to make a success of life be a producer, learn to sell things."
This advice was acted on, and the writer remembers it as the turning
point in his career.
It is a sad thing to see the old man working for $40.00 or $50.00 a
month who in the past drew $3,000 or $4,000 a year. Such men were
expense men and not producers.
Moves on the checker board of business are made quickly. The man
with silver hair may be an accountant or confidential man drawing a
good salary. Something happens, his firm goes out of business or sells
out, and our old friend is left without a position. He has been used to
the comforts and associations a good salary allows, and now he finds
himself out of a place and faces the necessity of starting over again, and
his competitors are young and active men ready for the battle of life.
The old man out of a job goes around amongst his friends. The friend
can do nothing but gives him a letter of recommendation. He is passed
along from one to another until he is foot-sore and heart sick and weary
of it all.
He winds up as a sleeping car conductor, or gets a position as floor
walker or clerk at the inquiry desk.
The producer, be he ever so old or ever so often out of a job, can catch
on again. He gets his job on results and not sympathy.

Business men are on the lookout for producers.
Young man, learn to be a producer.

The Man--Not the Plan
We are prone to give credit to the plan as being the thing that makes a
successful business. It is not the plan, it is the man behind the plan that
is responsible for the success.
The man who has a well-defined ideal, who hews to the line, who
eliminates all deterrent influences, who concentrates his energy on his
ideal, who bends his efforts towards the one thing is pretty sure to
accomplish his purpose.
We often see a man make a marked success in a field that others have
considered barren.
Take a small town, for instance, where there are many retail stores. The
people of the town will tell the prospective merchant that the town is
already overcrowded with stores, that none of the stores seem to be
making more than a bare living, and that it would be impossible for
another store to make a success, on account of the already overcrowded
conditions, yet the right man comes along and starts a store in that town
and makes a marked success.
If the plan were the making of success, all an enterprising business man
would have to do would be to pick out some plan which was successful
and then imitate it.
The great ocean of business has many derelicts on it as a result of
copying plans. It is a part of