Mike Mirarchi 0:19

Welcome to the Toilet Paper Salesman Podcast. My name is Mike Mirarchi. I'm your host. I'm excited to present to you Episode 1 of this podcast series. It's been quite a journey to get this first podcast episode going. This is probably the 10th or so t ry to get an episode up.

Mike Mirarchi 0:37

What I've discovered is, sometimes, when you have challenges and sometimes when it's challenging to get something done, that means it's going to be meaningful, and hopefully it is. And if it is meaningful, please like and subscribe the podcast so that you can get timely updates, as well as to help to get the word out. How did I even get to this place to have a podcast? I'd like to talk about my journey here to this place to get to the podcast, but why? Why a podcast? It's an extension of the book that I wrote in 2016, sales Wisdom from a Toilet Paper Salesman. In this podcast, we're going to get deeper into those topics of sales, leadership and living your best life. I do plan on having guests on occasion on the podcast to talk about certain topics and we're going to explore not just sales leadership, marketing, negotiations, those topics, but we're also going to discover things that enrich your life, like gardening, ancient history, art, music and discovering your purpose. So my goal is to share all that I've learned in my life so that I can help you in your life. I have over a 40-year career in sales and in sales leadership. I've made a lot of mistakes and I've had a lot of successes. I'm interested in sharing all of that information. If you can get one or two things out of each podcast episode that you can apply to your life, it will be worth your time to listen, and so my hope is that you do get something out of each episode. Just one small incremental change if you make it will make large gains in your life. So my mission and purpose and mission and purpose is something we will talk about quite a lot on this podcast my mission and purpose is to make a difference each day, and I'm going to do that by looking for opportunities to help people and companies I come in contact with to grow and prosper. This podcast is in line with that mission and purpose as well. For you, we only have one day to live. Each day is an opportunity for you to make a difference. If you look for those opportunities, they will present themselves and if you act on those opportunities, you will make a difference incrementally, day by day, as you live your life. So how did I get to this place where I'm doing a podcast?

Mike Mirarchi 2:46

I grew up in a very middle-class family. My dad was a punch press operator. My mom stayed at home. She was a master cleaner of our house, as well as others, and she did some odd jobs and part-time jobs to help make ends meet. I grew up as a typical 70s child. We had free reign. We were able to go out whenever we wanted. We really didn't have to tell our parents where we were going every minute.

Mike Mirarchi 3:07

In eighth grade I had a decision that I made that changed the course of my life. Now I have two older brothers. My parents never went to college. My two older brothers did not go to college, and so there was no reference point for me to understand that in school you take a college prep course or track. I obviously wasn't on the college prep track, and in eighth grade we were shown a video on VOTEC and the different opportunities to look at a trade and look at a career in different fields, such as food service and cosmetology and baking and plumbing and electronics and so forth. I always loved the food business and so I decided that I was going to vote tech for food prep.

Mike Mirarchi 3:46

What I didn't understand is that decision changed the course of everything that happened. From then on in my schooling, instead of getting college prep type courses, I got general math, general, science, general general until 12th grade and I decided that I wanted to go to college. And I remember sitting in a class with my science teacher and I said to her I would like to go to college and I was wondering if you would give me a recommendation. Well, if you would have saw the look of shock on her face, it will never leave me. It will stick with me for the rest of my life Because in her mind she's thinking are you kidding me? You have nothing to go to college on. You have no classes. You have nothing to go to college on. You have no classes, you have no transcript. But what did I know? I didn't know any better. So I went forward and I started to go to colleges and visit and I remember one college that I visited, sat down with the counselor. He looked at my transcript and said I can't even believe you got out of high school with this transcript.

Mike Mirarchi 4:37

My prospects of going to a traditional four-year university were pretty dim, to say the least. I did interview and go to a place up in north of Scranton, pennsylvania, called Keystone Junior College at the time. It's now Keystone College. They specialized in kids like me and they had a program for hotel and restaurant management. They also had a wrestling program, which was very interesting to me. I got accepted into the college. I was going back and forth as to whether I should go and that's when my dad stepped in and my dad put his foot down and said you are going to this place. You're not going to be like your brothers who didn't go to college. You are going to go. And so I did, and it was truly the best decision that I've ever made in my life, because not only did I get some college courses and I learned a lot in Keystone College, I had some great professors. I college courses and I learned a lot in Keystone College. I had some great professors, I was able to wrestle in college and it really was a great experience and it helped to launch my career into sales.

Mike Mirarchi 5:29

So how that happened was I was in high school and I had a job. I cooked for breakfast and for lunch I went to the nursing home. I had a checklist. I checked it all down. I had breakfast ready for the residents, served them breakfast, went out and spent time with them. I made some great connections and great relationships with the residents. I would wheel them into the dining hall. I loved the job. As a matter of fact, it's one of my favorite jobs that I've ever had in my life.

Mike Mirarchi 5:53

I was lined up for a job as soon as I graduated with MW Wood. So as we were doing interviews, my professor said to me why don't you interview with this company who's coming in? Made Right Steak Company, that's portion control meats. They have a sales position open. Well, as far as I was concerned, I felt like sales were or what I knew of sales was like a door-to-door salesman selling vacuum cleaners. You know, hey, get your foot in the door and close the deal right. I had no idea what business-to-business sales were all about. On the advice of my professor, I decided to go and take the interview and so I sat there with the owner's wife her name was Elaine and we had a great interview and she told me about the position. Company car expense account. It sounded like a great opportunity and was granted a second interview.

Mike Mirarchi 6:38

The second interview was at the plant. I went to the plant, met the owner, mr Bernstein, and he took us around and answered some of our questions and showed us the plant and it was a really great tour. So after that I was on a Saturday, I was laying on my couch watching TV with my dad and I decided to write a thank you note. So I wrote the thank you note, dear Mr Bernstein, and it was a handwritten note. Dear Mr Bernstein, thank you so much for the opportunity. I think I can do a great job, etc. Two weeks later I get the call and got the job. Later I found out the reason I got the job was because I was the only one who wrote a thank you note. Personalized thank you notes matter in every situation. Handwritten thank you notes matter Even in this day of digital. As a matter of fact, you'll stand out more with a handwritten thank you note now than ever. And so I started the job in sales.

Mike Mirarchi 7:27

I remember going to Syracuse, new York, which was my first assignment, and I met my boss and my boss was an old school salesperson and the only way I can describe that I don't know if I can describe that, because if this person worked today, he would have been fired in about two seconds from HR violations. He was a walking HR violation and the thing I learned the most from him and he taught me a lot about sales. But the biggest thing I learned is that you have to be yourself. You could not be him, because if you were him you'd be fired immediately. But you had to be yourself and you have to in sales, be yourself. You cannot pretend to be anyone else. That was a huge lesson that I learned out of there. I also met my wife, who now we've celebrated our 39th anniversary together. Two wonderful children, all artists. My wife's an artist, my son's a professional musician. My daughter is an artist as well as a business person. Great things came out of that decision to take the interview. It turned out that my wife and I decided that we were going to get married and unfortunately the job at MaidRite required me to leave on Sunday and travel the whole week and come back Thursday. It wasn't conducive to a great marriage.

Mike Mirarchi 8:34

A friend of mine from college had an opportunity at a company called Marston Industries. That was a restaurant supply and equipment company huge $125 million at the time and in 1985, that was a lot of money Started. A local sales position was there for three years, grew 30% each year. The last year I made less money than the year before, even though I grew 30%, so the handwriting was on the wall and it was time to make a change. The next lesson is always apply for a position, whether you're qualified or not. I saw a position in one of the trade magazines for a district sales manager. I applied for it. It was with a recruiter. The recruiter called me up. They said hey, we don't think that the district sales manager position is the best for you, but we have this other position we think might be great, and it happened to be with a redistribution company called Huff Paper Company. Huff Paper Company sold to wholesale distributors toilet paper, twine, paper bags, among other things Since 1889, huge history.

Mike Mirarchi 9:30

I decided that I would take an interview with Huff Paper Company. I remember meeting the owner His name's Phil Sullivan, unfortunately no longer with us Truly great man and I remember meeting him and having our first interview together, which was a great interview. We had a lot in common. The thing that sment at the interview, though, is he asked me what I did for a hobby, and at that time I volunteered for Big Brothers. He had been a volunteer for that same organization as well, and so as soon as I told him that that was one of the things that I did, that sment it the deal. So I started my career with Huff. That was in 1988. The first 12 years under Phil, I grew 30% each year, year over year. For 12 years straight I opened up new territories, opened hundreds of new distribution accounts, had amazing success with Huff Paper. So in 2000, phil decided that he was going to retire, so in his retirement there was a new management team that took over. Now there was nothing wrong with the management team, but it wasn't the same, obviously, as when Phil ran the company, and so I really felt like it was time for me to move on to something else. What I decided to do is I decided to open a business coaching practice.

Mike Mirarchi 10:34

When you make big life decisions, make sure your wife is fully on board or your spouse is fully on board, because when you make these decisions to open a business, for example it is a huge stress, not just financially but in every other way, and you need the support of your spouse 100%. If you do not have the support of your spouse, I would highly recommend that you look for something else. Start at the business team player of the year radio show had all kinds of success. It was very difficult financially in the business. It was very stressful at home. I had two young kids, so I really stepped out on a limb, jumped off a cliff and at that point my wife was a stay-at-home mom. That was something that we decided that we were going to do when we first got married. It was tough, it was very tough, so we made it through a year. Huffpaper decided to call me back. My wife was thrilled, of course. I was able to sell the business which was a miracle and joined HuffPaper back again.

Mike Mirarchi 11:25

Now I joined back as sales manager with carte blanche to make changes. I come in as sales manager but unfortunately I wasn't on the same page as the VP who was running the branch. And for the next 13 years I was at Huff learning everything I needed to know in order to take me to my next opportunity In 2016,. I wrote a book Sales Wisdom from a Toilet Paper Salesman, which I mentioned, and it was a great way for me to take all that I learned up from that point, because even those 13 years at Huff and through the coaching I learned a lot about sales training. I learned a lot about management and leadership, and I was able to take all of that and incorporate it into the book.

Mike Mirarchi 12:06

I would highly recommend anybody write a book if they're interested in that. If that's something that strikes you and that you think you should write a book, please write the book, because it's really important for you to get all that information down. It'll be a real benefit for other people to read your story, because people relate to stories. They want to know how did you get from point A to point B? How did you become the toilet paper salesman, for example? How did that even happen? People are really interested in those type of stories and so I was able to do it. It was a great experience. I self-published on CreateSpace, which is not available anymore. It's now KDP. There's still an opportunity for you to self-publish if you want, or get your book published in a different way. If you're ever interested in doing it, please do it. Go forward and take those steps. You don't have to do it in one chunk. You only have to do it step by step, and that's how it happened for me, how I ended up writing the book.

Mike Mirarchi 12:59

I was on LinkedIn one day reading a book about sales management which I completely disagreed with. So what I did is I started to write a response because it was like so wrong in my mind. So I'm in the middle of writing a response and I thought to myself you know what, I'm not going to write a response. I'm in the middle of writing a response and I thought to myself you know what? I'm not going to write a response, I'm going to write my own article. So I wrote an article and that led to another article, and another article, and so just about every week I would put out an article about sales, about leadership. So one day I took my son to college it was sometime in December. I'm flying back from Detroit and I'm thinking to myself you know, I really need to write a book, but how am I going to do that? I need a ghost writer. You know all these things coming through my mind. And then I remembered all the articles that I wrote and I took my iPad out, where I had all my articles stored, and I started compiling them and found out I had 30 chapters written in my book, which ended up being 40 chapters total. So it gave me the incentive to do the rest.

Mike Mirarchi 13:51

By July of 2016, which was six months, I had the book written. I had the book published, I wrote the book and then, in 2017, I was approached by RJ Schinner. Now, rj Schinner was a company that I knew. They were part of one of the groups that we belonged to called RDA. I knew a lot of the leadership. I knew the owner of the company. They came to me and said hey, we're looking to branch into the Northeast. We don't have a location. And I knew they did not have a location. The closest one to the Northeast was North Carolina and they needed somebody to lead the charge. So they asked me are you interested in leading the charge? My answer was absolutely yes, I'm ready for this opportunity. I'm excited for the challenge. It was a great challenge, which rarely happens, you know, in your industry an opportunity to greenfield something from scratch.

Mike Mirarchi 14:37

The interesting thing is I had a non-compete. You know there's lots of talk about non-competes. Right now they're looking to abolish them and everything else. Well, in Pennsylvania, the non-compete laws are favorable towards the employer. I had this non-compete, I gave my notice and boy, the next two weeks were tough. Now the good news was my wife and I were 100% on the same page for this opportunity, and so when the storm hit, after I put my notice in for two weeks, it was the most stressful two weeks in my whole life. My wife was with me, by my side, and we were able to weather that storm because we were together on the decision. So, again, that is a huge deal as to why I was able to make that transition. Finally, it turned out that Monday, after two weeks, even though I got ceased and desist letters and everything else went to, rj Schinner learned that they weren't going to sue me and I stuck 100% to the non-compete.

Mike Mirarchi 15:30

Rj made a huge investment because for a year I could not work anywhere in my territory. Not only that, I couldn't even work in the territories that were part of Huff United, which was Virginia, west Virginia, north Carolina. Those were territories I never even did business in, but it was part of the non-compete agreement. What did I do? I developed the sales training program for the company called Selling the RJ Way, which I still use today. That was a Zoom-based training program 15 weeks for new reps. I rode around with different reps helping them. I traveled all over the country. I did everything they wanted me to do for a year, and that year went pretty quickly. So right around June, when my non-compete was up, I started working back in my territory again. I'll never forget the day when I sent an email to our CFO saying, hey, this is the first day of my non-compete's over. Can I start working in my territory again? And the answer was yes, and so I got on the phone and start making phone calls to customers that I knew for 30 years but did not talk to for a whole year, and some of the customers were really angry that I didn't contact them, but I truly couldn't, so I started making phone calls back into my customers.

Mike Mirarchi 16:38

We opened a branch on August of 2018, august 13th to be exact. One of the meetings that I had early on sometime in July was with our director of operations at Bethlehem, pa, which was our first location. His name was Ralph Orobono. Unfortunately, ralph is no longer with us. He was a great man.

Mike Mirarchi 16:55

We had a conversation for our first meeting out to lunch about leadership, and what we talked about was the upside down pyramid. Most people think that when they ascend to a leadership position, that they're on top of the pyramid. What we talked about and what is true? True leaders, servant leaders are actually at the bottom of the pyramid. If you take the pyramid and you turn it upside down, the leader is at the bottom, helping to support all the people that work for him or her. We both agreed that that was the way we were going to manage and that was the way we were going to lead our teams, and we did. We had a great team atmosphere.

Mike Mirarchi 17:29

We were focused on excellence and that's the key Leading up to us opening the branch. I had many people say to me you guys are nuts, you're going to get crushed. You're in the Northeast. Northeast is the hardest market in the United States. It's the most competitive. You're going to get crushed like a bug. My response was this there's always room for excellence. If you focus on your competition, it's like driving your car and looking out the side window You're going to crash the car. Driving your car and looking out the side window, you're going to crash the car. If you focus on excellence, your competition fades away, and that's exactly what happened.

Mike Mirarchi 17:59

We opened up the branch August of 2018. Sales skyrocketed. No-transcript 2020, covid hits. So during COVID and this is an RJ thing we're bold during these times, which is the reason why we've been so successful, not only in 2020, we hired two reps this is just in the Northeast two reps. We became a region.

Mike Mirarchi 18:21

We bought my old company, huff Paper, and we opened a warehouse in Hudson, new Hampshire, to service our New England customers. You want to talk about bold? That is bold, and we did all that. We were opening up Hudson. That was going to be December of 2020. About a month before that, I get the call that we bought Huff and Philly. Not only did we open up Hudson, but we integrated Huff at the same time. So for about six months, I was completely underwater. Not only was I underwater, but all of our reps were underwater. All the people we brought over from Huff were underwater. We were all underwater. 2021, in March, we opened up a brand new warehouse in Bethlehem 160,000 square feet and that really made a difference. Took us about six months to integrate the business and then things started getting smoother from there.

Mike Mirarchi 19:04

The biggest lesson I learned there is never be afraid to get thrown in over your head. It's one thing about RJ we throw in people over their head. They either sink or swim. From a cultural standpoint, it's a great culture to be in, because the way you grow and thrive, the way you learn that you can do something, is by getting thrown in over your head, by being completely overwhelmed with what am I going to do, how am I going to do this? And then you figure it out. Here we are. Five years later. We're sitting here 10 times growth in five years from when we started 160,000 square feet in Bethlehem, 91,000 in Hudson, 10 salespeople, 16 trucks. It's literally a miracle what we were able to do and it's a testament to RJ Schinner the commitment that they have to growth and to the territory.

Mike Mirarchi 19:46

Beyond the growth that we had in the company during that time, the biggest growth has been with the people. As an upside down management style, the goal as a servant leader is to help your employees get from point A to point B. That's what happened. We took our salespeople in many cases and we literally changed their lives. They worked hard. I mean, it was not for the faint of heart in any of the salespeople that I've hired. That's one of the things I tell them right up front what we're doing is not for the faint of heart. And so our sales team came in and they did a tremendous job, working really hard to build a company to the point where we are. Beyond that, all the support, people, purchasing, category management, customer service, operations all of them yeoman work to get to the point. When you grow 10 times in sales, you know the amount of effort that that takes, not just from sales standpoint but from every other department. It was a massive effort overall. That leads to the next step for me, which is the podcast. It's an extension of the experiences that I've had. The podcast it's an extension of the experiences that I've had at RJ. It's an extension of the book that was written in 2016. It's always a step forward. It's always progress.

Mike Mirarchi 21:01

You've always got to be looking to move forward because if you start thinking the other way, no matter in your business, in your life, you're either growing or you're dying. We're like trees. Right, business is like a tree. Our life is like a tree. It's either growing or dying. There's no middle ground, and that's what happens to a lot of people in life. They get to a certain place and they say, ah, we're good, you know, we're going to unpack, we're good, we don't need to go any further than this. This is great. But what life is like? Climbing a hill and the hill, even though it's slight, there is an incline and if you stop, you start sliding backwards automatically. So you've always got to be pushing forward and moving forward to the next thing, and that never ends for your whole life.

Mike Mirarchi 21:40

We all have a mission and a purpose. We're all put on this earth for a reason. We have one day to complete a task, whatever that is, and day by day, that leads to your success. And you look back on your life and you go, wow, I can't believe I've been able to accomplish that much, just doing a little bit every day. Success is always built outside of your comfort zone. It's never built in your comfort zone. You'll never achieve success where you're comfortable. You'll always achieve success where you're uncomfortable, and that's where I'm going to leave it off today. Thanks for listening. I appreciate your support. If you think this was valuable, like and subscribe. I have a saying who says selling toilet paper isn't glamorous? It's one of the best businesses in the world Selling toilet paper. That's what we do. Thank you for listening. I appreciate your support and I hope you have a great day.