Community Bank Investor

05-14-2026

The North Star

Before I ever found my way into finance in the late 1980s, I spent years in the most basic form of sales imaginable. Door to door. Books, electrolytes, vacuum cleaners. I was good at it, and I had the energy for it back then.

I started out as a traveling salesman, and when we moved back to Maryland I decided I did not want to be knocking on doors in the snow. That led me to insurance and financial services, which pointed me toward a career in finance.

I sold cars briefly when I moved to California, and then a couple of lucky breaks (and a boatload of persistence and determination) put me in the brokerage business.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Back in those years, if you were a door-to-door or face-to-face consumer salesman, you read Zig Ziglar and you read Tom Hopkins. Tom is a subject for another day. Reading him is a little like reading Joe Girard, the great car salesman who wrote some genuinely useful books on selling.

Once you understand the verbal and psychological techniques these guys employed, you want to go find every salesman you ever knew and punch them and then shake their hand

Ziglar, though, was the granddaddy of them all. He sold cookware door to door and eventually became a powerful motivational and Christian speaker, and his books were phenomenal.

Ziglar once wrote: “You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” I have used that sentence as something of a north star ever since.