Ben Fiechtner: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | E1185

You're looking at four different aspects of the business. We think about it as, like, create, convert, close, and churn. I tell people all the time, salespeople aren't lazy, they just are wired to find the quickest path from point A to point B.

Ready to go? Ben, I am so excited for this, dude. I have heard so many wonderful but also interesting things through many mutual friends, so thank you for agreeing to do this.

Uh, I cannot wait to get started. I'm excited to spend the time here, and a little bit nervous about those interesting stories you've probably heard.

As I said to you before, this isn't your first time on the big screen 'cause your first time on the big screen was when you were a young entrepreneur starting a T-shirt company. Just talk to me about the T-shirt company in college, Ben, as a starting point.

My freshman year, uh, a buddy of mine, Troy Vosler, and I lived in the same dorm, and we were both nerds in high school, where we did a lot of T-shirts for sporting events, student council, all of those things. And it was a time when, like, every rapper was getting into apparel, and so we were thinking, like, two kids had maybe one or two different... or adult beverages on a Wednesday evening and went like, "We should start a T-shirt company." There was this word Sconnie, which is kind of the equivalent of Cheesehead in the state of Wisconsin, which is, you know, being proud of all things Wisconsin, brats, cheese curds, drinking PBR on your John Deere tractor. We trademarked the word. We sold... We both invested 300 bucks in our, out of our own money and, like, sold out of T-shirts in probably two days. And at that point, we're like, "Holy cow, we're onto something." We set up an e-commerce website, we started a wholesale business, and it was just right place, right time, and it's still, like, Troy's still running the business and it's going really, really strong. So, pretty wild.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I didn't realize that th- this actually worked. No offense.

(laughs)

I thought it was, like, one of those (laughs) that, like, pff, pff, pff, you know, crashed and burned. Okay.

(laughs)

So it, it's still running today and Troy still runs it today?

Yeah, yeah. So there, and there's a bar now across the s- street from the stadium. There's a microbrew, like, beer that's sold throughout the Midwest. Yes. And, and a lot of it, what happened was it was actually, like, one of the most unbelievable experiences, I think, for both Troy and I. And I don't wanna speak for him, but, like, you know, I thought I was gonna go into politics, I was gonna be a lawyer, all these things. We sold our first big T-shirt deal to the University of Wisconsin bookstore, and at that point, I was like, "Holy cow, I love this sales thing. This is much more for me and more my speed." Um, so that's how I actually got into sales, I would say, and that's how I picked this as a profession, one. And two, it was, I mean, over our four years, it was insanely, insanely, um, successful, I would guess and say in terms of notoriety and brand. We ended up actually having our wholesaler, who was a buddy of ours as well, that actually held everything, held all the inventory, shipped it out for us. So we just kinda took a margin and ended up really, really minimal work for a lot of brand building and guerrilla marketing that was super fun to do.