Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.

The year was 1998. My company had sent me to our office in Malaysia to train some office staff on our company business processes. I was a young budding manager and as you can imagine I was quite excited about this opportunity. I was 28 years old, traveling in a foreign Asian country. Who wouldn’t find that exciting? However, while walking into the doors of the office to meet the general manager and his staff, the general manager walked quickly past me saying he was just fired. My boss at the time said something like, “Joe, you are now the acting General Manager.”. Suddenly I had 20+ staff staring at me wondering what the next move was going to be. I then walked into a room full of the top sales people who wanted to know my vision and get some level of confidence that I knew what I was doing. They gave me 1 week to get a plan together. The pressure was on. What was I going to do? Inside, I was freaking out. I was quite concerned. I called my father. He said something like, “son, you need to step up and lead. It is up to you whether you succeed or not.” We hear it all the time that each of us individually are in charge of our own destiny. We hold the key. Not only that, but we are the key. You are the key. We need to first understand this. Once we know that it starts with us, then we can build from there. All the sales training books and seminars on the mechanics of sales will not help us achieve being a top sales performer until we first know that we hold the key.

I went on from that opportunity in Malaysia to lead that country to more than 10X their sales within the year that I was in the country. It was an amazing year. It also happened to be the period of time that I got the idea to bring a botanical called Mangosteen to the world, which would go on to sell more than $1.5 billion in accumulative sales in over 40 countries. I am glad my father reminded me that if it is meant to be, it is truly is up to me. In our book, The Sales Key, Ale and I help you understand that first and foremost, you are the key. We then build upon that with 21 keys to success as a sales person. Let’s go!!