๐ Scaling Service x Simon Lucey: how selling fish door-to-door taught me to run an agency
Or: The Importance Of Sales To Your Future Career
Scaling Service is a newsletter from The Family. We interview agency founders and ask them about everything from funding to sales to exits.
This month weโve got Simon Lucey, founder of Hype Collective, on how he learnt to sell.
For Simon Lucey, the path to founding the student marketing agency, Hype Collective, began with fish. Frozen fish. And chicken goujons.
โAnybody could carry six boxes of frozen food,โ Lucey explains. โSo you'd knock on the door, you'd have a script about how you've been chatting to all the neighbours, how it's completely normal, this is a very localised initiative. You'd say, 'Do you want to see what we've got to offer?'ย ย
โThen you run back to the van, you grab six boxes of frozen food, and you march straight past them into their living room and say, 'I'll just plonk it down here.' Go back to the van and grab six more different boxes, and dump them on their living room floor."ย
It was an education from the very first moment.
โThe way they got me to say yes to the job is the best sale that's ever been done,โ he says. โI was approached one day by the coolest guy on the campus: he lived with a friend of a friend and I was desperate to be seen as cool by him. And he approached me saying: we've got this job opportunity working in marketing and sales โ which sounded glamorous to me โ and did I want to come along to a meeting on campus?ย
โI went along, watched a very slick presentation on The Importance Of Sales To Your Future Career. Wasn't really explicitly told too much detail about what the job was, but was invited to apply.โ
That application led to what Simon calls โThe toughest interview I've ever had in my life. I was made to fully work for it. Finishing the interview, the guy said to me, โDo you want to hear what my concern is about hiring you?โ Sure, go for it. โI don't think you've ever had to work for anything,โ he said. โYou've had life handed to you on a plate and you've got a silver spoon in your mouth.โ I fought tooth and nail to prove that I would work hard and graft and all this, and then he said to me, โI'll tell you what, you've given me a great response to that. I don't often do this. Have the job.โ And I left elated and phoned my mum. I was so excited.โ
At this point Simon hadn't quite twigged that it was a door-to-door gig: โI rock up on day one, I've obviously got lots of suits with me. And we were selling frozen meat and fish out of the back of a van.โ
Ten weeks over the summer, "about three days off," and "the most aggressive commission structure you can imagine. Each box of meat and fish was about 40 to 50 quid. And your goal was to see how many you could sell a day. If you were good, the best people used to sell like 30-40 boxes a day. Which is quite a lot of value. One day, we emptied our van. There's two people in a van, and the van could hold something like 120 boxes. And I remember driving home with an empty van feeling an absolute champion."
There's an art to selling frozen food, since "a frozen chicken goujon, raw, does not look great." Simon recalls having to run through each item โ "your prawns, your chicken goujons" โ and "sell the sizzle of what they taste like." Then, at the end, a flourish of sales technique.
"My favourite line that I got taught was, 'Okay, so we've run through all 12 boxes, I appreciate you didn't like all of them. So we'll put them in three piles, the ones that you definitely don't like, the ones that you really liked, and then the maybes.' You'd pick up the No pile and say 'Okay, you didn't want the prawns and the goujons. The rest comes to 500 quid. Cash or card? I'll just go and grab my card machine while I put these ones back.' And you just leave the Yes and the Maybe pile there. The main objection was 'I can't fit them in my freezer.' So we did a deal that if they took 12 boxes off your hand, we'd give them a free freezer."
Simon draws a direct line between the door-to-door fish sales and the founding of Hype Collective. "The trouble is that if you're a grad, sales positions are incredibly unfashionable and unsexy, right? If you're an incredibly smart, switched-on graduate, you're going to go and work in tech, or for a big bank, or in consultancy.
โWhereas I would argue that my summer doing door-to-door sales taught me so much: not just about sales, but one-to-one communication. I think my biggest strength is my ability to listen, and I don't think I was good at that before. It's not just the sales element, it's the communication element."
It was a crash course in situation management. "The other thing it really teaches you is to take all stress away from a situation very quickly. You're knocking on someone's door at six o'clock, it's raining, their hackles are up: what the fuck is this guy doing on my doorstep? You get very good at diffusing a situation and being incredibly relaxed about it.
โWhen you go into a sales situation with a prospect and they're thinking, 'I don't want to deal with this shitty sales guy that's going to try and pitch me something,' it's the exact same skill set. It's about putting people at ease. You're not just some shitty sales guy."
The big question, of course, is this: how many free freezers did Simon shift? "I only ever did one. My style was Mr Consistency, I just kept grafting out the numbers. If you want a cricket reference, I was Alastair Cook. No flair, just three boxes to everyone." And like any England batsman, character was formed and tempered through endless disappointment.
"There's nothing like being told to fuck off 100 times a day to toughen you up."