Morgan: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the latest episode of Client Horror Stories, and I’m very excited to have the one and only Jody Durand with us tonight. How are you doing, Jody?

Jody: Very good, Morgan. Very excited about being on the call tonight and look forward to our conversation.

Morgan: So am I. Before we start, I just want to call out the fact that you and I are members of an honored and special club, which are names that could be boys’ names or girls’ names.

Jody: That’s true. That’s—there’s a whole story on that that is long and winding, and it caused me a lot of trauma when I was a young man trying to find my path as a grade niner in a city school. So, I can tell that if you want, but yeah, I think someone else should start a podcast where your name came from and just interview people on the origin of their names. That would actually be fun.

It wasn’t a very popular name in 1965. I don’t even know where my mom came up with it. But yeah.

Morgan: I have a quick theory on both of our names that I will share just for fun and then we will jump in, which is because thinking about my own name, which could be a guy’s name or a girl’s name. The theory I came up with is names that are gender ambiguous, like Jody and Morgan. I’ve realized over time always become girls’ names.

So, like, when I was a kid, half the Morgans were boys, half the Morgans were girls. But now every single Morgan born is a girl. And I’ve noticed the same pattern with, like, Leslie. Leslie Nielsen, but now all the young Leslies in college are girls, right? So, I would predict it’s the same for Jody.

Jody: Yes. Yes. For sure. For sure. And I know a lot of Jodys now, but back when I was young, I didn’t know any. You know, Jody Scheckter, I think, was an F1 race car driver. That’s the only Jody I knew. And so anyway, interesting.

Morgan: That’s cool. And with this preface, I have my juice in hand tonight. It’s not going to be an alcoholic night for me tonight, but a juice night. And I’m excited to hear about your most challenging client horror story. I’m all ears.

Jody: All right. Well, this story took me a few years to be able to talk about again because that’s a sign. It’s a powerful story. It’s extremely powerful.

So, it happened at a time in my life when I was in transition between being a farm boy, being a farmer working in the agricultural industry, and then going into sales. There was a time period in the middle of that that I went through this, and it was around 1999 when it all started.

I was around 35 years old at that time, and I had been a farmer my whole life. I had been married and had four kids that were less than 10 years old at that time.

Morgan: Wow.

Jody: And so there was a lot going on in my world. Whenever I was 20 years old and was planning to farm with my dad, he died of lung cancer and so I had to farm on my own.

So that was quite baptism by fire, but I’m a hustler and a hard worker and I managed to do it. And it’s very difficult to be a farmer, so I was pretty proud of that.

And then I got married thinking I could duplicate my parents’ relationship. And that was a bit of naivety at its best because, well, you can’t. You just can’t.

And so at that point in my life, I was struggling with my marriage and struggling with the farm and struggling with quite a few key components of my life.

And so I was approached by a friend of mine who had a really nice house, and he was a really nice guy, and he said to me, “Jody, how’s the farm going?”

I said, “Well, I’m kind of changing the farm, so I’m looking for work now.”

And he said, “Well, geez, we’re actually looking for somebody to run this telemarketing call center.”

Now, I gotta be honest with you, Morgan. At that point in my life, I don’t think I had ever even received a telemarketing call. I didn’t know a single damn thing about telemarketing.

We lived in a place in Ontario called Huron County, where it takes two hours to drive north to south and an hour and a half to drive east to west. And there’s maybe 60,000 people live there total in the whole county. It’s extremely rural, very agricultural.

And so this kind of worldly thing called telemarketing, I didn’t know anything about that.

But I listened to what he had to say. So, we kept talking, and I said, “You know, why do you want me to work at this? Why do you want me to run this thing?”

“Well, because you know everybody, Jody. You’ll be really great at this. You’re a well-known guy. You’re a likable guy. You’re an influential guy.”

Little did I know that really what he wanted was somebody who could attract a lot of employees because we needed a tremendous amount of employees to keep this call center going.

So anyway, he kept working on me and eventually he pushed the right button, the ego button. And so I fell into that trap.

And I asked a bit more about the call center, and he said, “Well, we actually have three other ones operating right now in Ontario, and they’re all very successful, and I’m a shareholder in all of them. So I want you to run this one, but what I really want is you to become a shareholder.”

And I’m like, “Okay, well, what’s the deal on the shareholder?”

And he says, “Well, you need to come up with $120,000 cash.”

Bear in mind, this is 1999. A house would cost $120,000, right? My farm didn’t cost a lot more than that. That was an enormous amount of money. An enormous amount of money.

No bank was going to touch this because it was an unheard-of concept. So, I went into my personal network and I borrowed this money from family members and paid a tremendous interest rate. But I was so gung-ho this was going to work.

So I dug in a bit more and said, “Well, what if I get the money? I need to know more about this concept.”

So then he started to explain what we were selling.

Morgan: And I have a quick question. How long did you know this guy for?

Jody: Five years.

Morgan: Five years. Okay. Okay.

Jody: Our kids went to school together. We went to the same church, and he had a really nice house and a really nice car and he seemed like a smart guy and a trustworthy guy.

Morgan: I want to observe that when you go into business with anyone that you don’t really know them. Well, unless it’s like a childhood friend or something, but for the vast majority of people, you don’t know them.

So, you look for these signs around them. Well, they have a nice house, a nice car, they probably have money. Oh, they always say the really nice right thing, so they’re probably a nice guy.

And it’s interesting how we use superficial signs in order to try to understand how good they are in their hearts.

Jody: Yeah. Yeah. And this guy was pretty clever. He also knew how to kind of play me, which was pump the ego up, tell me, “I know you can do this, Jody. Everybody likes you in this town.”

And in that little town of 800 people, I had run a bunch of different organizations and everybody did know who I was.

So when we dug into what it was all about, what we were actually selling was cellular phones in the US.

The reason we were located in Canada was our accent in Ontario is neutral. So we could be selling it to Philadelphia, Boston, New York, California, Florida, and you wouldn’t really know if we were from anywhere. We kind of sound like we’re from everywhere.

Morgan: That’s interesting. In the US, they say that it’s the Midwestern accent sounds neutral, and Huron, like you’re just right above the Midwest. So it’s a similar accent.

Jody: Yes. And that sort of warm Canadian, you know, we’re friendly, kind of nice people, kind of comes through the phone as well.

Morgan: You just have to control your stories.

Jody: That’s right.

And you know, back then nobody had a cell phone. Like, there were—if you were rich, you had a bag phone. If you were a high-flying businessman, nobody even had a portable cell.

So they actually sent us these cell phones to our call center and showed the reps, and they were just so excited, so enthused.

So the other thing that was quite attractive was in the year 1999, the exchange rate between Canada and the US was about 135%. So every dollar that we received in revenue from the US was $1.35 here, right?

So we would make between $30 and $50 US per sale, and we would pay our reps $8 an hour Canadian. So if you could get half a sale an hour, you can do the math in your head.

We had 24 seats that could run up to 15 hours a day because, again, we were located in the center of the country. We could start at 9:00 in the morning and go right to midnight into the evening and sell right out to California until 9:00 by the rules. So it’s just sounding better and better.

I mean, I had a production background being a farmer. I did the numbers and I thought, this is just wonderful, not having a clue how hard it would be to sell or any of the other downfalls or any of the minefields really that came.

But when he said to me, “All you need to bring is $120,000,” I was already sold. Like, I was going to find that money.

I told my wife, “This is a chance of a lifetime for an opportunity.”

Morgan: Out of curiosity, did he also put in money himself or did he ask all the money from you?

Jody: I didn’t see any money from him or the other two partners. There were four partners. I put all the money in.

Now, I assume he put money into other locations, and on the corporation documents there were four shareholders, but yeah, literally I funded the project.

Morgan: I just want to point out a red flag risk factor I see already, not knowing where the story is going, which is if you and I want to go start a business together, or I come to you and I say, “Jody, we should start a business called The Guys With Girls’ Names,” right? And I say to you, “Jody, let’s start a business, you and me. You know, whatever. We’re going to sell strawberry juice. Yeah, The Guys With Girls’ Names.”

But you put in all the money and we’ll be partners.

Jody: That’s it. When you say it that way, it sounds so much worse.

Morgan: That’s exactly what happened.

Jody: Exactly.

Morgan: So it’s interesting, a few things. First, how decades give us experience. So now we can see how ridiculous it sounds. But you at 20-some years old, it was just really, really hard to see it.

And it’s also interesting how the same concept but just said in a silly way brings out the ridiculousness because when you make that same point but it’s through contracts, percentages, and the whole conversations are in legalese, the legalese hides the profound unfairness of it.

Jody: Right. Right. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.

So, some practical stop signs that I drove through. I mean, one, I didn’t know anything about call centers or telemarketing. I had no idea the turnover rate and the absolute insanity of outbound cold-call telemarketing, cold-call sales for me.

Morgan: I want to add to that, which is it’s not just that you didn’t know the turnover rate. It’s that you were so ignorant of the industry, not even knowing it had existed, that you wouldn’t have even known to investigate, research, try to find out the turnover rate.

In other words, it’s not that you didn’t know. It’s that you didn’t know that you didn’t know.

And that’s the worst type of not knowing because it’s a trap that prevents you from getting out of your own ignorance.

Jody: That’s right. Unconscious incompetence.

Morgan: Yes. Yeah.

Jody: That’s right. That’s right. I like that phrase.

But it gets a little worse, Morgan. It was bad, but we haven’t even got into what happens.

Morgan: I’m on the edge of my seat.

Jody: Yeah. So, while it’s going on, while I’m preparing to invest in this, I had a sister-in-law at the time who was a controller at a company, and she was a bit of a ruthless business person. You know, she was much more savvy than I was.

And she said to me, “Jody, do you know anything about this? Do you really know anything about this?”

I said, “No, but it’s a great concept and we’ll make a lot of money. It’ll be fine.”

She’s like, “You know what? If there is really three other call centers, why don’t you drive up to one of those call centers and sit on the phone for three days yourself and see how you like it. See how well—”

Morgan: So, I just want to observe, still not knowing where the story is going, that is fantastic advice. And I didn’t think of proposing that in real time, but I should have, because it’s actually an embodiment of a really strong principle, which is things that you’re excited about in theory, just go see for yourself.

There’s nothing like looking at it with your eyes directly, touching it with your hands, and so on.

Jody: Absolutely. Absolutely.

And I had an opportunity. Actually, I took her advice somewhat. I drove to Thunder Bay to look at another call center owned by one of the partners.

So, three partners owned three call centers, and I was the fourth guy to come to the party. So now there was four partners to own the last one.

Morgan: Yes.

Jody: And the guy wouldn’t let me hardly near the call center. He—we met him and we saw this place from the outside, but we never got to talk to the agents. Never really saw any numbers. They’re all kept at arm’s length.

Morgan: And this is such a great detail. Yes. Like, we’re building up to the van, but him not letting you in—I like, in my mind, it’s like you standing outside the building and he’s giving you BS excuses. “No, we’re really busy today.”

Jody: Yeah. Yeah. And his daughter was the general manager there. So his daughter was exactly the same. If I tried to call and bypass this guy named Joe, I would get his daughter, and his daughter would tell me the same thing. “Oh, everything’s great. You know, it’s super.”

And so we drove home and, again, I was already sold anyway. So I blew past that stop sign.

But the client—the horror stories from the client horror story really comes into play here—is what I learned at that point was we actually only had one client.

We had one client to feed us contracts for all of these call centers, and that was a company in Florida called CMS. And they don’t exist anymore, and so I’m not too worried about any blowback.

Morgan: But wait, what? What do you mean you had one client?

Jody: You meant you had one source of phone numbers to call, basically.

So, yeah, this is how a call center works. You need leads. Leads are phone numbers of people that are supposedly interested potentially in buying products. And you need a product to sell, and then you need a script and a fulfillment path.

So basically I call up Morgan. “Morgan, hey, we have a new cell phone in your territory. If you buy it, you get a two-year contract. You get a free phone.” And if you say yes, then we read a recording off and say, “Do you agree? Yes or no?” And then you move forward with it, and that’s how you get paid.

Okay? So we had one client that controlled all of the contracts. They were the filter between us and DirecTV, us and AT&T. The contracts were legitimate big companies. They were legitimate products, but this company CMS was the filter in between.

Morgan: So, I’m sure if we got paid $32 US per sale, they probably got paid $20 US or $30, I don’t know, something. So you were really just a reseller for CMS, correct?

Jody: Correct.

Morgan: I see. Correct.

And by the way, I also want to point out this falls in the category of you don’t know what you don’t know. You wouldn’t have even thought to ask, “Well, tell me about the diversity ratio of the sources of different leads.”

That’s a very subtle question. You have to understand lead acquisition to understand the importance of having various channels.

And dude, I wouldn’t have understood that at your age either.

Jody: So the thing was, with the border in between us and, you know, 2,000 miles driving, it’s very difficult as well just to drive over to CMS and say, “Hey, this isn’t working. We need to talk.”

So that wasn’t very helpful either.

But, you know, anyway, we managed to open the place and found a location.

Morgan: Wait, so hold on. So, you learned you didn’t come, you weren’t let into the building, and then you learned that there’s only one source, that you’re really just a reseller, and you still moved ahead?

Jody: Correct.

Morgan: Okay.

Jody: I was young. So my friend Mike said it was fine and he said they were very successful. And to be fair, he could have been successful. I mean, this was 1999, so things were a bit different back then.

So we decided to blast forward with it.

I opened up in a little town of 800 and I put an ad in the paper. This is back in the days when the newspaper was where you found your jobs.

And so everybody that came in for an interview knew who I was. You know, I knew them from various community work or coaching their kids in hockey or seeing them at church or seeing them somewhere.

They asked me, “Is there a quota? Because I hear that at call centers there’s a quota and if you don’t hit your quota for sales, you get fired.”

And of course, this is an absolute cornerstone of any real hardcore sales organization that gets paid commission.

Morgan: Yes. And that is if you don’t make sales, you get fired or you don’t get paid.

Jody: So we were paying them by the hour. And so I assured them, “Oh, no, no, no. We only have good products. It’s going to be easy to sell. Trust me, there’s no quotas. Just come and start.”

So now as we’re building up, I see the disasters in the distance. We’re getting closer.

Morgan: Yes.

Jody: So that was another young Jody mistake.

Morgan: Whereas, you point out, any sales operation has to include some version of you don’t make any sales, you’re gone. And it’s really just a question of the numbers. Like some are more generous, some are less generous, some give you more time, some give you less time.

But whether it’s more time or less time, no company can afford to just pay people X dollars per hour and no, don’t make any sales.

Jody: No, no, they can’t. They absolutely can’t.

And the other thing we discovered was us nice, warm Canadians—the people in New York City were not warm Canadians. They were not happy or pleased to be getting phoned four times a day by the same company looking to connect on a potentially great deal on a cell phone.

So, eight out of ten calls, or the majority of calls, would end pretty bad, and some of them would end quite bad where you got yelled at, screamed at, had your life threatened.

Morgan: By the way, I’m one of those people from New York that you just mentioned a moment ago. And if I got four calls in one day from the same company trying to sell me a phone or anything, I would start using bad words.

Jody: Yes. Yes. And quite a difference, too, the eastern seaboard to Florida and California. Like, there’s quite a difference. The eastern seaboard, the folks are a little bit more wound tight.

We used to love getting leads from the Midwest because those people were a lot easier to talk to, but there just wasn’t enough leads. We would burn through the calls.

So, when I say leads, like you had 24 people sitting in seats and each seat had three phone lines pumping into it. So, you would get a call pop up on your computer screen every 15 seconds.

Morgan: Wow. That’s full. You didn’t realize that.

Jody: Yes. And you’d launch into your script, get hung up on, or launch into your script and they’d say, “I’m not interested.”

And you’d say, “You know what, Morgan? A lot of people say that. Anyway, let me tell you about this.”

And you’d hear, “Listen, I’m not interested. I don’t want to get a cell phone.”

“Hey, everybody else said that, too. But Morgan, let me tell you about this.”

We instruct other reps to get three nos before they can let the person go.

So you can imagine what the grind would be.

Morgan: Wow. So wait, and so I’m just curious. I know less about call centers than you knew when you started. So there’s just some software that is basically autodialing or something, and then it rings at the phone of one of the agents who is not currently on a phone, correct? Rotating through the agents or something like that?

Jody: Yes. If you can imagine, it’s like a water hose feeding a screen. And once one drip goes through one piece of the one hole in the screen and it’s full, it goes to the next hole and goes to the next hole and goes to the next hole.

Well, the predictive dialer—that’s what it was called, the predictive dialer—would dial numbers night and day and it just dialed numbers at extremely fast and then fired them out.

And you know when you’re on, you know when a call center calls you. When this happens, you pick up the phone. “Hello.”

Then you hear a click. Then you can hear a background noise.

“Hello, Jody. This is, you know…”

The click is the call center, the predictive dialer finding me, the agent, a person to talk to.

Morgan: I see. Yeah. You have to pay attention for that momentary pause.

Jody: Correct. Correct.

Morgan: Okay. Okay.

Jody: So, we get started and instantly we’re having no success. None. Because everyone is way too nice, way too polite. Like, they don’t go for three nos. They barely get anything out of the client. And if the guy gives them any trouble, they’re like, “Oh, sorry, sir,” and they hung up.

Well, the leads cost money and you just can’t get unlimited amounts of leads.

So the Florida company, after three days, said, “This isn’t working and we want this to work.”

So they sent a guy up to show the agents how to do it, and he got on the phone and—

Morgan: By the way, I also, before you tell me about what happened with the Florida trainer coming up, I also want to point out your three partners.

If we were to give them the benefit of the doubt and ignore all the red flags that we saw up until now, it’s like pretending they’re better versions of themselves.

Jody: Yes.

Morgan: Because if we were to say, “Okay, okay, everything was fine, everything was legitimate,” then you still have a situation where the other partners had experience in this industry and you didn’t.

Jody: Right.

Morgan: And they should have been able to recognize that the call center was not performing the way it needed to perform.

Jody: Exactly. Exactly.

And that’s what happened. So the guy came up from Florida, and he got on the phone and he showed them how to do it. And the people were actually making sales. So we were pretty excited.

And so I thought, “Okay, we’re going to turn this thing around.”

But then we discovered the next problem, which was that we had all these sales, but we didn’t get paid for all of them.

And that was the next lesson.

We would submit 50 sales for payment, and we’d get paid on 45. Or we’d submit 60 sales for payment, and we’d get paid on 57.

Every time, we’d get a little squeezed.

And by the end of the year, we’d submit 60 and get paid for 45 or 40.

So I totaled up all those non-paid sales, and it totaled $100,000.

Morgan: Wow. Just remarkable. Just remarkable.

Jody: We grossed probably $700,000 or $800,000 but made $100,000. And I was shocked.

But I noticed every single time we would submit 50 sales for payment, we’d get paid on 45. Or we’d submit 60 sales for payment, we’d get paid on 57.

Every time we’d get a little squeezed, and by the end of the year we’d submit 60 and get paid for 45 or 40.

So I totaled up all those non-paid sales and it totaled $100,000.

So in effect, in the first year we made zero dollars because we didn’t get paid for the work that we had done.

Now, what CMS would say was, “Well, the customers return the product within 30 days, and therefore you don’t get paid,” which wasn’t laid out to us beforehand.

And this is what you call in the business the churn—the churn rate.

So, the churn rate was too high.

Now, again, I call my partners up at Lake Superior Telecom.

“No, no, no. We don’t have any of that problem. It’s all bullshit. It’s just you guys. You suck as agents.”

So we would try to work through it and we would have them sit in the calls and monitor our salespeople.

The people from Florida would do this monitoring where they would, unbeknownst to the agents, say, “Guys, we’re getting monitored the next hour.”

And the agents wouldn’t know who was getting monitored, so they’d just keep going.

And if any agents made mistakes, they’d say, “This guy did this wrong or this wrong or that wrong.”

And they would sometimes tell me, “Fire that guy. They’re just never going to make it. Just fire them.”

And I wouldn’t want to do that because I like my employees.

But it turned out we couldn’t keep going.

And so basically within 12 months of starting at that location, we ran out of people. We ran out of employees. We had a 400% turnover and we couldn’t find any more employees.

And we got stiffed $100,000.

Morgan: Wow. So, I want to make a comment on the—you would submit an invoice for 60 and they would only pay you for 57.

A few thoughts on that. First, was that detail in any sort of contract that you signed beforehand?

Jody: No. No. No.

Morgan: So, it’s typical where there are often these little legalistic things that, “Oh no, if someone returns it, we’ll give it back to you,” and so often it’s just never told to you in advance.

Jody: Yes.

Morgan: And then when it is told to you in advance, it’s often like in the contract you sign, page 82, as a footnote to the fourth paragraph in 6.5.

Jody: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

Morgan: So there’s another good lesson here, which is something as small as, “Oh, no. Just when people return it, we’ll give it back,” like actually that really small little percent can be your entire profit margin as well.

Jody: And it was. It was. And it was very, very sad.

But at the end of the year, we decided we had to move. So, we had signed a three-year lease. We had worked a big deal with the phone company. We decided to move location to a big city.

We moved to London, Ontario.

And so that was extraordinarily difficult. Here I was, the local boy that was going to bring a big source of employment to town.

Morgan: And everyone was excited.

Jody: Everyone was excited, and the local municipality was very excited about the improvement in the employment numbers, and there was going to be some more dollars generated in the community.

We were buying coffee at the shop next door. A whole bunch of things were good about it.

But we couldn’t survive.

So we moved.

That was quite an interesting thing. Moved to London, which is a city of 400,000 people. And so we could find employees a lot easier.

And we kept going. And we kept going.

And we got more aggressive reps. And again, we started to do pretty well.

We got some contracts to work with the US political campaigns for the Democratic Party in New Hampshire, and we got some real plum contracts. It was really going.

But again, only one source of the contracts: CMS.

And again, squeezing us on the churn. Just squeezing us, always squeezing us.

And then they started to get a little slower in payment.

Morgan: And so what? So, what is it? Like they went from net 15 to net 30, or 30 to 60?

Jody: 30 to 60.

Morgan: Yeah. I’ve also seen this pattern where it’s net 15, net 30, net 45, net 60, and before you know it, it’s like a quarter has gone by and you haven’t been paid for agent work.

Jody: Yeah. And the trouble with having one client is what are my options? Do I cut them off and say, “Let you pay me,” and then send all my reps home?

And I have some really good reps there, and they’re getting asked by other call centers to go work for them because they know they can sell. They can make good money.

Some of those people were making 20 bucks an hour or 15 bucks an hour, which was a lot of money back then.

And so I didn’t want to lose them, so I kept going.

We started to look for Canadian contracts at that time. But again, this wasn’t something that you could just get anywhere. Not many people were large enough businesses.

And so we kept going. We kept going, Morgan.

And the second year, the year 2000 to the start of 2001, our fiscal year—I think it was June 30th—we got stiffed $160,000.

Morgan: No.

Jody: Yes.

And so by this time, Jody had tapped every piece of equity he had in his previous life.

I had nothing left.

I even started to dip into my savings, registered retirement savings plan, or the 401(k), so to speak, which is, you know, untouchable.

But I had to make this thing work.

I was absolutely dug in. This was going to work.

And just to make matters even worse—oh yeah, I lost my dad when I was 20 and I think you mentioned a few times, like, I started this call center when I was about 35.

Well, when I was about three years into the call center, in the middle of the year, I lost my mom.

My mom died in a car accident.

So I was just having a terrible time, and my marriage was in really rough shape.

You know, I had moved and started this new business because my wife didn’t want to be a farmer, and I thought this would make her happy, and it wasn’t working.

And I had all these bills piling up, and I had tapped all my equity, and it just kept getting worse.

You know, I didn’t know really much about the world at that time, but I discovered you could do cash advances on your credit card.

And so I went and got some credit cards.

Morgan: And he surely didn’t know it had like a 40% annual interest rate.

Jody: It didn’t matter. I was gonna make it back anyway.

Morgan: Yeah.

Jody: And so we kept going.

When my mom passed away, my sister and I were the executors of her estate. And I went to see my sister and said, “Can I have some of that money now to support this business?”

And my sister, to her credit, knew full well she might as well just lit it on fire on the ground instead of handing it to me, because it was both going to be burned to nothing anyway.

But she still gave me the money.

And so I did. I poured it down that hole and kept going and kept going.

And then, to top it all off, 9/11 happened.

And when 9/11 happened, September 2001, consumer confidence in the US plummeted and nothing would sell.

Absolutely nothing.

We had all the contracts disappear. We didn’t have any work.

And it wasn’t—it was a really bad spot to be in at that point.

And I was on the phone with CMS every day begging them to pay me the money they owed me.

And they weren’t paying me.

It was really rough. It was really rough.

And actually, in a bit of a humorous twist, the four shareholders, four partners, fired me and said, “You’re fired as the manager of that call center because you’re doing a bad job. We’re going to put the operations manager in charge of it.”

And it didn’t make a lick of difference, you know.

And I went home for like two weeks and I came back because I was the one who owned everything anyway.

So, I mean, but I tried to help them.

I thought they would help out.

Nobody helped.

And so we kept going and kept going and digging ourselves deeper and deeper.

And what I discovered, though, Morgan, really, was number one, there are certain people that are just con artists.

And then there’s no amount of cajoling, begging, legal action that can move them.

And so we even flew down to Florida and met CMS and got ghosted, and they weren’t there.

And I never met anybody from CMS.

You know, I saw the checks come through, but the checks stopped.

And there was an LJ Maul in the US, a lady down there. I must have called her 500 times inside of about three months looking for some money.

And I’m sure she got sick of hearing from me.

But what I discovered after 40 years on the planet was I love sales.

I actually loved sales.

And I had spent my whole life avoiding being a salesperson because when I was eight years old, my dad said to me, “Well, you better stay in school, kid, or you’re going to end up being an underwear salesman.”

I didn’t know what underwear was—there was no Victoria’s Secret back then—so an underwear salesman could have been anything, right?

But it sounded bad.

So I heard “salesman,” bad.

So I never wanted to be a salesman.

I was asked to be a salesman my whole career when I was farming and even took some other jobs, but I avoided sales.

Avoided sales and avoided sales.

Well, eventually the call center hit the wall and we had no money left.

And I remember my financial planner came to see me to cash out my last RSP.

And God bless her soul, nice lady, very, very nice lady. She passed away in an accident after that.

But she looked me in the eye and she said, “Jody, you don’t need to keep doing this. You don’t have to. No one’s making you do this. Like, you don’t have to keep putting money in.”

And I thought, for the first time in my life, the first time in three and a half years, it actually dawned on me, like, I can walk away from this.

I mean, I’ll walk away with nothing.

So, the partners that collectively fired me, Mark—or Mike, the partner that got me into it at the start—the collection agents that were calling us over and over again started calling him.

So, he petitioned me into bankruptcy thinking I was hiding.

It didn’t matter.

Anyway, I was heading for bankruptcy.

So I said, “Yeah, go ahead.”

I accepted his proposal and petition for bankruptcy, and basically I started my life over at that point.

Within two years of that I was divorced and had to start a brand new life all over again.

Morgan: Yeah.

So that is the sad story.

So how about those Blue Jays?

Jody: So, but it gets better.

Morgan: The story does get better. Tell us more.

Jody: Okay. So, at that point in my life, I had been offered a job by this feed company. It’s now known as Cargill in Canada.

They had offered me a job in 1993 and I said no. And I laughed the guy off the place.

I said, “I’m not a salesman. I’ll never be a salesman.”

Well, 10 years later, I accepted a job with them.

And inside of the first six months at that location, I sold eight accounts in six months.

And at that point, there was—and you have to understand, in the farm world, I had maybe 150 accounts total in my whole territory.

And nobody gets—nobody sells that many accounts in six months.

And I didn’t know that.

I sold the eight accounts, Morgan, because I got paid $50 bonus for every new account.

So I went into the administrator’s office and I handed her the paperwork, and she said, “You really got all these accounts in six months?”

And I said, “Yeah.”

She goes, “You know, Jody, I’ve been working here for 23 years. I have never seen a salesperson get eight accounts in six months ever. Ever.”

Like, what are you doing?

And all I said to her was, “Can I get the 50 bucks per account now? Can I get that check?”

But I really, really took off.

I was astonishingly good, and within two years I was coaching some people.

Morgan: And I think there are two other lessons I want to get from the success at the end.

First, you began by saying you were a farm boy and you escaped the farm to do this, but your success happened by going back to your roots.

And I think that’s a powerful lesson where everyone grows up in a certain way, and often each individual’s magic powers—to summon them, you have to go back to your roots, because that’s what’s most natural. That’s what’s most obvious to understand deeper and better than anything else.

Another lesson that I want to get from the success at the end is you didn’t listen to yourself that you were a salesman.

But instead, you stayed around that world, like starting a telemarketing company is starting a company that does sales, but you weren’t doing sales. You were being the manager.

So you heard the calling enough to know there’s something for sales in there, but you had to listen to the calling in a deeper and harder way in order for you to say, you know, the sales calling is to actually do sales themselves.

And I think that’s a very powerful lesson, because there are so many people who are really into music and they just love listening to music, and that’s cool, but that only takes you to a certain level.

To really become the best version of yourself, if music is your thing, then you have to go make music.

Jody: Yeah, for sure.

Man, that is an incredibly astute observation of what you just described my life, because, Morgan, did you read this book?

Country Boy Soul: Pastor to Prosperity. That’s my book. Jody Durand. That is my book.

And I tell you, that is exactly the take-home message in the book: that you should listen to yourself.

And I had to go through a tremendous struggle to find where I fit in the world.

But I have been in that position now for over 20 years, and I’ve been extremely successful and I am such a happy guy.

And I could—but the thing is, you have to struggle.

I don’t know how else you can do it.

You almost have to struggle to find that place.

Like, it’s just some people, it just lands in their lap and they do well.

But for me, I grew up farming. By the time I started to sell to those same farmers, I knew the stuff. I knew my stuff.

I could walk the walk and talk the talk.

And I had a tremendous amount of credibility.

And for that reason, I was super successful.

I also learned how to sell because I listened for three years to people on the phone, working hard at talking to people and communication and all those kind of techniques.

And so I used that experience.

And then the third pillar was out of straight necessity because I had to feed my four kids.

I had to be successful.

So I absolutely owned it. Dug in, learned more about my company’s products than anybody else knew. Learned more about the other competitors’ products than anybody else knew.

I was an absolute fiend for success.

And it worked.

It worked.

I’m not—and I’m not a genius. I’m not. I don’t want you to come across like I’m something special.

I just focused on it and worked hard.

And if you focus hard on it and work hard and get an opportunity, you can turn your life around.

You can.

It’s absolutely possible.

Morgan: Those are great lessons.

I will embarrassingly admit I did not read the book, but I know a book to add to my reading list.

Jody: Yeah.

Morgan: And I do appreciate your subtle self-promotion at the end. I think it’s great and I fully support it.

Jody: I appreciate you waiting to the end.

Morgan: Yeah.

But it’s a great callout. There are very powerful lessons in this story, and yeah, I get shivers listening to the arc of the story, but I’m happy that it has a happy ending.

Jody: There’s a few more bumps and bruises along that way. It’s quite an interesting read, and it’s an easy read, and it’s on Audible if you want to listen to it instead of reading, and it’s on Kindle.

But the interesting thing that people have told me is it almost gives them an opportunity to tell me their story, especially men don’t like to complain and say, “I’m not having success,” unless you share with them your own struggles.

And it is an extremely vulnerable sharing of struggles.

And a few of friends of mine that I’ve known for 30 years have called me and said, “Man, we got to talk.”

I’m like, “What about?”

“I want to talk about your book.”

And I went out to see one of those guys, and we spent two and a half hours, and I never talked once about my book.

He told me all his troubles and all the things he had been struggling with in his life.

And his life looks great from the road.

As my dad’s favorite saying, “It all looks good from the road, son.”

His life looked fantastic from the road, and he spent two and a half hours telling me all the things he had struggled with in his career as a farmer, as a dad, as a business person.

And at the very end of the two and a half hours, he said to me, “We haven’t talked about your book yet.”

I decided—I said I wanted to talk.

I said, “How do you feel, buddy?”

He says, “I feel better.”

I said, “That’s all that matters. We can talk about the book anytime.”

And that conversation has happened quite a few times.

So, you know, it’s kind of about helping each other, helping people out.

Morgan: Yeah, that is also an astute comment of yours.

I agree with that.

And what’s interesting is just in the last weeks I found that identical pattern as well, which is I’m now finishing up—I have like a final-ish manuscript of a book I’m writing about forgiveness because there are some people who did very not nice things to me in my life that I’m emotionally working to forgive.

I’m very close. Not quite there yet.

And because this book on forgiveness is similarly a very vulnerable book because I’ve done well, but it’s also me opening up to whoever reads it about the darkest and most painful moments in my life story.

But the interesting thing is what happened to me. This is all like in the last two or three weeks that that point you just described happened exactly to me, where three friends of mine I showed this manuscript to, and all three of them after I did started opening up to me about painful stories and their life experience.

So, I just discovered that same pattern.

This could be a revolutionary insight because men don’t talk about their pain and their traumas.

But maybe if you write a book about your trauma and give it to friends, that could be this masculine way to get other men to open up to each other.

And it certainly appeals to all people, but there’s a lot of value in that.

Jody: There really is.

And that’s what I’ve noticed.

And it’s funny. I had a coworker—the industry I work with now is pretty small. You know, there’s not that many players, but I probably know 2,000 people in various [roles].

And one of them is a lady that’s worked at four different companies, got fired four times.

She’s just not good enough. She’s not.

She tries hard and she gets interviewed well. She interviews well, so she gets another opportunity.

Well, she read the book and she commented on my LinkedIn profile.

She said, “I want you to know, Jody, I read your book over the last week and I feel a lot better. I’m in one of those troughs in my life, but the book really helped me out.”

And I said, “Well, yeah, whatever. If you want, I can help you with your network and try to find you another job. I really shouldn’t, because you should look in a different industry.”

But that’s really what it’s all about in the end of the day, is, you know, I’m not—I didn’t write the book to make a million dollars or to be on Oprah.

You know, I wrote the book because I want people to look at our lives and think, “Oh man, I’m going through a bad time. But this guy made it. I know this guy. He’s just a regular guy and he seems so damn happy. So, how could that be possible?”

Because you struggled to get there.

Morgan: Yeah.

You also wrote the book for another reason, because you couldn’t stop yourself.

Something I found about writers and good writers is they write not because they have a message they want to tell the world, but you literally can’t stop yourself.

And that’s a sign that you’re on to something.

I’ll give a pitch for my writing company that I work with called Working Writers Co.

So, when I sat down with them to write the book, they basically—you sign a contract with them and they say you work with us for six months or a year and we’ll help you produce a manuscript and we’ll do some content editing for it.

And we’ll teach you a lesson every week about paragraph structure, about conversation, about plot twists, all these things.

Two lessons a week.

One lesson is, “Hey, Morgan, read us a chapter and we’ll all critique it.”

The next lesson is an actual lesson.

And so, when I sat down with this company two years ago in January 2023, I told them I wasn’t ready to start the book yet.

And they’re like, “Okay, bye.”

I thought, “God, that is a terrible closing rate, guy.”

And so what I realized was it’s because I can’t whip you or yell at you or scream at you to make you write.

You have to want to write your book. It has to come from inside you.

So then January 2024, when I sat down with them, I said, “Okay, I’m ready to write.”

And they go, “What do you want to write about?”

I said, “Only good stuff. Only happy stuff.”

And they said, “Why is that?”

“Well, because I wrote a lot of happy stories during COVID and people said it made them smile and it was great.”

And so once again, the guy’s like, “Sorry, Jody. Nobody’s gonna read that crap.”

“What? Come on. I’m a good writer.”

“Well, you could be a good writer, but if you want to write a book that people are going to read, then you got to write the truth, the good and the bad.”

And so that’s how it started.

Morgan: Yeah. I like this company. I didn’t even know companies existed to help you write books and give you sort of guidance. But it sounds very, very helpful.

Jody: It is. It is. They’ve helped a lot of my friends out, and we’ve written about 10 or 15 books now.

It’s a brand new company in Canada. So, been going for about three years now maybe.

Morgan: Yeah. Okay. It’s called Working Writers Co.

Jody: Cool. Sounds fun.

Morgan: Yeah. Jody, it’s been great having you on. I love the story, the buildup, the details. I love and appreciate the acknowledgement of the different mistakes you made.

I enjoyed the pitch for your own book at the end and then the surprise pitch for this random writing company as well. It’s been a fun episode full of surprises.

So, thank you for your time. Thank you for being vulnerable and opening up.

And everyone who has watched the episode up until now, thank you for watching, and we hope that you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have.

Until next time.

Jody: Thanks, Morgan. Really appreciate you having me on. It’s a lot of fun.

Morgan: Yeah, it was. Okay, take care.