Turning Young People Into the Leaders of Tomorrow April 26th, 2010

    The core of Southwestern is the idea of bringing in new people, watching them grow, and then offering them bigger and better positions inside the company if they still want them. Spencer Hayes , a man who has been the chairman of the board for a long time is fond of saying that you can’t build a company, you can only build up people, the people have to build the company. That is probably why he is part of Southwestern Company, because there have been times when there was almost no one working at the company, just a few people, and the company was built back up to to significance it has today through the hard work of the young booksellers who took off into America selling books, and came back wanting more.

    The time was actually right after WWII and the company had almost shut down during the war. There were few young men who were able to go to college, and there were even fewer young women who were not working to support the men across the seas. In the end, not counting the secretaries, there were a total of five full time employees working at Southwestern Company, three of which had been sales people for at least a year, and were determined to get more people into the company and to get the books they produced moving out the door. While the company was small, they still felt lucky. With men coming home from war, they were finding it a lot easier to sell books to people. It was especially easy compared to the Great Depression when the company had first started to dwindle because no one had the money for books.

    By 1948 the sales force grew exponentially with a whopping four or five hundred sales people and more coming in. Most of them signed up for the money, but soon found out that it was a lot more than money that they were earning there. They were building character, street smarts, wisdom, and other things that school just can not instill in you. That is why so many of them stay with The Southwestern Company after that experience.

    Related posts:

    1. Building a Legacy

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