Kale Flagg remembers the day that he answered a newspaper ad for his first sales job. “I drove in,” says Flagg, “in my Ford Festiva. Now I know I’m a small guy, but that is a really small car. I had just driven across the United States. Everything that I owned [was] on top of the car and inside the car. I was looking for some mountain to climb. I was looking for a career.”
Born and raised in Hawaii, Kale Flagg went to school on the East Coast at Yale University. Then Flagg found himself working on Wall Street for a couple of years. What he found out in corporate America, recalls Kale Flagg, was that the further people got on in their career the more money a lot of them made, but the more time they also put in. Says Kale Flagg, “here were people ten years in that were working 80, 90, 100 hours a week; 20 years in working 80, 90, 100 hours a week; 25 years in working 80, 90, 100 hours a week. That is not what I wanted. I wanted something different.”
Then, Kale Flagg answered that ad. He was broke and looking for a job; he was $27,000 in debt. He needed to make some money, but he had never seen direct sales before. Kale Flagg remembers coming into a roomful of people. He says that he “picked up three things real quick. The first thing,” recalls Flagg, “was there were a bunch of people in the room. It was packed. And that said something positive, it meant that the business had appeal, that it was selling, it was working.”
According to Kale Flagg, the second thing he picked up real quick was that there were some people in there that were very average people and yet still successful—which he translated as meaning that the business had something to offer to everyone. But the third thing that really stuck out was that there were some people that were way above average—people that Flagg knew could become successful at anything they set their heart too. And of those very above average people, a couple of them really stuck out, says Kale Flagg. Rich Von was one of the people that really stuck out as different, as heads and shoulders above the rest. Rich was the one doing the presentation. He was the one explaining what the business was all about. Kale Flagg looked at him and saw his drive. He remembers his passion. “It was then that I decided that I wasn’t going to listen to everyone, I was only going to listen to the special ones—the top dogs—the ones with the most success.” “And Rich agreed to guide me,” says Flagg. “He became my coach. I was a salesman in his sales organization and he showed me the difference between the average, the above average and those that become the most elite.”
Kale Flagg remembers that it was about a week into the business, and it got to the point where Flagg saw some people “doing stuff that was wrong—they were cheating, breaking the rules.” Kale Flagg says that he spoke up about how “what they were doing was harmful to themselves, the business and its future. It was totally wrong; it was unethical.”
According to Flagg, the offenders were kicked out of the business, but they also left with undeserved gains that bothered him. He was told that he could quit the business himself and let those cheaters get the last laugh at his expense; or he could go and become very successful and have the last laugh, proving to the world that doing it the right way was always the right thing to do. And that, asserts Flagg, is when the light clicked on for him. “I knew that I could climb the mountain if I wanted to; that everybody had the same exact mountain; everybody had the same exact shoes; everybody had the same exact equipment; everybody had the same exact stuff [to] climb. And you know what?” concludes Flagg. “I fell in love with climbing that mountain, and they were right. The success was much greater doing it the right way; and so was the true feeling of accomplishment.”
