I worked for Scott Paper Company 10 years and it was one of the most rewarding and growth promoting experiences of my life. It was a first class company, with quality products and some good and very smart people. I was hired in September of 1971 and left them in October 1981. During that time I lived in many different parts of the country and met a lot of quality individuals. I also learned a lot about my self and how to sell and engage with people in business situations. I worked hard and had good success. During much of my time with the company I was considered a “climber” and was promoted often. I was always proud to hand someone my business card.
I had been out of college for about a year, with a degree in Latin American Studies, when I was hired by Scott as a Sales Representative in their Los Angeles District. I had spent the previous 12 months working for a decal company on their sales desk. The decal company manager did not feel I had a future there, so he suggested I look for a job elsewhere. So, working with a recruiter, I was given the opportunity to interview for a series of sales positions with paper manufacturing companies, which was his speciality. I really did not want to work in sales, but that was the only type of work available to someone like me with no experience.
Bob Baldocci was Scott’s L. A. District Manager at the time and I did well in the initial interview . After a day on a “ride along” with one of the salesmen, Dan Kissel, who later became a good friend, I was offered a position.
My starting salary was $9,500/yr and the job included benefits and a company car. I was in the “away from home” division of the company. We were responsible for working with paper distributors, who purchased our products from our mills in railroad carload quantities. They then sold our line of paper hand towels, toilet tissue and disposable wipers to end-users, such as office building, manufacturing facilities and school districts. I was assigned a couple of low-volume distributors to work with at the start. I spent my days calling on large businesses myself, or occasionally with a distributor salesman, in an attempt to switch the end-user/client away from a competitor’s product over to ours. Distributors would often carry multiple lines of our types of products. We were trying to build our business with them for the additional volume, but also so that their management would focus more new sales effort on Scott Products.
In the early 1970’s paper manufacturers were in a dominate position with their distributors. There were a series of paper “shortages” because demand for sanitary paper products was growing faster than production capacity. Late night show host Johnny Carson once made a comment on his program about there being limited supplies available of toilet tissue and the next day grocery store shelves were cleaned out of this product. Due to constrained supplies, paper companies such as Scott were able to pick and choose the best distributors to work with and were also able to raise prices often. It was a good environment for us salesmen, as we were important to our distributor/clients and were treated with some deference . This all changed in the next decade, led mostly by my future employer, Fort Howard Corporation, as paper manufacturers got into a paper machine building war that created an over abundance of product and shifted the power from the manufacturer who controlled supplies, to the distributors, who controlled the end-users.
Scott offered good training and I also studied other people’s approach to selling. Slowly I developed my own “style” and the confidence I could be successful. I did well and grew to enjoy the work.
In January of 1972 I attended my first National Sales Meeting with Scott in New Jersey. I enjoyed the experience and the thing that impressed my the most was the awards ceremony. I swore I would not attend anther of these meeting without winning an award. A self-promise I kept.
After a year and a half of working in Los Angeles I was promoted to Portland, Oregon as a Senior Sales Representative in April of 1973.
So my wife Karen, our new son Timothy and I moved to the Great Northwest, where I covered the states of Oregon, Idaho and southern Washington. It was there that I bought my first home and fell in love with that lush, green part of our country. Also for the first time I was responsible for a couple of large distributors; Blake, Moffit & Towne and Western Paper, where my efforts could make a significant contribution to the business volume growth for our company. I also began to travel overnight for business to Idaho and southern Oregon.
Also, at 27, I spent my first winter in “snow country” and learned about “black ice.”
One thing that made this move, and all subsequent transfers, easier to deal with is that I played Rugby. The first thing I would do
Scott Paper training class circa 1975. That’s me, back row on the left.
in a new location was to find the local club, show up for practice, and instantly have 30-40 friends in my new home. In Oregon it was the Portland Pigs RFC.
In August of 1974, after a year and a half in Oregon, I was promoted to Omaha, Nebraska as an Area Manager. I covered the states of Nebraska, South Dakota and the western 2/3’s of Iowa. I spent a lot of time in the car driving to Des Moines, Sioux City, Lincoln, Grand Island and beyond. It was a cultural introduction to agricultural America. I remember when I first got there, there were a lot of reports on the news about possible crop failures due to poor weather. When I brought this up to one of the managers of a distributor I was working with, he said “farmers here lose their crops several times a year before they finally bring it in.” And, so it was, as we always had good harvests in my 2 1/2 years there.
The most important event during these years was that my daughter Kerry was born.
And, yes there was snow. One storm trapped us in the house for three days. The advise given to me was to always keep your liquor cabinet well stocked. I also learned how important the University of Nebraska football team was to the state. This was early in the tenure of Tom Osborne (later revered by Nebraskans) and the team was not doing well. Calls for his firing filled the sports pages.
In April of 1977 I was promoted to the Boston District Manager. My first position managing people, something I had always wanted to do. In the many years that followed as a manager, I would give myself a rating of so so. I was not bad, but I seemed to have spent most of my time making sure salespeople were doing what they were supposed to be doing, rather than providing leadership to those reporting to me. My experience was the same as most other managers, you spend too much time with marginal performers, who never get any better, to the neglect of the top people who would improve faster with more guidance. I found as a manager that having people report to me was often the source of my greatest satisfaction and my greatest misery.
I loved New England and my new Rugby team, Mystic River RFC. Boston is half way between the Los Angeles area, where I grew up, and Europe in more ways than just distance. I enjoyed the rich history and traditions, as well as the East Coast attitude and vibrance of the area. My daughter Kerry and her family now live north of Boston and I still enjoy experiencing that ambience again and again on my semi-annual trips back to visit.
We lived in Ashland and my office was in Wellesley Hills along Route 16, the course of the Boston Marathon, which we’d stand out on the road in front of our building to see each year.
Once again I did well and, after two years, was offered more responsibilities as the Chicago District Manager, but I turned it down and shared with my supervisors that my desire was to return to the Northwest to be closer to my west coast roots as well as my brother, Tim, who lived there. The Chicago position was then offered to the Seattle Manager and, as a curtsy to me, Scott moved me in April of 1979 to Seattle to replace him as the District Manager to fulfill my wish.
So, I was back in the Northwest with high hopes of finally being able to permanently settle down in that wonderful area. The flaw in my planning was that my marriage to Karen was on the rocks and we were soon separated and on our way to an ugly divorce. Starting up a new position and dealing with all the difficulties in my personal life was difficult and, while I did an acceptable job for Scott, my performance was not up to the standard I had set for myself in previous positions.
Shortly after our divorce was completed, about 18 months after we arrived in Seattle, Karen, completely without my knowledge or consent, picked up an moved with my children and a girlfriend back to the Boston area. This crushed me and, although I tried, there was nothing I could do to get the kids back. This was the worst part of my life.
Scott was sympathetic. There was an opening for a District Manager in the Carolinas and they offered it to me. My great mistake was that I accepted it, thinking I would be closer to my children. When I got there I realized I was still a significant airplane ride away from them and that I was really alone there, without the type of personal support I had developed back in Seattle. So, I got on a plane a flew back.
The problem was that Scott had already promoted someone else to the Seattle District Manager position, so I was without an assignment. Throughout this whole situation I was treated well and fairly by Scott, but they had nothing for me to do, committed to the Seattle area as I was. So, they made something up.
Scott was planning on expanding into foodservice items, i.e. napkins, placemats, tablecovers, etc. They asked me to survey the opportunities with foodsevice distributors in my part of the country, like Sysco and Kraft, with whom we did not at that time have a relationship. I didn’t know what I was doing and my heart wasn’t into it, so I just muddled around lost for a couple of months until I could line up something else to do, outside the company.
That something turned out to be buying a Management Recruiters franchise in Seattle with a friend of mine, Don Urie. I knew Don from my first days at Scott in the Los Angeles office. He had left the company a number of years earlier and opened up one of these franchises in the Bay Area and had had a lot of success.
With great regret I resigned from Scott and started this new venture which did not turn out well, but that is a story for another day.
Several years later I ended up working 16 years for a Scott competitor, Fort Howard Corporation, where I advanced to Division Manager level responsible for, at different times, all the states west of the Missouri River as well as much of the South. It was at Scott however, that I developed all the skills I would use later in my work experiences. When I think back on those years, the things I remember most are the friends I made, some of which I have already mentioned. Others that were important to me are Bill Yarnall, Craig Calloway, Pete Diamond and Dwight Jackson.
Scott Paper no longer exists, they are now part of Kimberley Clark. For that matter, neither does Fort Howard, which was integrated into Georgia Pacific Corporation. I too have moved on and have my own company selling health insurance to individuals. I treasure my time a Scott, probably most of all because it opened up a world for me that I didn’t know existed and provided me with an opportunity to succeed beyond my expectations.
charleymallon 