Adapted from Chapter 1 of my book Chasing Black Unicorns, about where I come from and how I got my start in sales.
By the age of twenty-three, I had already planned my own funeral. This is not the story of a spotty, desperate kid who decided to end it all after too many depressing rock ballads. No, sir. I did it for the money. I had decided that the funeral services sector was a great business idea, one that certainly needed new blood, so to speak.
But before that, and long before Africa, I have to go back to Koszalin, a leafy town a stone’s throw from the Baltic Sea. Meaning a backwater. I am proud to be a Koszaliner, but it is a damn long way from anywhere, and half of Poland thinks it is a coastal town. It is thanks to that city that I am where I am today, or to put it more precisely, thanks to my overwhelming desire as a teenager to get out of there as fast as I could.
Clingfilm and sweets
I was born in 1986, which meant first Chernobyl, then junior high school. It was not going to end well. If you are a short, overweight kid there, boys will not take you seriously, and girls will not take you seriously either, which is even worse. My obesity made me the target of nasty jokes from classmates who were fighting for their place in the pecking order. Lonely, sad and ashamed, I isolated myself more and more, and buried my sadness in eating sweets.
One hot morning I decided to wrap my torso in clingfilm to hide the fat. Someone in my class noticed my little trick and loudly informed everyone about it.
That day I ate an awful lot of sweets.
Two years in, I summoned the courage to ask out a girl from another class. She had never laughed when others made fun of me, so I thought it was a safe bet: even if she said no, she would do it kindly. How wrong I was. “Marek, you must be nuts. You walk around with lumps of fat because you yourself are like a walking lump of fat. How could you even think that someone like me could go out with someone like you?”
That day I ate even more sweets.
And I talked myself round like this: all of you who are laughing at me now might be famous in junior high, but in ten years it will be me who is world famous, and you will be the ones trying to gain my attention. That is how Koszalin, or its teenage inhabitants to be more exact, formed a trait in me that was later to shape my future: “I’ll show you.” The necessity of proving I was worth something. Many years passed before I realized that if you have to prove your worth to anyone, it should be to yourself above all.
A plan on a sheet of A4
In the second year of senior high school I grew taller and lost weight, thanks to puberty and to the computer game Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, which got me into real skateboards. My mother, a teacher, was the commander of the home forces, and she laid out my life on a sheet of A4 paper. I would finish the university in Koszalin, she would talk to her school principal and he would take me on at her school. “It’ll be quite funny us being work colleagues, now won’t it?” Dad would help me build a house beside ours. Then I would marry the neighbor’s daughter, and we would all bring up the children together.
“Uhhh,” I replied, not looking up from the computer, and “Uhhh,” said my dad, not looking up from the television. That is how I gained the absolute certainty that Koszalin was too suffocating for me, and I decided to go to Poznań. It was a well-thought-through decision; I must have spent at least half an hour on it.
“We don’t look for experts, we make them”
Studying came easily. Money did not. About a week after my mother’s monthly bank transfer I was left with the memories, and I once took myself to Lidl with 20 zloty to buy bread and a piece of sausage. Those were the times.
It was 2006 and everyone in Poland wanted to get under the mattress of the average Pole. Then one evening a friend dropped in and said he had just become a “financial advisor”. I had no idea what it meant, but it sounded more or less like “a ton of money”. So I asked him to get me in too.
I will never forget the first and last job interview of my life. I turned up in my high school graduation suit, two hours early, because I couldn’t sit at home in such an excited state. The waiting room was full of fellows like me in outgrown suits, and on the coffee tables lay catalogues from Porsche showrooms and Rolex outlets. Then the manager said:
“Taking my monthly earnings and the time I spend at work into account, an hour of my time is worth 1,000 zloty. Why then should I invest it into training and managing you? We aren’t looking for experts in finance, we make them. Which is easier? To find a guy with an encyclopedia of economics in his head and teach him openness, class, eloquence, style and charm? Or to find smiling, ambitious, communicative people and teach them the fundamentals of finance?”
I was ready to sacrifice a kidney for such a career. Of course, I now know that what counts in this sector is how much you sell, not the interview. They accepted basically everyone. They even waited two days before calling me, just to create an atmosphere of exclusiveness.
When Big Daddy talks, the kids listen
The introductory training was on a Friday evening. Around forty young men in outgrown suits sat in the room. At seven o’clock sharp, a man well over six feet tall walked in, with a beard, glasses and a piercing stare. He stood silent in the middle of the room until it went quiet and then said, slowly: “When Big Daddy talks, the kids listen.” Nobody laughed.
He told us that if Poland had a boom like Spain’s, the annual commission paid to advisors would reach six and a half billion zloty. “We stand out for only one thing: here we work our asses off.” He explained why we should not take a safe full-time contract: “A full-time contract isn’t participating in the profits, it’s participating in the losses. As long as you’re young and single, you can make this decision. Once you have a wife and kids, you won’t take the risk. If not now, then when?”
His name was Felix. He built one of the largest and most controversial financial sales organizations in Poland and changed the lives of thousands of young people hungry for success in a still-new post-communist economy. He later died in an accident flying his own private jet. Even today my adrenaline rises when I hear the classic Nokia ringtone I once set for his calls. For many years of doing business I wanted to be just like Felix. You may laugh at neuro-linguistic programming and life coaches, but something got into my head that evening and stayed there: if I worked hard enough, I would achieve success.
And goddammit, it worked.
Closing the doors
My first client was Ewa, a thirty-year-old graphic designer, single, earning more than average and aware she had no chance of a state pension. She was afraid, because I was the one who had placed that fear in her. The plan: set aside 500 zloty every month for thirty years. We met in a café, which is always worse for the salesman than a client’s home, because a client can simply leave a café, whereas at home they have to ask you to leave.
“I have to sleep on this decision, can we meet in a week?” she asked, which is the standard question of a client losing their nerve.
“What kind of decision do you want to sleep on? On facing hunger during your retirement if you don’t do something about it right now?”
Felix had taught us how to close a deal. The big training room was really just a corridor with several doors, and he told us to imagine the client in it, wanting to get out. “Each door is an excuse: ‘I don’t have a stable job’, ‘I’ve got to ask my mother’, ‘I don’t know how much I can save’. During a sale you close all of them. The only one that stays open is the door called…” and he took a red marker and wrote on the doorframe I’m stupid. “The only way they can turn down your product is by saying: no, because I’m an idiot.”
So when Ewa said she should read the small print in peace, I told her that was unproductive, that I was there to explain it, and that if she didn’t trust me we could read the whole thing together, I had the time. The ping-pong ended with pen touching paper.
In one hour I earned my first thousand zloty. And she gave me the names, addresses and phone numbers of fourteen of her friends, which was standard. The next day in the office the boss said: “You see? This Zmysłowski got a contract signed from nothing, and what about you?” If there was ever a turning point in my life in which I believed that I could make money and that my life would be really good, that was it.
Too much, too easily, too quickly
My first salary, the first real salary I had ever received, was 15,000 zloty. In 2006 that was astronomical money to me. I bought proper shoes, a Hugo Boss suit and a briefcase, and then an Omega Seamaster, the same watch James Bond wore. Suddenly I was really good at something, and others were trying to keep up with me, not me with them. By 2007, aged twenty, I was pulling in thirty to forty thousand zloty a month.
Nothing devalues money so effectively as working in finance. A coat from Hugo Boss did not cost 2,000 zloty, it cost one “big form”, an hour’s work. That was when I understood that if you earn just to spend, you will never earn enough, because there is always something newer, more wonderful and more expensive that you don’t yet have.
The real money came with multi-level marketing: from every form signed in the structure under you, you earned a commission. So MLM plus financial advice equals money, lots of money. And we recruited like crazy, on the street. We did not use job ads, because we were looking for badasses, and badasses don’t look for jobs; jobs look for badasses. I would stand on Półwiejska, Poznań’s shopping street, spot a promising young man, and ask whether he knew where the recruitment office was, scratching my right cheek with my left hand so that my gold Rolex caught his eye. “I need real pros. Here’s my business card… damn, I left it in the car. Will you come with me? It’s twenty meters away.” Around the corner stood an Audi RS4 borrowed from the boss for “hunting expeditions”. I would hand over a card to a guy amazed by what he had seen and set my stopwatch. He usually rang back within the hour.
I bought a black BMW Z4, a car worth over 250,000 zloty, in which I had never even sat. I had got the idea that morning, and by the evening I walked into the showroom, put a gold card on the table and said: “Take what you need as my down payment and give me the Z4.” It was the highlight of the most immature era of my life. Ordinary people spend more the more they earn. We earned more the more we spent, because the best motivator is having no way out. If you have a gun to your head in the form of high monthly expenses, you work your ass off. The boss was happiest when the boys became fathers.
Chorzów, and the bath
Then Felix gave me the speech: “Zmysłowski, now is your time. We’ll open new branches and you’ll get the chance to open one. You’re going to Chorzów, and from there you’ll conquer all of Silesia.” I had counted on Wrocław or Kraków, but Felix sold it to me so well that Chorzów seemed a hundred times better. After a weekend party with the new regional managers, I drove to Silesia in the Z4 with a hangover. An apartment of 100 m² paid for by the company was waiting. True, it had a view of a coalmine.
I went from restaurant to restaurant looking for eloquent barmen, because a good barman is above all a good salesman, and soon I had a team of hungry young guns. But I was not as good a trainer as my boss, and now I paid for the office and the assistants while my commission from my team’s work amounted to pennies. I was running out of money, and I had become very unused to not having it.
The bigger problem was that for some time I myself had not been convinced that this work was making me happy, or that it was completely ethical. I didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning, I lost patience in the office, and I simply stopped liking people and started avoiding them, which is perhaps the worst thing that can happen in a sales and management job. I counted the hours until Friday, when I could get into the Z4 and drive to Kraków at 200 km/h and party the weekend away. I didn’t know it then, but these were the classic symptoms of burnout. Nobody had warned me.
And some of the advisors were ever more creative in cheating clients. Sometimes a pause in a sentence can cost tens of thousands of zloty: “Everything which you pay in, you can take out after five years.” I began receiving difficult calls at the office, from people saying we were a gang of fraudsters and that they would hunt me down. I spent more and more time training my people so they would not sell an investment contract for a thousand zloty a month for ten years to someone who earned 2,500. There is an irony in this. Many years after I left, my father suddenly died, and when the time came to cash in the insurance policy a colleague had sold my parents, the payout turned out to be missing a zero from the end compared with the figure he had presented. And the fact that my folks had trusted him was down to me.
As long as there was money, I lived in a bubble of happiness. If I felt bad, I went somewhere, bought something and it was lovely. But the bubble burst. One October evening in 2008, in my 100 m² apartment, I ran a bath, hopped in, closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I tried to feel as light as possible, just to float carefree on the water for a moment longer.
The phone rang. I looked at the display. It was my boss.
I let the air out of my lungs and I slid under the water. The phone rang a little longer and then went silent.
This is from Chapter 1, “I’ll Show You”, of Chasing Black Unicorns. The story continues in the book. All of my income from the book goes to the MaYa Foundation.
Listen to this chapter: Polish audiobook on YouTube (English version coming soon) · Spotify
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