Chapter 2

I'd be the first to admit that I missed being with Nancy over the next few months. I still thought of her as my very first Oregon friend. Missing her or not, I had set myself some very specific goals with regard to getting my business going. The best way for me to achieve my goals was to work longer hours. From eight thirty to eleven, I concentrated mainly on going around giving out samples of my products, passing out my business card with every sale I made. From eleven to two, I tried opening up new commercial accounts. After doing this for three weeks, I had an additional twenty three new commercial outlets that were now selling my products to the public.

From two until five thirty, I concentrated on servicing the nine largest industrial parks in the area. Between the new business I got, and my repeat customers, I had started averaging more than fifty jars and canister sales to my non commercial customers every day.

I had two delivery routes going now too. The first one was the route that Dave had started, the one that Nancy had turned over to me. I serviced this one each Wednesday morning. The second route, made up of all the new commercial customers that I had developed, I serviced each Wednesday afternoon. With just the profits from these two service routes, I was now grossing better than twelve hundred dollars per month.

For the first time in awhile, I was taking some pride and satisfaction in what I was doing. Playing poker is a skill, and the best players usually take home the money. A lot of time though, the losers of this money are people with emotional illnesses, compulsive personality disorders. Having seen some of the darker side of problem gambling, it was difficult for me to believe I was engaged in a positive activity when I had played poker for a living. I found myself with almost no desire to return to playing, not even as a recreational pursuit.

The money I was now earning made it easy for me to move myself away from the temptation of the so called 'easy money' aspect of playing poker. In my first full month of selling jerky, I'd netted more than five thousand dollars. My living expenses up in Oregon were negligible, so much so that I'd already increased my spare cash by quite a lot. What I used to think of as my poker bankroll was now my spare cash. I still kept it in the same place I had before, but now I thought of it in a slightly different way.

If Dave Towns hadn't come back to Oregon when he did, I might have become complacent with my new endeavor. I wasn't all that ambitious anyway, and sixty thousand a year seemed more than adequate for what I wanted to do with my life.

The first time I ran into him was at one of my inherited commercial accounts, a gas station, just off the Cascade Highway in Oregon City. I walked inside to find him writing out a delivery receipt for the product he'd just placed in the store. I recognized him right away.

"What the hell are you doing, Dave? This is my customer now."

"Hey, Ralphie, Earle told me you were up here, but I didn't really believe it. He also told me that you've been told about his policy of not granting exclusive sales territory to anyone. I'm probably not going to be hanging around here for that long anyway, so you'd be better off just putting up with my cherry picking some of my old customers 'til I leave."

"That doesn't work for me, Dave. As far as I'm concerned, you lost your rights to selling these products when you didn't come back and pay me the money you lost in that game over at Ferdie's house that night. I own whatever rights you once might have had."

"You have that business as near as I can tell. I'm not stopping you from selling anywhere you want to. I started selling here three years ago. You have the business, but I never said it included any of my accounts. My uncle will sell to me any time I go over to his plant with cash to buy some product. He even raised my prices, so now I have to pay the same as you do."

I didn't bother going over to see Earle Towns to argue my case with him. The fact that Dave had product to sell was all I needed to know. In the month I'd been in the area, I'd found out that there were quite a few meat smokers and jerky maker's within a fifty mile radius of Tigard. For the most part, their jerky wasn't as good as Earle's, and their pepper sticks didn't even come close to his. There was this one guy though, J.C., who had a smokehouse up in Clackamas. He made a very different kind of jerky. It was very moist and soft, and had a very sweet and mellow taste to it. It had only two drawbacks that I could see. There were only twenty pieces in a one pound canister, instead of the forty pieces in one of Earle's jars, and the meat would get moldy a week or so after the canister was opened. When I first saw J.C. he was experimenting with individually plastic wrapped pieces, using a gas as a preservative. On the positive side, not only was the meat very tasty, the price he'd quoted me to sell his products compared quite favorably with Earle's.

I drove over to Clackamas that afternoon to see how J.C. was coming with solving his mold problems.

"It's looking pretty good right now, Ralph. Look at these three pieces." J.C. handed me three of the individually wrapped long, skinny, meat pieces. "Try the Teriyaki flavored one first. I made it fifteen days ago. The other two are twelve and ten days old. Bite into each of them. I can't tell any difference at all between them as far as taste or bite goes. I can let you have these in packs of a hundred for thirty five cents apiece. Should sell easy in the stores for a buck a copy."

They tasted fine, all three of them, but, whatever they were, they weren't really jerky. It was a different cut of meat for one thing. Earle's jerky was like steak and he called it beef jerky. J.C.'s was more like a pot roast, but he called it steak pieces. The steak pieces each weighed about twice what a piece of Earle's jerky did.

"How can I make any money selling individual pieces J. C.?"

"I'm getting a new box made for them, forty eight to a box. Be ready in a week or so, just need government approval. All the labels are already approved. $17.00 a box is all I'll need. You can put these in the same stores you put Earle's product in. Not really any kind of competition with his jerky. Different product all together."

"There's a big market already for Jerky and pepperoni sticks. Might be awhile before people start switching over to these things."

"Everyone who tries these likes them. People like something, they generally will buy it. All these need is someone to take them around to show to people. Let them try one and they'll start buying."

"What about samples? Earle makes up sample bags for all his products."

"Fair enough. How about this? Every box you buy off me, I'll throw in six extra sticks for sampling. Just for the first month say."

I knew I could cut each piece up into at least eight samples, so I knew that would easily cover my sampling costs. I was also convinced that I could sell some of this new product if I could sample it to the people I'd been selling to already. I was paying about a quarter a piece for Earle's jerky, and a little less than that per piece for the pepperoni sticks. Based on weight alone, the steak pieces were a better deal for me, but only if they sold as well as the product Earle was selling me did.

"If I went ahead and bought say two thousand pieces, loose like the ones you gave me to try, for six hundred dollars, would you still throw in the extra two hundred fifty sticks for sampling?"

"Can't, not for six hundred. I'd be working for nothing if I did that deal with you. Could make out okay at seven hundred that way, for a short time. Best I can do."

"I guess I'll just have to wait until you've gone out and established the market for it then. Most companies, they expect to lose money any time they introduce something new. Costs money to build a market for anything. I'll stop back to see you in a few months, if I start seeing these in some stores."

"If I went ahead and saw things your way this time, just to help you get started and all, wouldn't mean I'd be agreeing to keep it up forever. Sooner or later I'd have to start seeing some return for the work I'm putting in."

"You can call it market research and write the whole thing off on your taxes."

"Could if I had any profits to write it off against. I've been spending a lot of money on product development and labels for this idea of mine. Too damn much, if you want to know the truth of it. I need to start seeing some future prospects out of this. I'd need to sell at least five hundred boxes a month just to break even on this product. That's twenty four thousand pieces. You think you could get me there?"

"If it takes off I can. No reason I can't start looking around for other distributor's for you too, if the product finds a good reception in the marketplace. At seventeen a box, that's only $8,400.00 in sales for you to break even each month. Right now, I'm selling more than that for Earle, just by myself. Thing is though, I might just stop selling his products, unless things change in a big hurry."

"You do know that me and Earle, we go way back? Like as not, he's going to find out that we're doing business together now."

"I'm hoping he does, J. C. That's one of the main reasons I came over to see how you were coming with this new product of yours. Earle thinks it was funny setting his nephew up to compete with me. He'll probably think it's funny when we start competing with him in all the places I sell to now."

"Not too likely, I'd judge. More likely he'd want to stomp you right out of business. The best you can hope for is he'll stop selling you his products."

"If he does, I'll have to make a run over to Tillamook and see how badly they'd want to mess with Earle's head. From what I heard, there used to be a lot of competition between them. Earle's a pretty sharp businessman though. I can't really see him starting any new jerky war with Tillamook."

"Tillamook is a long way to go for jerky. Plenty of people closer in would sell you theirs."

"Earle's is the best. I haven't found anyone close who can compete with it, no offense, J.C."

"None taken. Most people would agree with you on that point. I know a man over in Idaho could give Earle a close run over who made the best, but he won't sell at wholesale to anyone. Sells direct, always has."

I ended up buying two thousand pieces for six hundred dollars, with another two hundred and fifty pieces for sampling. J. C. didn't have that much stock on hand ready to deliver, so I took what he had and arranged to pick up the rest in four days.

J. C. should have been a fortune teller. Just as he'd predicted, Earle decided to come down on me with both feet. The first thing he did was evict me from my office because I didn't have a valid business license in my name. He also sent code enforcement around to ticket me for that as well. He called me on the phone to let me know I'd never get another jar of his product from him again. I offered to sell him back all the unsold product I had left, but he refused my offer.

The people at Tillamook thought the whole thing was pretty funny, but told me that they already had representation in the area where I'd be selling. They didn't do any direct marketing to the public anymore, only commercial sales through their outlets.

I went to get a business license in several cities that I sold in regularly. A wasted four hundred dollars I thought, but I avoided a five hundred dollar fine by showing my business licenses to the judge who heard my case on the ticket I'd gotten for selling without a valid business license. The citing officer hadn't bothered looking into any specific sale I might have made to anyone in his jurisdiction.

It took me two more weeks to sell out of the remaining store of Earle's products I'd had in stock. While I sold those off, I was also introducing J.C's products in all my industrial parks. Initial sales were great. I had no problem selling that first two thousand, and people seemed to prefer the taste of my new product to the old ones. I knew it would depend on how repeat sales went. During the second week I only managed to sell sixteen hundred of the steak pieces. The new boxes were approved and ready by the third week, and I managed to sell about seventy boxes at all my commercial accounts. My industrial park sales in that third week tapered off to twelve hundred pieces.