Ben Gay III has been called a living legend in the sales world. In his 40+ years of professional selling and sales training, he has been the #1 salesperson in every organization in which he has ever worked . . . and he’s a powerful speaker/sales trainer/author to boot!
Having started his first business at 14, by age 25 he was the president/CEO of what was then the world’s largest Direct Sales/MLM/Network Marketing company. And he was personally trained by fellow sales legends J. Douglas Edwards, Dr. Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightingale, William Penn Patrick, Zig Ziglar, Merle Fraser, Fred Herman, James H. Rucker Jr. and many other sales giants.
Now one of the most famous, popular and powerful sales trainers in the world, Ben accepts and conducts just 24 live “The Closers Sales Training” seminars a year and writes/publishes/produces “The Closers” series of books, audios, videos, newsletters, and teletrainings . . . a series that is considered “The Foundation of Professional Selling.” Visit WWW.BFG3.COM for more information.
He was the founder and is the current Executive Director of The National Association of Professional Salespeople.
Ben and his lovely wife Gigi live in the little Northern California town of Placerville (about halfway between Lake Tahoe and Sacramento – in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains) . . . 8 miles from the very spot where California’s gold was first discovered, starting the world-famous California Gold Rush!
Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with Ben Gay III about how Ben became a sales legend by being the only one to answer an ad in a local newspaper.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
- Personal stories of legends Zig Ziglar and Napoleon Hill, and the important lessons offered therein.
- The role of strong mentors and how beneficial they can be to a successful career in the business world.
- The power in writing a book and how it can build your name, credibility, and authority.
- Charles Manson, and the unsavory consequences of using valuable resources for their unintended aim.
- Confidentiality and how trust in that can foster fruitful relationships.
Connect with Ben:
Twitter
@BenGayIII
Facebook
facebook.com/BenGayIII
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/bengayiii
Links Mentioned:
www.bfg3.com
www.stores.ebay.com/ronzonebooks.com
Guest Contact Info:
bfg3@directcon.net
Rob Kosberg:
Hey. Welcome, everybody. Rob Kosberg here. I have another great episode because I have a great guest here for our Publish. Promote. Profit podcast, Mr. Ben Gay. You may have heard of him because he has sold tens of millions of copies of his book, his original book, The Closers, and that has become very, very well known. He is a living legend, or at least has been called that in the sales world, and 50-plus years in professional selling, number one in every organization he’s ever been a part of, and I love the people that are your contemporaries, fellow sales legends like Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightingale. These are people that you’ve met and known, Zig Ziglar, of course, and many other sales giants, and very, very excited to talk to you today. You’re the founder, and currently, the executive director of the National Association of Professional Salespeople, so thank you for being on the podcast today, and I look forward to having a good conversation about sales, which is something that I love.
Ben Gay:
Thank you, Rob. It’s an honor to be with you.
Rob Kosberg:
We were obviously talking a few minutes ago, just before I started recording for the podcast and I love talking to people that have been doing something at a very, very high level for a really long time because it’s hard enough to do something well for a short period, let alone to do something well for a long period of time. Let’s start there. What do you credit your longevity to? What do you credit the ability to continue doing what you do at such a high level?
Ben Gay:
Well, one, I enjoy it, and two, there’s nothing else I can do. I got into big ticket selling out of desperation. I literally decided I needed to get another job. I was working for my father as a salesman, but he had made it clear to me that I wasn’t going to inherit the business because he had two business partners, and as he told me one day, “They don’t like you.” So, had he died, I’d have been unemployed, and I figured I better start looking at some other options, and I got The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 15th, 1965, a Wednesday, and it’s funny how things stick in your mind when they’re important to you. I went through the want ads. Standing beside the box, I got the thing out and I went through the want ads. I got to the P’s for psychologists, and if there were any Z’s, I got there rather quickly, and I literally wasn’t qualified to do any of them. I couldn’t type. I was a high school graduate, elected president of my freshman class in college, but unfortunately, the election and the inauguration were three weeks apart. So, by the time they had the inauguration, I had dropped out.
Rob Kosberg:
If only they had been closer together.
Ben Gay:
Yeah. I think you should be elected and sworn in right then. I truly didn’t have any options, so I thought, “Oh, this is grim.” I was putting my wife through nursing school which was taking up most of what I was making after taxes, and so as I went to throw the paper in the trashcan, I saw the next thing beyond employment was business opportunities. I didn’t know what it was, but it sort of sounded interesting, so I started reading it. First or second ad I came to say, “If you know anything about marketing plans and want to make more money, dial this number.” So, I dialed the number, talked to a gentleman named Bill Dempsey. I began interviewing him to see if he was worthy of me joining his business, and he cut me off and he said, “Mr. Gay, I’m not the man standing in a phone booth answering want ads. Where are you?” I was about two blocks from his office, as it turned out, on West Peach Tree Street in Atlanta, so I told him. He says, “Good. You can be here rather quickly. Be standing in front of my desk in 10 minutes, or never dial this number again,” and hung up. So, nine minutes later, I went skidding into his office, said to the receptionist, “Hi, my name’s Ben Gay,” and she said, “We’re expecting you,” and a voice behind me, a man who had been sitting there, laughed, and I turned around and he said, “Ben Gay? Is that your real name?” Well, I’m used to Ben Gay jokes. I know all the jokes. I know all the responses. I said, “Yeah, I’m Ben Gay,” stuck out my hand, and I said, “What’s your name?” He said, “Zig Ziglar.” Well, it turned out Zig, I’d never heard of him, and nobody else had either unless you were in his church or in the cookware business, but he’d answered the same ad I had. I don’t know what the circulation of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was back then, but I’m guessing a half a million. I’m just making up a number. Two of us answered that ad. We became the number one and number two salespeople in the company. It was a multilevel marketing company. Holiday Magic Cosmetics was its name, the largest MLM in the world at the time, bigger than Amway and Shaklee combined. So, that’s how I entered high-level selling. I’d been doing well, and I was number one selling Krispy Kreme donuts when I was 10 years old.
Rob Kosberg:
Well, look. Let’s be honest. Krispy Kreme doesn’t need a salesman to sell.
Ben Gay:
It does. You have to knock on the door.
Rob Kosberg:
They are so delicious. If someone came to my door right now with some, I’d buy everything he’s got.
Ben Gay:
That was one of the tricks my father taught me. He said, “Stand where they can see what you have in your hand.” My little script was, “I have your Krispy Kreme donuts,” not, “Would you like to buy them?” or, “I have them,” and they’d open the screen door and take them, and I would say, “$3.00,” or whatever it was for a dozen donuts. I won a bright red Columbia Bicycle doing that, I was sort of hooked.
Rob Kosberg:
No kidding. That’s great. So, you met Zig Ziglar during your job interview. I guess you guys have stayed in touch. I mean, obviously, he’s passed now, but I guess you stayed in touch for many, many years.
Ben Gay:
Yeah. He became a good friend. Zig was 18 years older than I was. He was in the Navy the day I was born. He was sort of a father figure, although, two years later, I won a national sales contest. First prize was a mystery prize. Second prize was a Rolls Royce, then I think a Lincoln Thunderbird or something like that, and I won the mystery prize. So, they flew me to California, and William Penn Patrick, the owner of the company, took me out to lunch, and I said, “What’s the mystery prize?” He said, “You’re going to be president of the company.” I was 25 years old. I said, one, “Okay,” and two, “Why was that a mystery prize,” and he said, “Because if whoever won was somebody I didn’t like, I would’ve changed the prize.” So, Zig and I used to kid about it if I was having an especially rough day. I was running a big company. It was quickly becoming international with subsidiaries, et cetera. I was having a rough day, and talking to Zig, and I’d say, “Zig, here’s the deal. Bring me the keys to the Rolls Royce, and I will give you the keys to the building.” He said, “Oh, no. You won fair and square.”
Rob Kosberg:
That’s great. So, Zig took second place, and he got the Rolls, huh?
Ben Gay:
Yeah, and very few headaches. He just kept walking around, telling his stories, and I was sweating bullets trying to learn how to a run a company.
Rob Kosberg:
How interesting. Now, what was that company selling at that time?
Ben Gay:
Cosmetics was the first when I joined it, and then we had subsidiaries rather quickly, Sta-Power motor oil, Bob Cummings vitamins, Ameriprise Home Care cleaning products, but they all had exactly the same marketing plan, same finances to get in, and so on. You just had to remember when you were standing in front of a few thousand people which product you were talking about. I’d carry a note with me that said Holiday Magic or Sta-Power or whatever. It was interesting times, the Wild West of multiple-level marketing.
Rob Kosberg:
So interesting. Now, obviously, you’re not a contemporary of Napoleon Hill. Probably, many people listening or watching this podcast have read, Think and Grow Rich, or one of his many books. What’s your connection? How did you know him, meet him? Legend, right? How did you get to know him? What was he like in real life?
Ben Gay:
Well, when we met, he was 84 and I was 25. He was biologically old enough to be my great-grandfather. I didn’t know he was there. He was in the building. We had famous people wandering around all the time, so no one felt the need to run in and say, “Napoleon Hills is here,” but he had named William Penn Patrick one of the five greatest living Americans, or something like that, in a book, and was there to present Bill Patrick with the book and a plaque, and so on. On the way out, I found out later, Bill Patrick said, “I want you to meet a young man. I think you could do him some good,” and while they were walking the length of the building, Bill’s office was in the back, mine was in the front, he struck a deal with him. You remember Rodney Dangerfield, the old comedian, said that his family tied a pork chop around his neck so the dog would play with him. Well, Bill Patrick tied a $50,000 check around my neck so Dr. Hill would be my friend. In today’s money, that’s $400,000, $450,000. Bill said to Hill, “This guy, he’s doing a great job,” but Bill knew the politics. He said, “I know he has his moments when he would like to ask me a question, but he doesn’t want to reveal to me, that he doesn’t know the answer or that he’s scared out of his mind, so you’re going to be the one in the middle.” There was a knock on my door, and I looked up, and it was Bill Patrick and a little old man standing next to him, leaning on a cane, and being a southerner, I didn’t know who he was. It wasn’t that high-collar picture you see all the time. By this time, he was an old guy. So, I jumped up, being a southerner, to shake his hand, and I said, “Hi, I’m Ben Gay.” I’m waiting for his name, and Bill Patrick said, “Ben, that’s Dr. Napoleon Hill.” I said, “Oh, how are you,” and he said, “Call me Nappy,” and that became the first of our ongoing fights. We were together two-and-a-half, almost three years before he died. I refused to call him Nappy. I’ve never said the word until he died, then I would tell the story. I continued, “You’re 84, I’m 25. That makes you at least Mr. Hill, and if you’re a doctor, it makes you Dr. Hill.” When I was growing up, teachers didn’t have first names. They were Mr., or Mrs., or Ms., or whatever. Bill told me the deal, and he said, “And I promise you Dr. Hill has sworn that anything you tell him will not come to me. He’ll tell you what he thinks, but that’s where it stops.” So, that’s how we started our relationship, and he used to stay at the house. We had the Dr. Hill room in my office, which was a big conference table. To my left was, obviously, a chair at the end. That was Dr. Hill’s chair, and no one sat in it if he was in town, and no one sat in it unless the room had no other chairs for some meeting. Then they’d say, “Is it okay if I sit here?” He was older, he wasn’t feeble, mentally he was very sharp, but he was an older guy, and we didn’t sit around. One of my partners, we have a thing called the last protégé, which is based on, “I am the last protégé of Dr. Hill,” and when we first started working together, Mark said to me, “Now, did he give you lessons?” I thought, “Oh, they’re thinking about student, teacher, grasshopper, so on.” What Dr. Hill did was sit in my office when he was in town and write on a legal pad, probably writing some book we’ve all since read, and he’d listen. We’d go to lunch and dinner. We already had breakfast together at the house, and he would listen, and I watched how he worked. If other people were in the room, he never said anything to me other than the shallowest social stuff, “How are you today?” When everybody got up and left, and the door between my secretary and me clicked, if his head popped up, he had something he wanted to discuss with me from a session he had just heard, and that would be the only time it would be discussed; in private, just the two of us. So, it was really wonderful. It was like having my great-grandfather or my grandfather in the office with me all the time. I could ask him anything, and I even tested the theory. Before I got to the home office, a group of people who were there when Bill started the company tried a coup. They walked in his office one day and said, “We’re going to take three quarters of the company. Everybody’s going to have 25% of the company. You get to keep 25. We’re each going to take 25,” and so on. Bill said, “Well, let me think it over. Come up to the house tonight for dinner,” and when they came up to the house, all of the Holiday Magic employees were there. I don’t know how many it was in those days, probably 50 or something, and when they walked in these big double doors, Bill was sitting at the far end of the dining room table, and he said, “Gentlemen, welcome to the last supper,” and he sent one of them to Mexico, one to Canada, and one to explore international opportunities. What it really was, was to get them out of town and bust up the clique. Well, Bill couldn’t tell you that story without getting veins in the neck. I mean, it would make him mad years later, even though he’d since re-friended one of them, Bill Bailey of Bestline, and they had become buddies. So, I wrote a letter to Bill. “Bill, I’m telling Dr. Hill that a bunch of us are going to try and take over the company from you. It’s not true, but I want to test this vow of silence.” I had it sealed in the art department with a wax seal and I had it put in his secretary’s desk. I said, “Miriam, if you should ever hear Bill explode while Dr. Hill is in there with him, or when I’m in there with him, or whatever, hand this letter to Bill because it will tell him you’ve been tricked.” It didn’t happen. So, I went to Dr. Hill and said, “There’s a group of us. We’re really doing all the work. He’s just wandering around taking vows, and we’re going to demand 75% of the company,” and so on. I laid out exactly what the first group had really tried, and Dr. Hill listened, and he said, “Don’t do it. It’s a very bad idea. Don’t do it. You have a bright future here,” and blah, blah, blah, “Don’t do it,” and I said, “Well, it’s just between you and me?” and he said, “Yeah, absolutely.” Dr. Hill died. Bill Patrick died in a plane crash. The company finally went under. I had left long before then, and to my knowledge, when they hauled Miriam McGuinness’s desk out of the office and cleared out the office, that letter was still in the top drawer. Dr. Hill never said a word to Bill Patrick about it even though Bill had paid him the first year. At the end of the first year, Dr. Hill said a couple things to me, and I said to Bill Patrick, “Dr. Hill is hinting that,” and I knew what he paid him because I signed the checks, it came to me later that day, $50,000, and I said, “Dr. Hill is hinting that he’d like to be paid to do another year. What do you think?” He said, “Well, it’s totally up to you. It’s your money,” and for a second I thought, “My money because I’m president of the company.” Then it dawned on me he meant my money. So, I wrote Dr. Hill a check for $50,000. We entered the second year. I was telling somebody that story the other day, and it dawned on me honestly he died two-and-a-half years after we met, and I couldn’t remember if I’d paid him for the third year, because if I had, the Napoleon Hill estate owes me about $25,000.
Rob Kosberg:
What a great story, very interesting. Obviously, you were around him. You knew of his books and famous personality. I’m sure you read most of, if not everything. Did any of that play into you writing your first book, and how much later was it before you actually wrote your first book?
Ben Gay:
Well, years. Dr. Hill was the first person I ever met who was a published doctor. My parents might’ve had some friends that were poets or something, vanity books, but a real book, he was the first person I ever met. Now with modern publishing techniques, I don’t know anyone who hasn’t written a book.
Rob Kosberg:
Well, I know plenty still. I’m in the book business and I’m still trying to get them to write.
Ben Gay:
It’s not quite as unique as it used to be. Let’s say it that way. I was fascinated by it. One day he came into our living room, and I think it was the first time he was at the house, walked in the living room, and my wife had taken a copy of, Think and Grow Rich, and put it strategically on the coffee table, only book in the living room, sort of like this is what the family does every night, we sit around and read. “There’s a copy of Think and Grow Rich,” struggling for something to make up for what was frankly, an awkward moment. Back then, they used to say it was second only to the Bible. I don’t know if that was true then or not. It certainly is now, but whatever. I said, “How does it feel to have written one of the bestselling books ever,” and he said, “Bestselling, least read.” One of his frustrations was that everybody talked about him. He said, “I can talk to somebody five minutes and know whether they’ve read it or not.” He said, “The vast majority haven’t.” This copy of it that I showed you a minute ago is bright red on this side, bright red on this side, bleached out on the spine. A friend of mine found this at a garage sale a couple of years ago for 50 cents. Fortunately, she just opened the cover and saw it was written to Mrs. Grace Dixon with best wishes, Napoleon Hill. Well, and you I have been in the business long enough. I can tell you the whole story just looking at that. Grace Dixon, whoever she was, heard Dr. Hill was coming to fill-in-the-blank, paid probably something to see him, sat in the audience. He talked, then he did the altar call, and people got in line to buy the books, and then they got in line to have them signed, and then she took it home and put it in her bookcase, and there it sat for 75 years. When my friend gave me the book and I went to open it, I stopped because it was obvious the spine had never been cracked. The only time that book has been opened was when Dr. Hill opened the front cover to sign it.
So, The Closers came along in the late ’70s, and for an entirely different reason. First of all, I didn’t write the first draft of what we now call part one. It was just called, The Closers. I had invented the call center business and discovered rather quickly that 96% of the people in 1976 didn’t know that an 800 number was toll-free, or free to them, and it didn’t appear in any ads anywhere. So, I wrote a series of letters to people who were running ads with our 800 number telling them their sales would go up and blah, blah, blah, and everybody in the company was given one of those pens, the one artists used to cut the clippings out. Each was given one of those, and we said, “Any time you see an ad that doesn’t have an 800 number in it,” which is all of them, “clip it out, send it to word process, and they’ll send out the series of letters.” Well, one day, I’m looking in The Wall Street Journal at some want ads, and I saw a poorly-written ad that had the word closers, or closing in it, and I wasn’t sure what it was, but what it really didn’t have was an 800 number. So, I took my pen knife, cut out the ad, sent it to word process, and just as I was sending it, I thought because they asked $14.95, “That may be a book about selling. I can’t tell.” I clipped my $14.95 check to it and sent it to them. I forgot about it. Three weeks later, this package arrived. It looked like something you might get if your kid had been taken hostage and this was the ransom letter. Horrible, crayon on the envelope. I opened it up, and there was this ratty little book called, The Closers, poorly bound. When I got it out and flipped the pages, like you do with a book, pages shot all over my office. It had been bound so poorly. I thought, “Oh, I’ve been cheated again,” so I gathered up all the pages and went to throw them in the trash, and then, being cheap, and there weren’t movies on all the airplanes yet, we didn’t have cellphones and so on, and I was about to go to New York, I decided to keep it, put it in my briefcase, glance through it on the plane, and I already had a plot. I was going to leave it in the back of the seat in front of me and let them throw it out. I started flipping through the pages after I got them reassembled, and it was like I’d found the Dead Sea Scrolls of selling. The writing was poor. It was misspelled. There were entire sentences missing. I don’t know where they went, but they just weren’t there. You could tell it was supposed to go to another thought. But I had stumbled onto something. When the plane got to LaGuardia I went to the payphone and dialed the number in the book, and I said, “Hi. I just finished reading The Closers, and I want to talk to somebody,” and they said, “Well, Mr. Gay, how are you?” This is before caller ID. The only thing around in those days was Candid Camera.
Rob Kosberg:
You were the only one who ordered it, huh?
Ben Gay:
Yeah. I said, “I didn’t give you my name.” He said, “Well, you just said you read The Closers.” He said, “We printed 500 copies.” There’s a story behind that I won’t bore you with, but, “We printed 500 copies, and we put one ad in The Wall Street Journal one day, and we sold one book. So, if you’ve read The Closers, your name is Ben Gay, and you’re from California.” I said, “How many more of these do you have?” He said, “Like I said, we printed 500. We sold one. I don’t have to go count them. We have 499.” I said, “I’ll take them.” So, I took them. I was going to tell people the story. It’s a horrible book, pages are upside-down. I ignored that, and give them out, and said, “If you’re smart enough to dig through them, you’ll find gold in here.” Everybody took one in the home office. That was probably 20 books to the salespeople, and then they started coming up a week or two later, “Bob in Chicago would like a couple of those,” and pretty quick, the 500 were gone, and they were saying, “How do we get more?” So, I called them back, negotiated the publishing, editing, rewriting rights to the book, and turned it into the bestselling book on selling ever written; 10-and-a-half million copies when we quit counting 25 years ago.
Rob Kosberg:
Incredible. What a story. I love that.
Ben Gay:
Yeah, and even on the book, most people don’t notice it, but on the book, it says, “Ben Gay III, editor.” Then inside, I state who I was told wrote it. I’ve since met him, and he’s not bright enough to have written it, so I don’t know who wrote it, and I don’t care.
Rob Kosberg:
That is great. What a great story. I mean, you found some incredible content and you did something amazing with it. Let’s change gears for just a minute. What are some of the most amazing things that have happened? You’ve obviously made a ton of money from the book, but besides that, what are some of the most amazing things that have occurred? How has your name grown, your authority, your credibility, using the book? Talk to me about those kinds of things.
Ben Gay:
Well, I call them The Closers, and there’s five books in the series and seven more being written as we speak where I’m coauthoring on different subjects. The Closer 4: Real Estate People, or that type of thing. Not unlike Chicken Soup for the Soul. The thing that it’s been for me, it’s a one-and-a-half-pound business card. I can go into any sales office in the world, and if I’ve got that book in my hand, there’s someone there, if not all of them, there’s someone there who knows what it is. It’s a trick I do, walk through the county fair through all the booths, and I carry The Closers like this in front of me, and I can tell who the salespeople are. They’ll stop talking, and usually I’ll wear my Ben Gay, Closer shirt. I don’t leave it to chance. It’s opened doors for me all over the world, and it’s now in 26 languages. If that’s all I did, was do that, I’d be in fine shape, but the trick was I had to be doing something else for it to happen. If I hadn’t invented the call center industry, I wouldn’t have been looking for ads that didn’t have 800 numbers. So, it all comes together and that, but it gets you into things. I was attitude coach for the astronauts, Apollo 15, 16, and 17. That was due to running the big cosmetic company, and the supervisor of the manned space program, his wife was a Holiday Girl, like an Avon Lady, and that got me into the launch of Apollo 14. I met everybody else and became their attitude coach and put together some programs, but it all came, in that case, because I answered a little ad in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. They only ran that thing for one or two days. Take out that ad, you and I wouldn’t be talking. Take out that ad, there wouldn’t be a Closers. So, it all ties together, and since you’re a book fan, it also got me into teaching at San Quentin for five years, of course, called People Builders, and that got me an invitation, not that it was a great honor, but one of the lieutenants came to me one day and he said, “Mr. Gay, there’s somebody who wants to meet you. He’s fascinated by the class,” and I said, “Well, send him down.” He said, “This one can’t come down.” Well, this one was Charlie Manson who was sitting in the Adjustment Center, but oddly enough, his cell, the only thing he could see out across the gun port was a little window, and the only thing he could see through that was the door that I came in every Friday night and left every Saturday morning, and always with a crowd around me. He wanted to know, “Who’s that guy.” I think he was jealous. So, long story somewhat shorter, we set up a meeting, which turned into three meetings, nine hours in his cell. When I walked in, two-bunk cell, top bunk was sort of like a shelf. No one wanted to sleep with Charlie. They said, “They don’t mind being in the cell with Charlie, but they don’t want to go to sleep with Charlie.” So, he was singled bunked in this cell. I walk in, on the top shelf there were a few little things lying around, but there was one book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. I looked around the cell for the other books. It was the only book he had. I said, “Charlie, that’s a fascinating book selection.” He said, “It’s my Bible. I couldn’t have built the Manson Family without it.”
Rob Kosberg:
Wow. That’s terrifying.
Ben Gay:
Yeah, but it’s so true about a lot of things. You can read The Closers and figure out how to cheat somebody.
Rob Kosberg:
You can turn it to evil, can’t you?
Ben Gay:
Sure, and he did.
Rob Kosberg:
Wow. Ben, just intriguing stories. I love it. So, tell me, what are you working on right now? You talked about four other books, and where can we send people? Where best to find out some more information about you, or maybe partner with you on a project, or have you come and speak if you’re still doing that? Tell me a little bit about that.
Ben Gay:
Now that hotels are opening up, the offers are starting to come in. If they want to reach me, you go to www.bfg3.com. That’s Benjamin Franklin Gay III. BFG3. If they’d like to get the books with special pricing and free shipping, they go to stores.ebay.com/ronzonebooks, R-O-N-Z-O-N-E Books, B-O-O-K-S. Interesting story. How can they sell it for less than I do and have free shipping? My wife Gigi’s maiden name was Ronzone. She owns Ronzone Books, and the answer is she goes in the warehouse and steals inventory from me, sells it on that site, then brings it back to me for signing. It still have to sign them even though she stole them. I sign and date them all, and then she slips them into our shipping thing, so we pay to ship the books she stole that I signed. So, if you don’t mind dealing with an embezzler, go to stores.ebay.com/ronzonebooks, and they’ll get them right out to you.
Rob Kosberg:
Well, it sounds like Gigi is a closer. I like her already. Hey, Ben, so good talking to you today. I just love your stories. I want to learn more. We need to do a part two of this at some point.
Ben Gay:
Whenever you’re ready.
Rob Kosberg:
I wanted to ask about Early Nightingale and others, so there’s more, and of course, I’m going to get some of your books, and I want your signature, so I’m going to buy them from Gigi, but thank you. Thank you for being on the podcast, today. Great, great, great to have you on.
Ben Gay:
Well, my pleasure. Anytime I can be of service, just shoot me an email. We’ll do it.
Rob Kosberg:
Thank you, my friend. I appreciate it. It’s an honor.
