From the Basement to the Big Leagues: Building my Business

Most 16-year-olds are more worried about clearing up their acne and getting their driver’s license rather than finding their future career. But that’s exactly what happened to me! Little did I know it, while knee deep in the promotional products industry (selling the pens, sports bottles, and tote bags you see companies giving away at various events), I was learning the craft that would later be my life’s work. All I needed to do was miss a few days of school and finish puberty first!

Like most high schoolers, I started out in a typical retail job, wearing the vibrant blue polo on the sales floor at Best Buy. I took my first job very seriously. Before I knew it I was selling more extended warranties, the bread and butter of the company at the time, than any of the full-time staff. While convincing countless customers to purchase what counts as pretty much vapor, I could only sell extended warranties for so long before wanting to jump off a cliff. Eventually I ended up assisting a representative from a local mom & pop promo company just down the road with their DirectTV purchase. The individual was so impressed he offered me a job right then and there. Unlike Best Buy, this position would offer commission, and so with the lure of limitless income potential, my journey into the promotional products industry began.

Fast forward a few months and I’m addicted to selling promos. It was so much fun. I couldn’t get enough. The only thing stopping me from reaching my full potential was school, something my parents at the time thankfully wouldn’t let me quit.

Little did they know – I did a REALLY good job impersonating my dad. I would wake up early and call the school before anyone had arrived, this way I’d always get the answering machine, and I’d call in “sick” so I could go to work. Eventually my parents got hip to what I was up to, and I have to say, my dad played it amazingly cool when the truancy officer eventually came knocking at my family's front door!

Now, before Google was a thing - you used to have to READ things and manually type URLs into your browser if you wanted to visit a company’s website. So, with the help of my good old PC Magazine subscription, I started calling on every technology company or hot new startup I could find and sold them on the value of promotional products. Before long I was selling/earning more than the small promo companies entire full-time sales staff!

It didn’t take long for me to outgrow the small promo company’s abilities to support my sales trajectory. As luck would have it, I was eventually presented with an offer to join a young start-up that sold promotional products online—something that had never been done before (did I just date myself?). At first everything seemed great, I was making more money than anyone below the legal smoking age should ever be allowed to make. After about a year, I had purchased my first home and bought a brand-new Infinity 635 (the latest hot ride at the time), all before I was 18-years-old!

As the ad-age saying goes, sadly, eventually, all good things must come to an end. Due to events outside of my control during my senior year of college, I found myself on the the outside of the small internet start-up I had help build. With no way to pay my mortgage and student loans (I was young and dumb and spent my money faster than Nicholas Cage or Johnny Depp!), it was either get to work and build a promo empire that I could call my own or start prospecting street corners and looking for the biggest cardboard sign I could squander.

With my best friend and business partner Michael Wenger by my side, and several sleepless nights later, Quality Logo Products was born. The business started out of the basement of my house. It consisted of an old laptop Mike’s brother donated, which was completely covered in beer stains and missing the “A” and “F” keys. If we had to type “after,” “affect,” or “affirmative” we were pretty much screwed! Still in college, we couldn’t afford heat, let alone updated technology. We slaved day and night building the website and of course making mistakes left and right. They don’t exactly teach you how to create/run a business in college, at least not at North Central College in Naperville, so we built this thing using bubble gum and our shoelaces. I can’t tell you how many times I showed up to class after spending the previous 12 hours pouring over HTML. I would catch myself adding brackets and backslashes to my test answers!

After going over a year without a paycheck, and $85,000 in personal credit card debt, Mike and I eventually hit a wall and ran out of cash. With nowhere else to turn, one of our college professors, Dr. Gary Earnst, shared a grant opportunity that the Coleman Foundation setup for young entrepreneurs such as ourselves. We applied, and sure enough, just like that, they gave us a $10,000 grant. We spent that $10,000 in less than a month. Eventually with the support of family and friends, Mike and I, against all odds, managed to keep things afloat just long enough to become cash positive.

Now - I can’t remember exactly how, why, or when our fortunes changed, but I haven’t looked back ever since. Within the year, my house was running out of room to place employees’ desks. I had desks in every room of my house, including the kitchen and the bathroom with my cat’s litter boxes. In retrospect, those were some pretty awesome, fun times. There was a sense of camaraderie within the team, family have you, and amazingly enough many of those employees are still with Quality Logo Products today. At the heart of Quality Logo Products is a culture of passionate, fun, and intelligent people that all want the best for the customers. It’s this passion that has fueled our growth. Over the years, our business has grown substantially with two locations, a customer-friendly website relaunch, 100+ employees, and a projected $50 million in revenue.

If you had asked me 10 years ago if I ever thought Quality Logo Products would be as large or as successful as it is today, I would have laughed in your face. Being $85K in credit card debt, plus a mortgage, plus a car payment with ZERO income teaches you a thing or two! No one ever said being an entrepreneur or starting your own small business would be easy, but with a little luck, and a lot of help from the people around you, Quality Logo Products is proof that anything is possible. What started out as a necessity is now my passion, and I wouldn’t change a thing about the journey that got me here.