Nathan Edwards: A Hard Sell for Success

Seventy young, black faces turned toward Nathan Edwards at a meeting room in Orange as he began his motivational pitch.

“I don’t want to stay in the ghetto,” the 45-year-old veteran salesman told his recruits. “I don’t want to check into the “Side Street Hotel.” I want you to wake up and see people who are about money.”

The meeting at the Doubletree Hotel was part of Edwards’ crash course for newcomers to his sales force of about 500 young men and women, most from inner-city areas. Edwards, an entrepreneur from a Chicago ghetto, says he offers hope that they, too, can succeed.

In 1965, Edwards was fresh out of high school, with no intention of going to college and no marketable skills, he said. Then he answered an ad for a magazine salesman that changed his life.

“I was good,” Edwards said. “I took to selling like a duck takes to water.”

Eventually, Edwards parlayed door-to-door sales into his own magazine subscription business. Then, in 1980, he and his wife bought a formula for soap from a friend, and today they run a multimillion-dollar soap business, Austin Diversified Products, with offices in Chicago, Paramount and Orange.

“I don’t know where I’d be if I wasn’t recruited at 19 out of Chicago,” Edwards said. The lessons he has learned since, he said, are what he tries to teach his sales people.

Most of his recruits are 18 to 30 years old, black, and with no education beyond high school. Many don’t have high school diplomas.

Edwards says he tries to show them not only how to be successful, working adults.

“Everything that they’ve learned in the ghetto, they already know. They need to know something different. The old saying goes, ‘You’re a product of your environment. This is their environment.”

New recruits attend daily seminars for 30 days, before they are permanently assigned to a territory.

With the sales training come self-improvement seminars, a weekly bulletin with features such as a vocabulary quiz, and a dress code. Men must wear ties.

“A kid knocks at your door. He’s neat with a tie on, your mind automatically leaves, ‘Here’s a black guy and he looks dangerous’ to ‘Here’s a black guy and he’s selling something.”

Edwards said he makes no “pretense about it; I do it for money. But at the same time I feel good about it because when these kids make money, send it to their mothers, their fathers and their kids back home. They’re recirculating the wealth” in the black community, he said.

And Edwards said he has become more to his employees than a boss.

“I’m motivated to train people who are not trained to rise above means that are not expected of them. I’m their mother, I’m their father, I’m their doctor, I’m their lawyer and most of the time, I’m things they’ve never had. I’m their priest.”