PROFILE
People Buy From People Like
Beth Standlee
How the TrainerTainment CEO found her calling. By Robert Sax
B
eth Standlee quit her first real sales job. she introduces her proven personal sales process that she says will help The future founder of industry mainstay anyone gain more financial and personal freedom by learning how to sell TrainerTainment was selling books doormore. to-door during the summer, hoping to Standlee began her sales career in earnest a few years later. She had two make money during her college break. But the sales young children and Jerry was making a good living, but she felt an urge she was making didn’t make up for the loneliness of to do something on her own to boost her self-confidence. That “something life on the road without her boyfriend, Jerry. She different” turned out to be selling returned to college, became Tupperware, which she did well enough pregnant, quit college and married to earn nine brand new cars from the Jerry, saying “I got my MRS degree company. “I learned a lot about selling during my sophomore year of during the eleven years I spent with college, and my MOM degree Tupperware,” says Standlee. shortly thereafter.” She also studied such top sales How a nineteen-year-old, newlypeople and motivational coaches as wed mother with no college degree Zig Ziglar, Norman Vincent Peale, and went on to a successful career in sales Tony Robbins. “I’ve never sold training and a prominent position in anything I didn’t feel like made a the FEC industry is the uplifting story difference in the life of the buyer,” she at the heart of her new book, People says. “I learned early on from Zig Ziglar that, “You can have everything Buy From People: How to Personally rry Je d an sb in life you want, if you will just help Connect in an Impersonal World. In it Standlee with hu
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PROFILE other people get what they want.” After a successful but unpleasant stint selling cars, Standlee took the event-planning skills she developed with Tupperware and translated them to a new career in the FEC business. She started as an event salesperson for the iconic Bronco Bowl in Dallas, TX, visiting every business in the neighborhood to sell them on parties. She then took a job at Fun Fest with Neil Hupfauer, now widely considered the pioneer of the family entertainment center. “I went to interview with Neil, and he waved his hand at me and [said] why don't you see what you can do about filling in the lanes with a few parties,” Standlee recalls. “I knew a lot about parties because I'd sold Tupperware. I knew about it from a direct sales point of view.” She says corporate and group events and birthday parties were soon generating twothirds of the revenue at Fun Fest. “It was crazy. We had 75 to 100 birthday parties a week and about 40 to 70 company and group events a month,” Standlee says. She then took her talents to Schumacker and Company,
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which ran multiple traditional bowling centers, including 13 Don Carter locations across the South and Southeast. “I was the national sales director. I took what I had learned and began to implement those systems in those traditional centers,” says Standlee. A mere eighteen months later, owners Joe and JaNelda Schumacker did some restructuring and Standlee was “restructured out.” Fortunately for all, their relationship didn’t end there. (Standlee includes the Schumackers in the dedication to her book.) A few months later the Schumackers contracted Standlee as a consultant to handle several projects, including a PBA event and a center opening in Colorado. At the time Standlee was doing well selling capital equipment to the bowling industry for several manufacturers. But she was often frustrated when customers blamed her for technical problems which she had no control over. “I got this idea about training companies. People were buying capital equipment because I was going on site and
PROFILE
Standlee, second from right, in her Tupperware days.
Esther Israel, Standlee’s first mentor, taught her that a saleswoman didn’t have to be in love with the product she was selling; she just had to care what the product could do for others.
training them,” says Standlee, who felt she could meet a need in the industry with a company that trained people in party sales, guest service, and leadership. “I saw what I thought the business owner needed. I could provide a better solution,” she says. Her next sale was to her husband. “I remember having lunch with my husband on a Thursday in April and I said, ‘Honey, here’s what's going on’. It was kind of a big decision,” Standlee says. “I asked him, ‘Do you care if I quit my job? We'll tap out if I can't make it, but I'd like to try.’ My husband is a man of few words and he said, ‘Well it sounds like a good idea to me,’ and I turned my resignation in on Friday.” Standlee then pitched her business idea to JaNelda Schumacker, who liked it and agreed to discuss it with Joe right away. “They signed on to be my very first customer,” says Standlee, and she soon began operating TrainerTainment. “I didn't want to be a consulting company. That's why I'm not Beth Standlee Incorporated,” she says. “I wanted to be a training company. I wrote a training manual and created a party host training video, got a real booth from Skyline, and went to trade shows and bugged everybody to death to let me speak.” Her networking generated a story in RePlay about her new company, and in February 2006, she began contributing a column called “Party Professor” that is still running in the magazine. TrainerTainment’s tagline is, “Fun Training, Serious Results,” and Standlee went beyond simple motivation to offer “meat and potatoes stuff that you could take home and use right after,” she says. Among the extensive menu of services her company offers are business and sales coaching, onsite training, webinars, grand opening strategy, and even mystery shopping services. Currently she has a team of twelve key people and spends much of her time being CEO and the face of TrainerTainment. Standlee believes TrainerTainment is viewed as an industry go-to for best practices, a position supported by the award for business coaching 18
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that IAAPA bestowed on the company in 2017. “I think we’re respected and people count on us to be out front and help with ideas and strategy and help people grow,” she says. Apart from the IAAPA award, Standlee is proudest of her current team members as well as those who have moved on to do their own thing. She also beams with pride over several clients who have gone on to win IAAPA’s “Top FEC of the World” award, a list that includes Jake’s Unlimited, Scene 75, and Big Thrill Factory. She is proud, too, of her status as the longesttenured teacher in the BPAA management school. “I was there before [current education executives] Bart Burger and Kelly Bednar,” she says. To that list of achievements, Standlee now adds her first book, People Buy From People, which went on sale in mid-May on Amazon.com and the TrainerTainment website. She says the book is for anybody who wants a career in sales or wants to be a better sales professional. She isn’t afraid to be vulnerable in telling her story, and especially hopes to inspire young women who are struggling to make it in work and life. Along the way Standlee shares lots of solid information on how anyone can improve their life by learning how to sell. “Life is a whole series of choices that you get to make, and you're in charge of that. I think anybody that wants to improve their financial [situation], whether they're in sales or not, can benefit from this,” she says. “We're all selling something.” ❖
Robert Sax is a writer and PR consultant in Los Angeles. He grew up in Toronto, Canada, the home of five-pin bowling.