There is a now-legendary story about (Ewing M.) Kauffman’s start in the business world. Fresh out of the Navy, he caught on with a pharmaceutical company in the Midwest.
He was so prepared, so motivated, so charismatic and so convincing that the commissions he made his first year were more than the salary of the company’s president — who reacted by trimming Kauffman’s commission and shrinking his territory.
Kauffman didn’t much care for that, so he quit and started Marion. He gave the company his middle name for two reasons. He never did like his first name (he also disliked the formality of “Mr. Kauffman,” which is why he went with Mr. K) and he wanted to give the impression that his was more than a one-man operation — even though, at the beginning, that’s exactly what it was.
“I’d go out (in the morning) and call on doctors and sell to them,” Kauffman once said, “come home at night and bottle the pills and label them, put cotton in them, put the lid on them, go to the typewriter and type up the order, go back and package them and then, maybe 11 or 12 o’clock at night, run to the post office and mail them.
“Boy, it was fun. It really was.”
Governed by Kauffman’s business model — essentially the Golden Rule applied to pharmaceutical sales — Marion went from $30,000 in gross sales its first year to $930 million in fiscal 1989. When the company merged and became Merrell Dow (now Aventis), the transaction created more than 300 millionaires.
Kansas City Star
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