Beginning Again
When I left Douwe Egberts, I once again found myself at a crossroads. I could continue in the world I already knew. Or take on a new challenge. Looking back today, one might think I always made important decisions easily. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every change brought uncertainty. I had a family. Responsibilities. Bills to pay. And Dorina and I dreamed of buying our own home in Heusden-Zolder.
The financial aspect therefore also played an important role in my decision. That was how I arrived at Groupe Riem, a company specializing in aerosol products. The owner was Italian. Signor Nicoletti. That also influenced my decision to work there. Although the aerosol sector was completely new to me and would never truly become my world, there was something familiar about working for an Italian owner.
Financially, it was also an enormous step forward. As a salesman, depending on my results, I could earn three to four times as much as I had at Douwe Egberts. For a young man with a family who hoped to buy a home, that difference was enormous. But once again, I was entering a completely different world. New products. New customers. New colleagues. And once again, I had to learn everything from the beginning. The aerosol sector never truly became mine.
I did not feel the same passion there that I had felt for coffee. But looking back, Groupe Riem gave me something else that would prove especially valuable later in my career. There I learned to sell in a much more systematic way. Everything was measured. Sales figures by product. By region. By representative. Every week, all the salespeople met. The results were discussed. Compared. Analyzed. Who had sold more? Which products were selling well?
Which region was falling behind? Where could the figures be improved? Everything had to grow. More revenue. More products. Better results. For someone like me, who always wanted to understand why something worked, it was especially instructive. I began to see sales not only as a human relationship, but also as something that could be analyzed. The numbers told a story. They showed where opportunities existed. Where something was changing. And where a certain approach worked or did not.
That knowledge would often be useful to me later as an entrepreneur. But there was another side as well. The pressure to sell ever more was intense. Week after week. And that was where I began to feel out of step. Because the sales philosophy I had slowly developed myself began from a different idea. I wanted first to understand what a customer truly needed. At Groupe Riem, I saw that the result sometimes became more important than that question.
Sometimes customers bought more than I personally believed was necessary. At times, I even had the feeling that they bought products not because they truly needed them, but because of the salesman's attention and power of persuasion. To me, that went too far. Not because I opposed selling. I was a salesman and I loved my profession.
But I wanted to be able to return home in the evening feeling that a customer had bought something because it was genuinely useful. Not merely because I had known how to persuade them. That difference may seem small. To me, it was fundamental. At Groupe Riem, I earned a very good living. Much better than before.
But little by little, I began to understand that money alone would never be enough to satisfy me. I also had to be able to recognize myself in the way I worked. At the same time, I received thorough commercial training there. One book that appeared again and again was Dale Carnegie's famous How to Win Friends and Influence People. We had to read it and study its lessons again.
It was about people. Listening. Showing interest in others. Human relationships. Many of those ideas spoke to me because they matched what I had already discovered during my years in the hospitality industry. A customer is first and foremost a human being. Yet perhaps I learned something even more important at Groupe Riem. A sales technique is only a tool. What matters is how it is used. Techniques can be used to persuade someone at any cost.
But the same knowledge can also be used to listen better, understand more clearly, and ultimately offer a better solution. I knew with increasing clarity what kind of salesman I wanted to be. And also what kind I did not want to become. The higher income Groupe Riem offered helped Dorina and me bring an important dream within reach. We wanted to buy our own bungalow in Heusden- Zolder and build a home there together for our family.
When we finally succeeded, it felt like tangible proof that hard work could give birth to something lasting. But the memories that truly made that bungalow a home deserve a chapter of their own. My time at Groupe Riem did not ultimately last long. Yet I learned lessons there that would accompany me throughout the rest of my professional life. I had learned to measure sales. Analyze results. Use commercial techniques to move forward.
Signor Nicoletti had given me the opportunity to discover an entirely new commercial world. A world that may not have been completely mine, but from which I would take a great deal. I had also discovered where my personal boundary lay. I wanted to succeed. I wanted to earn a good living.
But not at the expense of my own convictions. For in the end, a good salesperson is judged not only by what they sell. But also by how they sell it.