You may not have heard of PestWorld’s keynote speaker, Jordan Belfort. That will soon change now that Martin Scorsese’s movie about his life will be released nationwide on Christmas day.
The power broker known as The Wolf of Wall Street gained fame in the 1990s as head of a Long Island boiler-room brokerage firm with a reputation for outrageous parties. He served 22 months in prison for securities fraud and money laundering and now has a successful sales-training career.
What can a pest management professional learn from a former Wall Street broker who spent money like it was going out of style? More than you might think.
Belfort kicked off his Wednesday morning keynote address with a taped introduction from Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays him in the movie. He then launched into his cautionary tale of success and excess.
“There are three things you have to have to be successful,” he said. “You have to have a vision for your future, you have to have the ability to share that vision, and you have to give value.”
If anyone learned that lesson the hard way, it’s Belfort. He earned billions of dollars throughout his storied career, but he learned early in life that he had a gift for sales. At age 8 he had his own paper route. By the time he was in high school he was making $60,000 a year selling coolers full of cold treats to beachgoers visiting New York’s shore.
After a misguided attempt to become a dentist, Belfort launched his professional sales career selling seafood and meat door-to-door. He quickly realized he was so good at sales, he didn’t have to work for anyone else.
Before long, he started his own door-to-door sales business. Six months later he had 26 trucks on the road. One year later he was out of business. Belfort admitted he made the kinds of mistakes most entrepreneurs make, including expanding too fast and not screening workers.
When he heard a kid from his neighborhood was making a million dollars a day working on Wall Street, he got an interview with one of the oldest brokerage firms at the time, and landed a job as a broker trainee. His first day as a broker finally arrived, but as fate would have it, that day was Black Monday. The company shut down, and all his hopes and dreams were dashed.
“Where you are in life is not about where you currently are, it’s about where you think you are going,” Belfort said. He thought he was going nowhere. He wasn’t out of work for long, however.
He landed at a Long Island brokerage firm that was nothing like where he previously worked—there were no computers or dress codes—but he desperately needed the job. So he wrote a script, started calling people, and made $50,000 his first month on the job. In fact, he was so good, the other brokers at the firm listened in on his phone conversations to learn how he did it.
Six months later, Belfort opened his own brokerage firm. His success on Wall Street was based on a niche he uncovered. He focused on something that no one else was focusing on: selling penny stock to wealthy investors
Because he was good at training salespeople, he invented a sales training system called Straight Line Persuasion–a visual representation of what happens in a sale in a way that is easily understood. The salespeople he initially trained became successful and the company quickly grew.
But Belfort should have slowed down his growth. Lack of ethics and integrity, and the inability to manage his growth, were why he failed, he said. He lost everything: his money, his wife, his children, and eventually, his freedom. He deserved it and he knew it.
“Success in the absence of integrity is not success,” he told PestWorld attendees. He learned the hard way that ambition, not greed, is good.
Now that he has turned his life around—he’s 17 years sober and heads a successful training firm—Belfort is eager to share his path to success.
“[You] need a vision for the future,” he said. “It will motivate you.” Perhaps that’s why Scorsese’s film ends not with Belfort in jail, but establishing a successful business.
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