Sellenthal Column #8, Part II – SELLING WAS AND IS A FAMILY AFFAIR FOR THE MANDELS

This is Part II of a two-part column.

Author's Note

Those of you who read my 2020 book, "The Last Book About Selling That You'll Ever Need" (Amazon, $21.95), will remember Charlie Mandel, who tutored me on effective selling techniques before I got angry with him and ended our long relationship in the early 1990s (he passed away at 81 in 2016).

Regretting having done so, I contacted his two sons, Marc and Doug, and told them that I had devoted a praiseworthy chapter in my book to him which they seemed to appreciate. When I began my syndicated monthly how-to column on the art of selling over a year ago and then, more recently, started posting it with greater frequency on Substack, I let his boys know that I was planning to write a column about Charlie and his impact on both of them and their highly successful careers.

Happily, both Marc and Doug remember their father with warmth and appreciation, the kind that my own three boys have bestowed on me for the better part of six decades.

To do full justice to both father and sons, it became evident that this column needed to be presented in two parts. Today’s Part II post on Charlie’s sons is what you are about to read and Part I on Charlie can be viewed here - https://theartofselling.substack.com/p/sellenthal-column-8-selling-was-and

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Part II: HIS SONS TOOK VARYING ROUTES TO SUCCESS BUT THEIR FATHER’S FINGERPRINTS LEFT AN INDELIBLE MARK

As for Charlie Mandel's sons, Doug, 58, and Marc, 60, speaking with them individually recently provided several meaningful insights into his relationships with them and how he aided and abetted their careers.

A FAMILIAL APPROACH TO SUCCESS

Doug's buy-in to their father's philosophies was swift and uncomplicated. "The family had moved from an apartment in Whitestone, Queens, a stone's throw from Manhattan, relatively speaking, to a large house in Huntington, a popular Nassau County suburb that required spending at least an hour twice a day on the Long Island Railroad.

"There was no way I was going to keep commuting," he explained. “It simply wasn't my thing."

Like his father and brother, Doug was bitten by the same entrepreneurial bug and, after graduating from college and working for three separate publishing companies, he moved from New York to Atlanta in 2001 and established a rep firm, the Mandel Media Group, that provides media sales for publishers, specifically for clients and agencies that are based in the Southeast (he and his two partners also have an office in Florida).

Charming, disarming and driven to succeed, a "people person" in every sense, Doug quickly proved that he was prepared for the imposing challenges he soon faced.

ADAPT OR PERISH

Remember, a few years into his entrepreneurship, magazines began surrendering much of their cache and advertising revenue to online sources.

Unlike so many companies that either ignored or stumbled badly during the transition from the analog to the digital world, Doug read the tea leaves correctly. "We had to be adaptive, and we were," he said proudly.

Doug's company has done well, producing more than $200 million in gross sales since he, with his father's encouragement, set up shop in the spare room of his new Atlanta home.

CHARLIE TAUGHT, DOUG LEARNED

"My Dad was my role model when it came to what you would call the art of selling," he told me.

And, at my request, Doug synthesized what he learned from his father with the following "Charlieisms" - his word, not mine:

- Take risks. You have to cross the line now and then to determine where the line is.

- Nothing is more important than developing personal relationships.

- Be an entertainer. Yes, product knowledge is important, but if your delivery is boring, what you've said will be forgotten quickly.

- A little self-promotion goes a long way.

- Follow your heart and success will follow.

- Success is the ability to make choices based solely on you and your family's needs and interests.

Doug learned his lessons well and continues to practice the preachings of his father.

SUCCESS IS SPELLED F-R-E-E-D-O-M

As for Marc, he remembers dinnertime conversations when his father sometimes asked Doug and him how they'd define success.

"As a byproduct of the go-go 1980s," Marc said, "my standard answer would often be something like a hybrid of Tom Wolfe’s Master of the Universe Sherman McCoy and Michael J. Fox’s Alex P. Keaton, being a multimillionaire, of course. Dad hated that answer, often chastising me and retorting, 'It’s not about the money. Success is about freedom,' an answer, at least at the time, I thought made little sense. Picture for a moment the movie, Braveheart and Mel Gibson’s William Wallace shouting 'FREEDOM!' with his fist in the air. That was a Mandel dinner scene that played out more than once."

Continuing, Mark added: "The moderate or limited commercial successes he enjoyed eventually did bring him the freedom to remove those shackles of corporate life and muster the courage to pursue his idealistic vision of perfection in the later 1980s, when he opened his own publishing business, launching Madison Avenue magazine and, later, Media People magazine with his closest allies, friends and family, which proved to be a labor of love."

Marc noted that his father's failure to hit a financial homerun didn’t seem to matter to him because he felt freer to chart his course of how and with whom he’d make a living during the last stages of his career.

According to Marc, "He even worked out a passion project of blending his love of golf and publishing, launching a golf-related publication and, later, an Internet venture in his retirement, which I know made him happier than any other time I can remember."

In connection with Marc's own career, from which he is now semi-retired, he said, "I can finally admit that Dad was indeed correct in his idealism and desire to be truly free and unencumbered by other people's dogma. I can now spot his influence on my career choices as I shunned corporate life and opted for a more risk-prone entrepreneurial course, often in sales and sales leadership roles.

"My happiest times in recent memory were when I had the opportunity to call my own shots and, as Steve Jobs used to say, 'put a dent in the universe.'"

TAKING DAD’S SKILLS TO THE NEXT LEVEL

Like his Dad, Marc started his career focused on publishing companies like Bloomberg, Dow Jones, Reuters, The New York Times, and Tribune Publishing. However, this is where the father/son parallels diverge with Marc leveraging the interpersonal sales expertise mastered by his Dad and applying them "at scale" to customer interactions where companies attempt to win over customers daily. His sales approach has been consultative in nature, focused on improving Customer Experience management (CX) in call centers (customer service agents interacting with customers) and building Voice of the Customer programs (VoC) to ensure that customers feel heard and valued and the insights derived from these conversations are turned into actionable strategies to improve his client's ROI.

Recently, he semi-retired and said, "I love the art of dealmaking and now that I’m in the later stages of my career, I can finally admit Dad was indeed correct in his idealism and desire to be truly free and unencumbered by other people’s dogma. I clearly see his influence all over my career choices, even unintentionally, as I shunned corporate life and instead gravitated to a more risk-prone, entrepreneurial life, often in a sales and sales leadership role.

'I DID IT OUR WAY'

"Like Dad," he added, "my happiest times in recent memory were when I had opportunities to chart my course and work for myself or a small number of friends. And, like Dad, whether we genuinely achieved a huge commercial success or barely scraped by, that freedom and the privileges that came with it proved to me years after those argumentative dinnertime discussions of yesteryear to be my yardstick for measuring my achievements and successes, and ultimately, my delight.

"Even though I’ll probably never fill Dad’s formidable shoes, my journey has indeed allowed me to follow in his footsteps and entrepreneurially combine my passions of artificial intelligence, data analytics, and baseball card collecting in my young, exciting startup called Collectibli, a business I recently started to make it easier to buy valuable and rare sports cards via auction houses using a unique phone app that I designed and will launch during the summer of 2025. Even while I prepare to launch Collectibli, I will also work in the service of other entrepreneurs to help guide their business strategies with my tailored advisory and coaching services as they work to tackle whatever challenges they face.

"I can only hope Dad will be proud, and I genuinely think he will be.

While admirable and touching that his boys honor their father's memory so strongly, it's crystal clear to this observer that each of them is in a league of his own.