December 10, 2025

Abstract Essay, now in its fifth season, features Tim Barry—expert in developing top-performing sales professionals one step at a time—as my guest.

32 minutes

Tim Barry

Growing Top Performing Sales People One Step at a Time!

Starting a business can be scary, but greed and survival prompted me to get out there and start making money at a very young age.

Growing up in a lower middle class family can be challenging, but when my family's resources were split in half because my parents got divorced, it was even tougher.

But I had dreams of buying a Lamborghini Countach 5000 and traveling the whole world.....

So I went to the local grocery store (Butera Finer Foods in Downers Grove, Illinois) and applied for a job in the produce section. The hiring manager asked me, "Can I ask how old you are?" and I replied "I'm 14."

She apologized and informed me that she couldn't hire me until I was 16 under workplace laws. So instead of complaining, I figured out a way to start a business cleaning houses in the 'rich' part of town.

I printed out a bunch of flyers at the local library that had a dot matrix printer and I rode my bike then hung the offer to clean their gigantic house for $50. It worked and soon I was off to the races.

I've achieved incredible success AND failed miserably. The funny part is that all the most important lessons I learned in building businesses came from the miserable failure!

I've built and scaled 5 of my own businesses and today, I work closely with small business owners helping them achieve their dreams through sales training, leadership training and executive coaching.

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By Daniel Lucas /Sal Cosenza

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