James Catledge
speaker
208 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
James Catledge’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah. They're huge, huge markup. I think our parks were two or 300 and we're selling about 18, 1900 per year. Yeah. because to hear again is pretty powerful. Of course. To hear again. So I said, just tell me where the licensing is on this stuff, and do I need some type of medical credential? I mean, what are you talking about? Nope.
Yeah, so basically he explains all this to me, drives me down, and everybody he's employed is like triple my age. Like these people are all like, could be my dad or granddad. And I'm thinking, do you want me to manage these people? I'm literally right out of college. He goes, no, you know more than they know about sales. He goes, absolutely. You need to be an energy of these people.
I said, and you're going back to Salt Lake to run your franchises. I'm just loose down here with your people. He goes, exactly. So this guy put huge trust in me. I was already making, I think 130 was my last year in college. I made 130. Plus I got all this free trade. So it's almost like 200 grand in lifestyle. And so I need to make that. And what year is this? Yeah, by the way, it's a while ago.
1991, I left BYU. Okay, so 91. 91, yeah. So I moved down here to Las Vegas where we are, and I take this job. I sign a one-year agreement with him. He's giving me a bonus on every hearing aid, a six-figured flat salary, 100 grand flat, $83.33 a month. I remember the checks, $83.33 a month. And then I want to say it's like $65 on every hearing aid. every ear.
So there's a huge incentive for me to go store to store, making sure hearing aids are getting sold. And how are you testing? How long is your testing taking? What are you saying? So I'm literally having these older fellows explain to me their process, which they didn't like, you know, it just seems too young to come at them like that.
But I did understand the business dynamics of it and the business model. The other thing that helped me a lot is working in radio sales, I had to understand all these businesses and how they made their money and how they got their customers. I had to intuitively understand to write their ads. Like, what is their customer? How do they get there? What are the dynamics?
What are the profit margins on their products? I had to understand all that about all those businesses. And so, in a really weird way, without planning it, I ended up becoming pretty knowledgeable about how businesses work.
yeah right and being able to really provide quickly solutions to those pain points that were very appealing they responded to yeah yeah and by the way when you're spending money that's what a great copywriter does yeah that's exactly and that's what i was i was writing copy and what ended up happening was the the people who make the decision to spend money off the balance sheet
the owner of the business, okay? There's rarely a staff member making a decision about how much we will spend of our balance sheet money in this discretionary way. I usually end up meeting with the person who it matters most to. This is not like delegating to someone else to spend someone else's money. So I end up in these conversations and really in a weird way mentors
all these business owners in a really shadow way, mentoring my young mind about how the world looks, how businesses should look, how they could look. Good businessman, bad businessman. I'm able to observe that quickly, transactionally. So when I moved down here, I understood the hearing in business intuitively. I'd been writing this guy's ads forever.
And he is a mentor to me, a friend and a mentor. I do it for one year. I'm really bored. I'm bored. I'm in Montgomery Wards. I'm in Sears. I'm in wherever our locations were. We had a freestanding location over here in Tropicana in Pecos, and that's where my office was.
and they can't hear it and they can't hear you yeah right exactly you're yelling you're yelling all day yeah and and the wives always can hear and the men usually cannot hear that that was the other day i think that's my choice that may that may be something they worked out it's my choice right what was it there was an old couple on like sort of the late night cup one of the late night shows and they said what's the secret to a long marriage and he's like what he goes i'm sorry he goes
So I do that for a year. I'm attending church, still in the Mormon faith, and my bishop is an insurance agent general manager. He's like a GA, general agent for an insurance agency. I don't know anything about insurance. It sounds like a scam. We didn't have any as a kid. My family didn't own any insurance.
I don't quite understand the dynamics of paying premiums for 75 years and hoping that when you're gone, some stranger is going to deliver a check to your family for half a million dollars. The whole thing sounded scammy to me, but I liked this guy, this guy's mentor really is this Mormon Bishop. His name is Chris Zockel. And I say that because a lot of people in this town know Chris.
So he, as a Bishop says to me, James, you'd be very good at this. I don't know. I may have to hold my nose and jump in on this, and I don't know. I got a good gig where I'm at. He says, listen, we've got a proficiency test that the CEO of Beneficial Life has designed. Every agent has to take it. Just let me give you the proficiency test.
And it will tell us both whether you would be proficient at this. Strangest questions I've ever been asked. I mean, strange questions. So I go through this whole thing. He calls me. He submitted this thing. It takes a couple of weeks to evaluate in Salt Lake City. They send it back. He says, let's get together. I want to go through your proficiency test. He says, listen.
I've scored 60, 70 guys that have worked through the agency over the years. Never seen anything like it. I've never seen anything like it. Your score's off the charts. It's higher than mine by like 10 points. And he's the boss of the agency. I said, well, what does that mean? Because I do not, at this point, the way you've explained insurance, I don't like it.
So what does that mean to have a high proficiency? It means you would make a fortune in this business. Whatever's going on in you is dynamically designed for this. And I just believed him and I was flattered by the comments. And he took me under his wing, taught me estate planning seminars. where he runs an ad in the local newspaper back in the day. If you were over 65, you read the newspaper.
And his flyers were for living trust.
Yeah, come for a free lunch. And so I was a pretty good public speaker, and he was very good because he's a bishop. He's very eloquent. And so I would sit there and take notes on his –
Showing 101–120 of 208 · page 6 of 11
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