When Mike Johnson first started out as a full-time outside salesman for his father’s business, Johnson Lumber Company, in 1989, he couldn’t figure out why prospective clients would run away from him when he walked up to a construction site.
Dressed in khakis and a buttoned-up shirt, Johnson—fresh out of San Jose State University—would drive around Gilroy and farther south to towns such as Hollister and Salinas, look for ongoing construction and stop over to try to make his sales pitch to the onsite builder on behalf of Johnson Lumber.
There was just one problem: nobody would talk to him.
“Guys would literally be running from me. I would go to these job sites and guys would just not talk to me,” recalled Johnson, who eventually caught up to one of them long enough to learn that they thought he was a building inspector by the way he dressed.
