The One Moment That Shapes a Career
Some people can trace their entire professional life back to a single moment in childhood. Not a diploma. Not a lucky break. One small moment that revealed who they already were.
For Mike Kirby, that moment happened at 14, standing on a farm with a phone book and hundreds of cantaloupes that needed to sell.
He did not have a sales course. He did not have a script. He had a product and a willingness to pick up the phone. That willingness turned into a career.
The Big Idea, Fear Is the Real Obstacle
Most people assume the best salespeople are born with a rare talent. Mike says the opposite. “I would not say a lot of talent, but just no fear.”
That distinction matters more than it looks. Talent is hard to manufacture. Fearlessness is a choice you can practice. When the only thing standing between you and the ask is your own hesitation, the work gets simple. Uncomfortable, but simple.
The cantaloupes were real. The fear was optional. He chose to skip the fear.
How a Farm Kid Learned to Sell
Mike grew up on a working farm in Middletown, Indiana. He started pulling weeds in a strawberry patch at 12. By 14 he knew the operation well, so when the farm ended up with more cantaloupes than local buyers could handle, the owner handed him a job. Go retail.
So Mike grabbed the yellow pages and started cold calling grocery stores. His pitch was plain. We grow cantaloupes as big as basketballs, and they are local. Store after store said yes.
His takeaway was almost too simple. “Here’s my product. Do you have an interest? You get enough no’s out of the way, and eventually a yes shows up.”
That is the whole game, described by a teenager.
Where the Confidence Came From
Mike credits the ability to talk to people as a gift passed down through his family. His father had it. His grandfather, a Jewel Tea route driver in the 1930s and 1940s, had it too.
But he is careful not to call it genetics. The gift was not charm. It was the absence of fear. He did not treat a no as a wound. He treated it as one more step toward the next yes.
That same mindset showed up again later, when his path took a sharp turn.
The Path Was Not a Straight Line
Mike wanted to farm and coach wrestling. Then the farm economy collapsed. Interest rates spiked, families lost land, and by the time he finished at Purdue there were no agriculture jobs waiting.
So he learned to weld. A few years into precision welding, he looked at the older workers around him and saw a future he did not want. At 25 he decided to change direction.
A wrestling coaching job opened the door to selling life insurance on the side. He took it, realized he wanted to build something of his own, and went all in. “This is what I want to do. I want to be an entrepreneur.”
The trade changed. The trait did not.
How to Put This to Work
You do not need a new personality to sell well. You need a repeatable habit of making the ask.
Start by naming the call you keep avoiding. The follow up. The price conversation. The pitch to a prospect who already likes you.
Then make it. Treat the first few nos as the cost of admission, not as proof you are bad at this. The yes is usually closer than the fear suggests.
If you lead a business, model this for your team. Confidence is taught by example, not by memo.
And keep the bar low for what counts as a win. Mike did not need every grocery store to say yes. He needed a few. When you stop demanding a perfect record and start counting attempts instead of outcomes, the pressure drops and the activity goes up. More activity is what actually moves the number, not a flawless pitch.
The Myth Worth Killing
The myth is that selling requires a special gift. It does not. The people who win are usually the ones willing to be told no more often than everyone else.
Mike was not the most talented kid on the farm. He was the one who picked up the phone.
Your Next Step
If this story landed for you, the next move is a real conversation. The team at Performance Financial helps busy leaders make smarter decisions with their time and their money, and the first step is simple.
Reach out, find a time, and let’s talk about where you are headed.
Transcript
Host: I want to start with what we talked about yesterday at lunch. Do you remember that conversation? I was listening to a podcast on the way back from a coffee date, and it was talking about how a lot of incredibly successful people can look back at one moment in childhood that shows the impact of where they are professionally now. At lunch yesterday you were telling a story about something that happened to you as a kid that was a defining moment for you as a professional. You were talking about calling grocery stores to sell cantaloupes.
Mike: I am talking about the cantaloupes the size of basketballs. It is really not a huge deal, but it gave me some insight. I had no fear, more than anything. I would not say a lot of talent, but just no fear.
I grew up on a farm. I started pulling weeds in a strawberry patch when I was 12 years old. I was tan from the waist up because I wore jeans the whole time I was doing that. Back then they called it a truck patch. We had about three acres of strawberries, sweet corn, cantaloupes, and we planted 3,300 apple trees. It was really a grain farm, soybeans and corn, but to diversify revenue back then they also worked a lot of what they called truck patch, anywhere from strawberries to other commodities at the time.
That was when I was 12. By the time I was 14, I was very familiar with what we were doing. This is Howe Farms out of Middletown, Indiana. Dave, the owner, asked me to come in because we had all of these cantaloupes. I do not know if you are familiar with Indiana cantaloupes, but they truly can get as big as a basketball, and we had hundreds of them. He realized we were not going to get enough people to come to the farm to buy them. We needed to go retail. So he said, we are going to call grocery stores today.
I grabbed the yellow pages and started making cold calls. I did not even care who answered the phone. It did not matter to me. I said, this is Howe Farms, we grow cantaloupes as big as basketballs. Next thing you know they are saying, yeah, we will take this crate, this crate, this crate. I even told them, we can bring some over so you can look at them. They said, nope, if they are local grown, we will take them. This was Harvest Market, not the big chains. I want to say we even sold to Marsh, which was out of Yorktown, Indiana at the time.
We just had some success, and I thought to myself, this is fairly easy. So if I really look back, that is kind of where my sales career started. I can talk to people, which was a gift I got from my dad, who I think got it from his dad, who was a Jewel Tea route driver back in the thirties and forties. I am not saying it is genetics, but I just did not have a fear to do it. That was the big key. You say, here is my product, do you have an interest? You get enough no’s out of the way, and eventually a yes shows up.
Host: Dialing for dollars at 14.
Mike: Yeah.
Host: One of my favorite parts of your whole story is that it did not really catch up right away. You went to Purdue, and you went to school for Ag Econ.
Mike: Yep.
Host: There is a story you have at Purdue, where they had you do a public speaking piece. How does that story go?
Mike: It was not at the end of the year, it was graduation. I had been on campus, and the farm kids were easy to pick out, probably still are today, running around in flannel shirts and seed corn hats. The ag school, much like engineering or nursing, is tight, so you get to know who is in that school and the leadership of it. This was at the ag graduation, and they came to me and said, we would like you to give the invocation.
Now, back then I will tell you I was not a very religious guy. There were certainly more qualified people in my class. I said, are you sure? They said, yeah, we would like you to give the invocation. I am not sure I had ever prayed out loud at that point in my life, much less in front of however many people.
So I went to a classmate I knew was a churchgoer and said, they have asked me to do this. He looked at me and said, you, why you? I said, I have no idea, but they have asked me to do it, and I need help. We sat down and wrote a prayer. I could not tell you what I said, probably even while I was saying it, that is how nervous I was. They talk about how your knees touch when you get nervous. It is true. My knees were literally touching while I was up there.
One of the proud moments is that my grandmother, mom, and dad were all at the graduation. Grandma, who was the most religious person I knew at the time, was like, I cannot believe they are asking Mike to do this, but get it done. That was the first time I ever spoke in front of more than four or five people. It scared the daylights out of me, honestly, but we got through it and then we moved on.
Host: Did you go to school for sales? What was the original plan?
Mike: When you grow up you do not want to be a farmer, but I did. I wanted to do two things, coach high school wrestling and farm. Anybody who watches this is probably pretty young, but coming out of the seventies into the early eighties you probably heard of Farm Aid. The reason Farm Aid started was that people were losing farms. Agriculture was in major decline. Between the Federal Land Bank and the PCA, there was land grabbing. Farmers overextended themselves and borrowed too much money, and the lenders eagerly loaned it.
The bottom line is farmers cannot control grain prices, and inflation at that time, post Jimmy Carter, was insane. Interest rates jumped to 13, 14, 16, 18 percent. The farmers were collapsing. So by the time I got out of school, agriculture was not even on the radar.
Host: So straight out of school you had your speaking chops. You went straight into what?
Mike: At that time I went to Hobart because there were no ag jobs. I did all the welding on the farm, so I went to Hobart, the school of welding in Troy, Ohio, and came back and worked for a company called Anderson Tool and Engineering as a precision welder. About three and a half years into that I looked around and saw that most of the old welders, no offense to them, were alcoholics, miserable, and broke down. At that time I was probably 24 or 25, and I said, this is not the path I want to be on.
Backing up a little, in 1986 I was approached to coach the high school team I graduated from, Daleville High School, in wrestling. We had a fair amount of success. A little company out of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, called Life Investors was recruiting teacher coaches at the time. Their recruiters came in and approached me about selling life insurance. I said, let us try this. It is usually a part time gig, what we call a twin career, where you sell life insurance on the side. But I soon realized this is what I want to do. I want to be in the business world. I want to be an entrepreneur. That is when I made the leap and went full time.