Men think they push their own business to greatness, but they don’t. Nine out of ten have greatness thrust upon them by national advertising, but you never hear of them chasing the Agency that did it up the boulevard trying to catch and laurel it for pulling them out of the puddle of commercial provincialism.
Here let us state in calm, well modulated tones that we are not forgetting about the office boy, around whose life this little narrative is written, or wrotten. We are letting him alone until he grows into manhood.
The office boy is now grown and so is the business.
The boy is Alfred William Clerkmind, and he is the President of the whole outfit.
The old proprietor has long since been mounded and marked, and the Sales & Advertising Manager, of whom we spoke of, or rather, about whom we spoke about, is still reading Printers Ink and learning how they put it over.
Alfred William Clerkmind has been so busy growing up with the business that he has never had time to travel any farther from home than the one-lunged Country Club for nine holes on a Sunday morning.
His reading has been confined to his Trade Magazine, his home town daily, and his competitors’ catalogues.
The people he has met socially are the same earspreaders he used to know as boys and girls in the days when he was juggling up the mail in the leather sack, size 24″ x 36″.
The men he has met in a business way, all have come down to the bowlegged burg to sell him something, and so he has always had eager listeners whenever he talked from the chest out; so he has been denied the golden privilege of having men tell him to his cone-shaped face just what they thought of him and his Ideas.