ABSTRACT
Phil Watkins1 was the president of a division of a large paper brokerage firm. A paper broker buys paper from a paper mill, and then sells it to a manufacturer or printer. It’s a risky business, with paper-thin margins, as it were, but it can also be a profitable one. The paper business is also one of the last vestiges of oldfashioned salesmanship, the kind where expense accounts sometimes include customer entertainment at “gentlemen’s clubs,” complete with a huge bar tab. Watkins had been in the business for almost 20 years and was thinking about getting out. He felt that he didn’t fit in. “I’m not a sales guy, I’m not a financial guy, I just fell into this business when I was a kid,” he once said.
