Two Country Girls Put Together a Complex Global Marketing Network
Ellen Dolan and Joy Jackson have lived 14 miles from town and a mile apart since their teen-agers were babies. They have been together through diapers, drought and dark times in rural America.
Now the two farm women have teamed up to sell popcorn to the United Arab Emirates, ginseng to South Korea, taco sauce to Saudi Arabia, hash browns to Australia and oat bran to Wal-Mart.
They are the guiding force behind AMTEX, a home-grown marketing firm representing small to mid-sized Midwestern companies that mostly produce so-called value-added foods.
In 1980 Dolan, now 44, was a country girl who planted her peas and lettuce to suit her aesthetic sense, dabbled at art and exchanged dishrags with neighbor women at a monthly coffee klatch. Her husband, Gary, farmed 2,000 acres with one hired hand and brought in $750,000 worth of crops.
But by 1986, when AMTEX was founded by Gary and some other farmers and businessmen, the farm crisis had forced the Dolans to buy back their home on the courthouse steps. Most of the machinery was gone. So was the hired man. Gary Dolan was starting over on the land, and Ellen Dolan became, without intending to or knowing how, a fledgling entrepreneur.
‘I Was Drafted’
A couple of months after AMTEX started, its office manager quit “and I was drafted to ‘make this thing work!’ because I was the only unemployed wife,” Dolan said.
“I came in here with no accounts and empty files. I couldn’t run the typewriter, I couldn’t understand the concept. Every night I’d leave here crying. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Sell soybeans to Japan? Impossible!”
Today AMTEX represents 41 companies and is aggressively looking for more. Dolan and Jackson, 37, who “volunteered to help Ellen get caught up and then we never did,” say they still haven’t made any money. But they agree that every day they go to work they feel as if they will land a big contract.
“Enthusiasm is the key to this. We’re opportunistic, we’re tenacious,” said Dolan. “We keep reminding ourselves we sold oat bran cereal to Wal-Mart. If we did it once, we can do it again.”
It was their first big sale, full of hilarious foul-ups and tough lessons.
“I wrote Sam Walton (founder of Wal-Mart) a letter and told him about AMTEX, then months went by. One day I got a collect call from the head food buyer, who wanted us to come to Bentonville, Ark. (Wal-Mart headquarters), and show him our products. I told him I’d have to call him back because neither of us had ever driven through Kansas City.”
Laughing hard at the memory, Jackson said: “I panicked and told Ellen: ‘Oh, no, I can only drive to the Missouri River, I can’t cross it.’ It was like a phobia. Neither one of us had ever, ever driven in freeway traffic.”
But after giving each other pep talks, they called Wal-Mart buyer Joe Craig back and said they would come.
White-Knuckle Driving
“We drove through Kansas City white-knuckle all the way, sick at our stomachs, convinced we would die on the freeway,” Dolan said. “Then we just knew we’d never find Arkansas. Then we were afraid we’d never find Wal-Mart in Bentonville, which is ludicrous looking back on it, because it’s as big as the U.N.”
Buyer Craig, now working in another Wal-Mart division, remembers them as “pretty sharp, open-minded and professional. I was impressed with them from the beginning.”
It took 18 months to close the deal, said Dolan, “and in that time there was a worldwide oats shortage, not enough cardboard to make the cereal boxes, the original oat bran maker was bought by another company and Joe Craig was transferred.”
Along the way, the women got to know every restaurant in Bentonville and just about every Wal-Mart receptionist.
“Some days this job makes us crazy,” said Jackson, “and other days it feeds our souls.”
Every letter AMTEX sends begins “Good Day from Trenton, Missouri, USA!” Correspondence wings its way from a 10-by-12 foot cubicle on Main Street in this town of 7,000 to countries all over the world, as well as hundreds of potential domestic clients.
“In return we get letters that begin ‘An Exceedingly Good Day from Singapore,’ ” said Dolan. “It’s a thrill because we don’t send three-paragraph corporate letters, we extend a hand in friendship and offer barbecue sauce on the side.
“When we get an overseas call we tell ‘em right off that we’re just two farm women in a small office and we’re just getting started, so don’t expect a huge staff with BMAs from Harvard, or whatever those fancy degrees are.”
Added Jackson: “Somebody in Japan wanted an AMTEX flow chart. I went home and asked my husband: ‘Honey, what’s a flow chart?’ ”
They may not know the jargon, but they put in 10-hour days trying to market foods such as smoked meats, bee pollen, popcorn, Missouri wine and stone-ground flour, as well as homemade lawn furniture and firewood.
Government Agencies
From the beginning, AMTEX sought help from the Missouri Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s foreign service branch, which publishes descriptions of American products available for export.
“We operate on a shoestring, so we’ve become aggressive guerrilla marketers,” said Jackson, explaining they use a network of government services to make contacts.
The two friends and co-workers also have become experts in minutiae, trivia and exotica.
“We got a call from Switzerland asking us if we had Boletus edilus ,” said Dolan. “Neither of us had the vaguest idea what that was, but we thought it might be a plant. We went home, found out in the encyclopedia it was a dried mushroom, tracked some down in Poland and put the supplier and the buyer together by Telex.”
They also know where to find war-risk insurance, how to get labeling in Arabic and which freight forwarders are most efficient in Indonesia.
Their jobs have changed them and opened new vistas in lives once focused almost exclusively on home and family.
“Joy used to make wedding gowns and I used to watch the birds feed,” said Dolan. “AMTEX is my canvas. I talk about nurturing it the same way I used to talk about raising my boys. This is everything I never thought I’d do.”
