Tim King will tell you flat out that everything is sales, and he has the resume to back it up. Fresh out of college he got handed a Yellow Pages and the Kansas City metro, and six months later he had landed three accounts that barely paid anything. On this episode of Ground Zero Growth, Tim walks through two decades of sales jobs, warehouse shifts, collections calls, and a layoff two weeks before a home build, then explains how Southwestern Consulting finally got him coaching the thing he had been doing all along.
What You'll Hear
- How Tim uses the sniper approach to networking, sitting back and picking three or four conversations worth having
- The six-month stretch at a Kansas City radio station where he landed three accounts and still could not pay rent
- Why instant gratification versus delayed gratification changes how a manager should onboard a new seller
- The collections job at Citibank he took for the tuition reimbursement, and the one call where a ten dollar a week payment felt like a win
- The Blockbuster, Amazon, and Netflix comparison Tim uses to explain why big companies freeze and small ones pivot
- How a shutdown in 2020 turned a bottom health ecommerce side project from a couple hundred thousand a month into six and a half million
- Getting laid off two weeks before signing loan paperwork on a new home build
- How his former sales trainer Carrie used coaching questions on him to prove he had been coaching for years without calling it that
Meeting Tim and why everything is sales
Tim King is a consultant with Southwestern Consulting, and Sam met him at a Kansas City B2B networking event. Tim describes himself as an innovator who hangs back at a room before picking three or four people to actually talk to. He calls it a sniper approach. It is not shyness. It is a filter.
Southwestern Consulting is one arm of the Southwestern family of companies. Tim explains that the original Southwestern Advantage Company was born in 1870 doing door to door direct sales. Over time other companies started asking how they did it, and in 2007 the consulting side spun up to formalize sales and leadership training, one on one coaching, and broader consulting work.
Tim works mostly with small business owners and sales teams. The job, as he frames it, is not complicated. It is asking the questions that help a leader or a teammate get unstuck, clarify a vision, and reverse engineer the path from here to where they actually want to go.
The title of the episode comes from a story Tim tells later. A marketing professional at a networking event insisted she was not in sales. Tim walked her through the tough client conversations, the objections, the re presenting, and the re closing she did every week. By the end of the exchange she admitted it. If you are handling objections and trying to change someone's mind, you are selling. The label is optional. The work is not.
A Yellow Pages, a metro, and six months of floundering
Tim's first real sales job came straight out of Northwest Missouri State, where he had finished a broadcasting degree with a minor in health education. The plan had been physical therapy, then sportscasting, then some hybrid of the two. The actual job was a radio station in Kansas City that handed him a Yellow Pages after two weeks of training and pointed him at the metro.
He lasted about six months. In that stretch he closed three accounts, a chiropractor and two others that were not the bars, restaurants, or auto dealers where the real money lived. Three logos on the board. Not enough income to support a newly married couple trying to buy a house while his wife was a second year teacher.
What Tim took from that stretch was not a sales technique. It was self knowledge. He realized he did not have the killer mentality that some sellers have, the one that can hear a hundred nos to get a yes without it costing anything. His psyche did not enjoy that, and he would rather go work for someone else than keep beating his head against that particular brick wall.
He and Sam spend time on that tension. A good manager reads which kind of seller is in the room. Some people need instant gratification, a check handed over within fifteen minutes of the first close. Others are motivated by a target, a ladder, or the simple stability of a paycheck. The one size fits all playbook fails either way. Tim calls the fix personal conferences, the short one on one conversations where a leader figures out what a specific person actually needs.
Warehouse forklifts, Citibank collections, and an MBA
The next chapter was a small industrial electric motor company in Riverside where a friend hired Tim as inside sales. It was more customer service than hunting, and it played to his strengths. When the warehouse manager left, Tim took that role too, running a forklift, cleaning up the racking, and standardizing a FIFO system that had quietly become grab whatever is closest. Getting the warehouse truly first in first out meant his crew of two or three was often done by one in the afternoon.
He stayed about three years before he hit the ceiling of a small company. The next rung was the owner's chair, so he moved on. Citibank hired him into late stage collections in Kansas City. The benefits were better, the money was a little better, and the real draw was tuition reimbursement. Tim enrolled at Baker University and finished an MBA with a focus on strategic planning.
Collections did not fit him. Listening to people explain why they could not pay and then trying to sell them on paying anyway felt to him like begging. One call stuck, though. Someone was six months behind on tens of thousands of dollars and could only afford ten dollars a week. Tim walked them through it. Food, lights, shelter, ten dollars. They thanked him. He still says he did not help them much, but the phrase servant selling started to matter after that. It is the idea that his real job is to use what he knows and who he knows to move a person forward, even when the help is small.
As soon as the degree posted, he left Citibank.
Blockbuster, Netflix, and the cost of not pivoting
Midway through the conversation Sam and Tim end up on a long detour that frames everything else. Blockbuster had every piece it needed to become what Amazon and Netflix became. Each store was a distribution point. The subscription model existed. The physical inventory was already in place. What Blockbuster did not have was the willingness to pivot in a way that would cannibalize the retail model that was still paying the bills.
Tim's point is not that the executives were stupid. It is that change gets harder as the company gets bigger. Telling every store manager that the business is moving online means telling every store employee their job may not exist. The path of least resistance is to wait, try a halfway version, and hope the market swings back.
Netflix made the opposite call. Sam remembers the moment Netflix walked away from DVDs and went streaming only. The catalog got worse for a while. The A list titles dropped off. Customers put up with B grade movies because the convenience was that much better. Tim frames that as a calculated bet. Netflix knew what it could lose in subscribers and still come out ahead. Blockbuster never ran that math in time.
The lesson for a solo owner or a two person firm is oddly freeing. If a giant like Blockbuster with a full bench of advisors could not pivot, a small operator should not self damn for struggling to pivot either. The instinct to keep plowing forward is useful right up until the market has already moved. After that, the same instinct is what ends the company. Somewhere between blind optimism and honest reassessment is the call every owner eventually has to make.
A layoff, a coach, and finally naming the work
After Citibank, Tim stacked a series of roles that each taught him a different piece of the puzzle. A neighbor's two way radio company put him on sales and marketing before WordPress had really taken hold, so he learned how to build a hodgepodge site and generate leads online. Motorcycle closeouts in Smithville taught him data operations and ecommerce. A stint as a Missouri Farm Bureau insurance agent reconnected him with a sales trainer named Carrie who would matter later.
The biggest win on paper came at a company he refers to as bottom health. He joined as ecommerce manager. For years leadership treated the online channel as a side dish while Walmart, CVS, and Walgreens drove the numbers. When 2020 closed retail, Amazon and ecommerce became the only game. Tim says that by the time he left in 2023, Amazon alone was second only to Walmart retail, and the channel had grown from a couple hundred thousand a month to six and a half million.
Then the layoff. The company had been owned by private equity and had quietly missed an IPO window the week before it was supposed to go public. Private equity's fastest way to clean up a balance sheet is to convert employees into third party expenses. Tim's position was absorbed by three people and an outside vendor. The timing was brutal. He was two weeks from signing loan paperwork on a home build. That build did not happen.
Carrie called. She asked if he had ever thought about coaching. He pushed back. She started asking him the same coaching questions he now uses with clients. Tell me about a time you trained someone. Tell me about a time you helped someone get unstuck. By the end of the conversation he realized he had been coaching for years without the label. In December of 2023 he signed on with Southwestern Consulting, where the training materials alone would cost thirty thousand dollars on the open market. He is still there, still doing the work, and still insisting, with receipts, that everything is sales.
About Tim King
At the time of recording, Tim King was a consultant with Southwestern Consulting, the sales and leadership training arm of the Southwestern family of companies. He coaches small business owners and sales teams on servant selling, leadership, and getting unstuck. His background spans radio advertising sales, warehouse operations, Citibank collections, Missouri Farm Bureau insurance, and ecommerce leadership where he grew an Amazon channel into the millions. Southwestern Consulting