M. M. & M.

Diamond Jim Brady, who thought nothing of downing a few dozen oysters as an appetizer for a 15-course dinner, was during his lifetime as famed as a salesman as he was as a gastrophile. If his stomach was gargantuan, his entertainment expenses and the sales that followed were epic. The Brady fable got its pith from Charles A. Moore, founder of Manning, Maxwell & Moore, who took Brady on as a cub salesman in 1879 when the company was only a jobber for railroad supplies, sent Diamond Jim out on the road with instructions to spend all the money necessary to make customers like him. Diamond Jim stuck to this tenet through the panic of the middle nineties with such success that spending money to make money has been the Manning, Maxwell & Moore system to lick depressions ever since.

In 1930 the company varied the formula. By that time M. M. & M. was making safety valves, pressure gauges, industrial thermometers and other industrial control equipment in Bridgeport and Boston, but it was selling 80% of its products to only 100 customers. By 1937 it multiplied the number of its customers 40 times by the simple expedient of expanding its list of products, a plan followed so thoroughly that 70% of last year's $10,000,000 business was in products such as Hancock Bronze Valves, Consolidated Power Control Valves, and Hancock Turbo-Injectors, which the company was not making in 1930.

Last week, facing another depression, M. M. & M. reverted to Diamond Jim's original formula. President Robert Ross Wason, who is also president of Zonite Products Corp., this time decided to expand his sales force, began by increasing it 25%. This meant adding only nine men, but this is a large addition in a field where individual orders may run as high as $500,000. Mindful that when M. M. & M. bought Philadelphia's Box, Crane & Hoist Corp. in 1932 such methods boosted its share of the hoist business from 2.2% to 15% within the five years, Sales Manager William P. Bradbury predicted that 1938 would be his company's biggest year. "In periods of retarded buying," he explained, "we have found that more calls must be made in order to maintain the same sales volume. . . . We share completely Mr. Brady's boundless assurance of the prosperous future of this country."

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