Putting a Thesis to Work

"I don't know quite how it happened that I'm making $1,000,000 a month," says Cortes Wesley Randell, 32, a Washingtonian who is president and chief executive of National Stu dent Marketing Corp. "I just sit in the office and talk to people."

Randell's fast-growing wealth, which he offhandedly understates, comes from stockholdings. His company promotes or sells diverse goods and services: mouthwash and antacid pills, magazines and record-club memberships, vacation cruises. It even does naval recruiting in a fickle market of 10,500,000 college and high school students in the U.S. and Canada. Since April 24, when the company brought out a public issue of its common stock, the price of its shares has jumped from $6 to $26.50 on the over-the-counter market. Accordingly, the value of Randell's 54% holding has swelled from $2,509,998 to just over $11 million.

Wall Posters. Randell makes money through a network of 581 part-time campus representatives, who earn up to $4,000 a year distributing samples, doing market research and peddling fad items. Last year, for example, they sold 55,000 paper dresses in 27 days for Mars Manufacturing Co., topped that by selling 100,000 personality and psychedelic wall posters (at $1 each). At a higher level, the company sold 105,000 youth air-fare identification cards for American Airlines--and kept $2 of the $3 price of each card for its effort. To help manufacturers boost sales of everyday products, N.S.M.C. "reps" place soft-sell posters on strategically located bulletin boards. In one such campaign, Alka-Seltzer offered to send a "cramming pillow--it allows you to cram effortlessly until the wee hours" to anybody who sent in $2.50.

Having written a thesis on "How to Start a Small Business" while enrolled at the University of Virginia, Randell persuaded himself to follow his own prescription while he was working as a marketing manager for ITT in Chicago. The idea jelled during a debutante party in Newport. As he sailed up to the dock in his college roommate's yacht, he recalls, "I decided I was getting behind." In his spare time, he wrote a guide to collegiate summer jobs, then at a cost of $150 printed up posters advertising "high-paying, fun-filled positions" and distributed them on four Wisconsin campuses. So many orders poured in the first week that Randell quit his $12,500-a-year job and went into business for himself. The $2.95 guide has since turned into N.S.M.C.'s mainstay product; last year Randell sold 100,000 copies in three editions and recently Doubleday & Co. brought out a fourth for bookstore sale. The company also operates one of the nation's largest computerized dating services, and systematically mines the data for mailing lists. Through such ingenuity, Student Marketing's revenues shot up from a mere $40,789 in fiscal 1965 to $723,199 in 1967, and the pace is still accelerating. Sales climbed to $1,014,448 in the six months ending last February 29, while profits tripled to $181,540.

With Computers. Still spreading out, Randell early this year bought two other college marketing services and next week will begin a computerized service to match graduating seniors with corporate job openings through a third acquisition, Manhattan-based Compu-job. In mid-June he expects to open a campus discount store at the University of Oklahoma. "It's very easy to start a small business these days," Randell maintains, "if you want to give up everything else for years."

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