Sales First!: Growing Our Company the Old-Fashioned Way, the ColorMatrix Story

How do you grow a business to $100 million in revenue without venture capital? SALES FIRST! These two entrepreneurs financed growth the old-fashioned way: by selling products.

In the 1980s, Midwestern chemical salesmen John Haugh and Michael Shaughnessy found a new way to add color to plastics. Their product was an incremental innovation for the massive global plastics industry. It had great potential, but they lacked the connections and experience needed to raise venture capital. How would they afford to grow their business?

Driving their beat-up cars around the Ohio River Valley, they devised a simple plan: "SALES FIRST!" With every decision about customers, capital, or human resources, they asked one question: Will it generate sales quickly? That's how they grew their company to over $100 million in revenues, then recapitalized it, and eventually benefited from its sale for over $400 million. In the process, John and Mike managed their relationship so well that they never had a significant disagreement between them-and they created hundreds of jobs in Rust Belt Cleveland.