Selling vacations a Millinocket success

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MILLINOCKET – A dozen telemarketers were immersed in quiet telephone conversations, giving the room a seething sound. Vaguely Caribbean dance music pulsed from a boom box. Then a bell rang and the bell-ringer leaned out from behind a window partition.

“Is Jordana up there yet?” she called out.

“Yes,” Bill Gould answered. He rose from behind a blinking computer screen and marked green slashes on a large tote board next to “Casey” and “Jordana.” For Cancun Travel Unlimited, the green slashes – indications of sold vacations – were a good day in the making.

“We got a good buzz going here,” Mel Gould III, Bill’s brother, said. “These guys are hot. They are on fire. … And they’re making really good money, too. They snap up the phones as fast as the calls come in.”

Mel Gould III and his family opened the business, which sells Cancun and Costa Rican resort vacations to U.S., Canadian and British customers, on May 30 after several years in Florida.

The action gets him pumped.

“He’s high stress. He loves it,” Bill Gould said of his brother. “That’s his world. When he gets going, you can’t get him out of there.”

Since the phones went live on June 10, Cancun Travel Unlimited has increased staff from 24 to 28 workers. And the Goulds have been considering having 100 full-timers on staff by Jan. 1, up from their original goal of 65.

‘You get really beaten up’

The first telemarketing business in the Katahdin and Lincoln Lakes regions, Cancun Travel will be the fastest-growing firm in northern Penobscot County if it meets its goals. But the Goulds worry about logistics. They must explore whether their office in the Katahdin Business and Conference Center can accommodate the increase. Moving elsewhere in town is possible. KBCC operators have bent over backwards to help, they said.

And new worker training has been constant. Eight workers have quit. With a few dozen calls an hour, telephone sales work is high-pressure work, not for everybody, and stabilizing the work force and its production must come before expansion, Bill Gould said

Cancun Travel doesn’t cold-call people, workers said. The company employs automated systems to telephone previous Cancun and Costa Rica resort customers. The customers decide whether to hear sales pitches from human telemarketers. If they agree, that decision rings a telemarketer, who reads a sales pitch.

“The difficult thing is making people believe that this is a real deal,” said Sue Preo, a 51-year-old telemarketer from Millinocket. “Sometimes you get really beaten up on the phones by people. Some people just don’t believe the offers we give them. There are some people who are just downright rude.”

Others, said Donna Cox, a 49-year-old telemarketer from Millinocket, talk to telemarketers only to relieve boredom.

“That can be really frustrating,” Cox said.

The Goulds credit Magic, the economic development agency formerly known as the Millinocket Area Growth and Investment Council, and Town Manager Eugene Conlogue for helping them launch.

Magic Executive Director Bruce McLean helped write a business plan, introduced him to bankers, toured several locations with Gould and helped devise company business models, Mel Gould II said. Cancun Travel now occupies Magic’s former office with the Town Council member working out of his home.

“He certainly made what the business plan needed very clear,” Mel Gould II said. “Without it [McLean’s help], it would have been very difficult. I would have gone around in circles.”

The town’s primary economic agent, Conlogue pointed Gould to the Small Business Administration and Eastern Maine Development Corp., which the town keeps on retainer. He also helped the Goulds get a $20,000, two-year startup loan from the town. At 5 percent interest, the loan required monthly payments starting Aug. 1.

EMDC wasn’t “interested in doing much for us. We didn’t have a lot of hard assets,” Gould said. “If you turn it over [sell the business], you turn it over for a little on the dollar. If they took it as an asset and had to sell it, it wouldn’t be worth too much, because we basically just have a lot of telephones. It would be different if we owned the building.”

‘I love my job’

The Goulds like their salespeople to sell two vacations a day. They pay salespeople minimum wage and retroactive commissions per sale of $25 (for sales one through five), $35 (for six through 10), and $45 (11 and up). Eleven sales at $45 each plus minimum wage equals a weekly gross salary of about $775, Bill Gould said. The company also employs credit-check workers and other support staff.

The Goulds do what they can to relieve tension and make the atmosphere festive, workers said.

“It’s like a family here,” said Jennifer Slauenwhite, 30, of Millinocket, a sales trainer who is also Bill Gould’s girlfriend. “If somebody else has a bad day, everybody else is there to pick you right up.”

“It’s a very good opportunity,” said Preo, a bookkeeper for Michael J. Brown Cabinet Makers of Millinocket.

Helen LaPlante, a 45-year-old sales staff manager, said Cancun Travel Unlimited’s success is a tonic to the Katahdin region, which suffers higher-than-average unemployment, a sparse retail business market and a possible closing of the town’s Katahdin Paper Co. LLC mill.

“What we’re hoping for,” LaPlante said, “is to make this business a success so that the town will be able to use this as an example for some other businesses to come to town and succeed.

“I love my job.”

nsambides@bangordailynews.net

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