Difference Makers
ALL
IN THE
FAMILY Founded by George “Doc Thunder” Reed 40 years ago, Marketing Professionals is taking care of business in a flash. As president of the company, Pete Daley is bringing it into 2019 with the same dedication and perseverance on which the business was founded. WORDS BY JAMIE SORCHER
Call it karma how Pete Daley happened into a car audio career. As part of Marketing Professionals, Inc. for the last 12 years, he has held the reins as president of the company for the last five, but it could have gone much differently. Born and raised in Chicago, Daley moved to Texas in 1988. “When I got my first vehicle, I was a DIY guy and had a really nice install in my truck,” he said. “I was buying Rockford, my first radio was an Alpine, and I had Boston Acoustic speakers. “I got offered a job for this new company and went to fill out the application. When I drove up, my stereo was on—not super loud, but moderate—and there was this guy smoking a cigarette outside the store that I was potentially going to work for. He started asking me questions and then he told me he wanted to hire me. I said, ‘No, I’m here to fill out an application because this other person wants to hire me.’ He kept saying, ‘Don’t worry about it, don’t worry about it.’” As it turns out, the company Daley ultimately went to work for was Incredible Universe, a Tandy company. “The store didn’t even have a name at the time,” Daley said. “It was just a project [conceived by Tandy’s CEO John Roach]. So, here I was, 17 years old, and before we even opened, the store manager left
38 Mobile Electronics January 2019
and went back to his old job. They were looking for a store manager so I threw my name in the hat and ultimately did six million a year in our car audio/cell phone department for the three or four years that I was there. I’ve been doing this ever since.”
Straight Shooters With a Narrow Focus Marketing Pros covers Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Arkansas and carries just a few select lines. “We’re very narrow,” Daley said. “When I first started, we had 14 different factories. We weren’t very important to all of them. It was small checks here and there. Now we push our retailers to be important to their vendors. They should not be that diversified. So, that being said, we only have three vendors. Currently we have Kicker, Metra and Orca [Focal, Mosconi and Illusion.]” One of the company’s core values is about face time. “It’s about getting out there and traveling to better understand the environments our retailers are selling to and who their customers are so we can figure out our fit and how we can support them.” Accountability is another tenet of the rep firm. “You’ve got to fall on the sword,” Daley said. “If you screw up, then you screwed up. You have to make sure you take care of it. Having everyone’s best
interests involved is important. We’re the middle man between the retailers and the vendors. We need to make sure that everybody is taken care of appropriately. We need orders for the vendors and customer service and product reliability for the retailers. We have to be that buffer. Sometimes the vendor isn’t the nicest vendor and sometimes the retailer isn’t the nicest retailer. We have to be there to buffer that.”
Traveling to Connect In-Person With Retailers What differentiates Marketing Pros from other rep firms, according to Daley, is a key business practice the company upholds. “It goes back to travel,” he said. “A lot of rep firms are really just telemarketers. They’re not traveling. Our rep firm does upwards of 150 sales stops a month—either overnight stays or day trips—but it means we’re engaged with our retailers during the good months of the year and the bad months of the year.’ The firm pays for the reps to travel, Daley said. “By paying for their hotels and paying for their fuel, it means that sales don’t have to be up for them to get their butts out there in the field,” he explained. “When sales are up, they still need to be out in the field. So no matter what, the benefit of Marketing Pros is that we travel. The drawback of Marketing Pros…is that we travel.”
