Direct Success Enterprises - An “American Business Dream Come True” Story

Why do we choose to serve independent businesses on main street America? We understand their story, struggles, needs and opportunities, because we are one. We have navigated the evolving economic landscape and harnessed the exciting evolution of technology to serve it up as a competitive advantage to our clients.

Welcome to Direct Success Enterprises, founded in 1992 by my wife Tammy and I while our youngest daughter was on the way, but yet to be born. We are the prototypical American Dream come true business. When we married, Tammy was working for a large insurance company (CNA)  and I had just finished a position at Cox Communications. I left when they purchased a marriage mail company named ValPack for $80 million dollars. I was convinced that database marketing solo mail was the future and not traditional marriage mail. I was less than excited about the acquisition. I didn’t want to be a “coupon salesman” so we did something crazy. 

She wanted to stay at home with our daughters, and I had visions of the approaching tsunami of technology changing the landscape of marketing, so we started a company from scratch bringing my abandoned clients into the fold and learning how to do something we had never done before - produce high end “solo” targeted direct mail. I had sold it, but owning our own business meant taking on a whole new lineup of responsibilities, including producing the product itself.

We went to family and friends and made them a “startup capitol” deal they couldn’t resist. We promised to double their money in five years so we could have the money we needed to invest and live on; in our minds, failure was not an option. We were committed, and probably needed to be committed, but nonetheless off we went.

I won’t go deep into the startup stories, there are too many to tell, but before long the lower half of our house was a production facility. We had shelves of printed materials in the garage, an office with both of our desks in the same room in the basement. and the larger basement family room was frequently converted into production space when we had mail to be prepared for introduction into the mail stream. We had some targeted shared mailing programs where clients were aiming at the same audience, so often we had 10-15 clients who had a full color 8.5W x 5.5” insert going into a 9W x 6” themed envelope. One for families and one for new homeowners; and when we looked at all those labels and inserts and envelopes we looked back at one another like, ”what the hell have we gotten ourselves into?”

This is how the church youth group “insertion parties” were born. We hired the youth group, who always needed money for functions, to gather around the lineup of folding tables in the basement and the fun began! Ten dollars per teen plus a donation to the youth group, on top of all the pizza and soda they could consume, and work became fun! We had always believed in bribery as an honorable way to get younger people to do things, including our own kids, and this was no different. We had a need for occasional manual labor and they needed to make money doing something constructive so it worked out. Our daughter Lauren grew up with independent business talk at the dinner table and for some reason it didn’t scare her off, she has been a part of the company for seven years now and is a valued production supervisor and administrative assistant; it was her youth group friends that we had hired.

When I was at Cox as a sales representative burning up shoe leather on the streets of Nashville, I became a part of, and addicted to, the plight of the small American businessman (no gender intended). When Cox lightened their commitment to “database marketing” and went more mainstream with the services they were selling, I took my clients under my wing and kept refining the direct response methods that had been helping them grow their businesses. My wife stayed “all in” and handled all the finances and admin, allowing me to serve my people by continuing to be a serial innovator. We created custom strategies which added profiled leads through mail, eventually digital, and today integrated digital and mail campaigns. 

Our focus is on helping small American businesses dominate their marketplace niche with cutting edge, cost effective marketing strategies. 57% of American businesses have less than 5 employees and over 90% less than 500. The vast majority of American small businesses can’t afford a marketing agency at all, and allow me to be facetious, none of them can afford one who doesn’t understand them and doesn’t get results! We understand how to systematically grow a marketing approach that delivers more and more tangible results as the portfolio and our clients follow-up skill sets grow.  

Yes, we have landed large accounts in the past. We’ve served regional and corporate entities such as Lowes, Verizon, Steinway and Goodyear. What we found was that there wasn’t enough loyalty after we performed at a high level, it didn’t result in us being rewarded with a long term profitable relationship. Either our innovative ideas were pilfered and given to a company employee in a cubicle, or a new area marketing manager would come in and bring their own resources, which meant they were more than willing to discontinue campaigns that were wildly successful to put their own people in place. Compare that to the small businesses who have been our business friends for decades because we have helped them navigate and grow through the many changes the economy goes through. Being serial innovators, we are always prepared to offer solutions that create new sales opportunities for the current climate.

Here is an interesting real world story about our habit of doing “whatever it takes” to help our clients be successful. We are visionaries. We saw visits to websites and SEO being superseded by lead generation, which actually gave companies contact information for personal or digital follow up. We found a sharp young business person to partner with and BOOM!, in came the leads. In our estimation, we were just going to provide leads to our small business clients (because visionaries see trends before they arrive but can’t actually tell the future) and take the money to the bank. Not so fast, reality set in. We found that a startling amount of businesses had no CRM in 2015. We also discovered that they had no idea of what to do with a cyber-lead. They had no protocol to talk paid-for leads out of cyberspace and into the showroom floor. 

In junior high, you are taught simple “supply and demand” but this circumstance went way beyond that. We were identifying needs they never knew they had before they allowed us to funnel them internet leads! They now had more leads than they knew what to do with, no way to organize them and no idea how to give their sales staff advice on how to get the fish in the boat! We created a demand by providing a service and now our clients had needs that had to met, and worse yet, no money budgeted to pay for a CRM or sales training. What were we to do?

Well, we built a CRM, although we weren’t in the CRM business. We provided follow up workshops and webinars, although we’d never done them. We maintained an unbelievably high retention rate by investing in our clients and not charging them. It was “sweat equity” and our reputation created referrals which spurred organic growth. Our commitment to listening to our clients and using them for innovation ideas and fuel has paid off over the years. In the early years, it resulted in new postal files that had never been created before; in more recent years, digital follow up protocols which have allowed us to achieve unbelievable conversion rates compared to national averages.  

As I write this evening in June of 2025, I can state with confidence that we have assembled the “A” Team of lead generation for independent businesses. The core of this team has been together for a long while and the new additions are extremely talented and dedicated to the standard they have joined. I am sincerely proud of the work we are doing to aid Mainstreet American businesses thrive, not simply survive, in a world where the only constant is change.    

I’ll end with a favorite true story that I love to tell. It culminates in a lesson I learned as a young salesman that I have carried with me through my career and helped us get to where we are today. I had come off the road as a full time road musician, a troubadour of sorts, before I came to Nashville to find and marry the love of my life Tammy Rugg-Klinefelter.  I was working for a sign company in East Texas and spending a lot of time traveling and calling on businesses in East and South Texas. I landed a larger than normal client named “Morgan Portable Buildings and Spas.”  The company was successful enough that the V.P.’s had permission to sign checks up to $9,999 without ownership authorization. I had many occasions to visit this client, as I was selling outdoor advertisement (billboards), and they changed messages with my help frequently.  My contact was Guy Morgan. His brother Ed who started the business with him, was a music manager who was in and out more so than Guy, so Guy was the person I dealt with most often.  I watched him coordinate things in the middle of our meetings and was impressed with his leadership abilities and success. As a young businessman, I took the opportunity to ask someone 25 years my senior what his secrets were. 

He paused after I asked the question and I saw a twinkle in his eye, which meant he enjoyed being asked. We were in his office, on site, surrounded by buildings and spas and he leaned over and said, "Well, young man, I’ll give you three things that I think are the most important things for you to consider." I was excited, I was going to get some nuggets of wisdom from a very successful Texas businessman!  He kicked back in his swivel chair and said, ”Item number one”… then a pause again… ”get you a business card.” The twinkle became a grin and I knew he was messing with me but I played along. “Number two,” he continued, ”make your calls”, …another intentional pause, then forcefully…”ALL OF THEM!” After this piece of advice I thought for a moment and could see that this actually was good practical advice. I had been beating the performance of other sales people I was up against regularly by being more persistent and organized in my follow up. I accepted this as a well meant reinforcement of a sound business principal. Then came another moment of silence and he leaned back toward me, half-way over his desk and delivered a line of wisdom in Texas businessman speak that changed my life. “And always, always remember”… the now expected famous pause and delivery…”if you’re standing still, you’re backing up!” THAT WAS IT. A light bulb came on and I could clearly see what he meant. This was long before “innovation” was a buzz word. This was decades before silicon valley phrases like “automation is liberation” became commonplace. It was indeed bedrock solid because in today’s world, technology moves so fast that if you are standing still the world will pass you by. 

Innovations equal opportunities and he was sharing this thought long before the tsunami of technology washed over our world. I carried it, this wisdom, this attitude, into my mail career and ended up creating data cocktails that had never been heard of by the people I accessed information from. As recently as last year, my wife and I brought an UberWealth file to market that had never been in existence before by combining the right recipe of files so we could find pockets of wealth that had previously been hiding behind estates and offshore holdings and shelters. Our digital side does a fantastic job finding pockets of online opportunity and turning them into leads using internet audience intelligence. We always use AI in an appropriate and humanized fashion to aid the marketing efforts we provide our clients. Technology is our playground but we are calculated, always with the end result in mind, in how and when we apply it.      

In summary, our largest emotion is gratefulness. We have had business friends literally for decades and have maintained the hard earned reputation of being serial innovators and visionaries. Actually, although hard earned, it's the only way we know how to be. It is also the way we believe is most effective in an ever-changing world. We are excited to have several new approaches being beta tested at present and no, not all of them will work, but our beta testers know that going in and they pay much less than a normal service fee for helping us flesh out new ways to move different segments of the market. We love what we do and we keep moving forward, forward through every economic climate, forward using all the new tech tools in the tool box, forward because we know we need to. Because it’s the only way we know to be. Why? Because of this one Will Roger’s style principle we live by, ”if you're standing still, you’re backing up!”   

“If you’re standing still, you’re backing up!” - Guy Morgan      

P.S. If google is correct, Guy is still alive at this writing in June of 2025, at the age of 89