Emerging Growth Award winner finds niche in higher ed: education sales management has been growing 40 percent a year for the past five years.

• Author: Lewis, David

Rick Fort began his career with NASA, and if life had come out differently he might have been remembered as the man who brought quality circles to Kennedy Space Center.

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Instead, in the early 1990s, Fort wearied of working with big bureaucracies, and his entrepreneurial streak surfaced. In 1993, he bought the Denver Sylvan Learning Center franchise, which is what began him on the road to Education Sales Management, this year's ACG-Denver Emerging Growth Award winner.

Fort's moment of entrepreneurial insight appeared after he opened his second Sylvan franchise, in Greeley.

"That's when I recognized I had to get myself off the phone. I was up in Greeley five days a week on the phone, while watching my sales rates plummet at my Denver learning center," Fort says.

Why?

"Because the educators running the center were the ones taking the phone calls," he says. "One, they didn't give the calls enough time and, secondly, educators tend to make fairly lousy salespeople. They are just not very good at it, and they don't like it very much."

Fort hired a salesperson, who "started with a 20 percent conversion sales rate and improved that to a 85 percent sales rate in about four months."

Fort ran these numbers past some other Sylvan franchisees, who agreed to pool their resources to hire more salespeople.

The rest is history, as they say, or it would be except that over the years Fort learned something even more...