Turning flash into cash.

• Author: Bailey, David
• Position: Success story of Felix Sabates and his Top Sales firm - Includes related article - Cover Story

There's one product top seller Felix Sabates has pitched harder than any other -- himself.

In 1976 Felix Sabates was hawking hair dryers to Best Products Co. in Richmond, Va., when he got lucky. The guy who was supposed to meet with him was out sick, so Charlotte-based Top Sales' top salesman found himself face-to-face with Best Products' best buyer. With just three months to Christmas, the Cuban immigrant, who claims to have learned English from a Puerto Rican and has an accent that seems to prove it, put everything into pitching his two biggest items -- an $8 hair dryer and a $3.50 curling iron.

Without blinking the buyer said he'd take 100,000. "I said, 'Do what?'" Sabates recalls. "He said, 'I'll take 100,000.' I said, '$100,000 worth?' He said, 'No, 100,000 pieces of each.'"

Sabates hastily called the manufacturer, Miami-based Windmere Corp. "To make a long story short, the whole company went into a state of shock. They called Hong Kong, and somehow, someway, they were able to air-freight 100,000 hair dryers into Richmond, Va., a month before Christmas," he says. "Guess what? All 100,000 of them were bad. The fan that turns the blower, they were in such a big rush to make them, they didn't cure."

Best Products was understandably upset, and the buyer found his job on the line, Sabates says. "Someone had to pay for this," recalls a former buyer for the chain of catalog showrooms, now in Chapter 11 reorganization, "and it wasn't going to be Best Products. It was either fix the problem or eat it."

Dozens of phone calls later, Windmere and Sabates had a solution. Because shipping the dryers back was out of the question, Sabates and Windmere President David Friedson decided to bring part of the Far East a lot nearer. "I arranged it," Sabates says. "All the Chinese guys, they sent them in through Hong Kong. ... I mean I had people from Top Sales Co. meeting all the Chinese guys with suitcases getting off of airplanes, and what they had was a suitcase, a screwdriver and fans. And they changed 100,000 hair dryers in eight days.

Now, did I earn my keep on that one?

"A middleman is like the jelly in a jelly doughnut," Friedson says. "It holds both sides together and hopes it doesn't get smushed out and end up on the floor."

Landing in Miami with two boxes of cigars and $25, Felix Sabates started out at the bottom and played both sides against the middle to come out on top. As a manufacturer's representative, he peddled cheap transistor radios and low-priced hair dryers in the mid-'60s. Using his considerable charm, he got his foot in the door of catalog showrooms such as Brendle's, Service Merchandise and Sam Solomon's just as they were emerging. Then, with what competitors say is an uncanny ability, he picked winner after winner for the lines he sells. His streak started in 1979 with an electronic game, Pong, made by a company no one had heard of -- Atari. Then in 1983 came Teddy Ruxpin, a talking teddy bear. The doll maker, in which Sabates had invested, had sales of $100 million in its first five months. These two products alone, associates say, made him a millionaire. Then other winners followed -- Nintendo games, Canon copiers, Mirata fax machines, Emerson VCRs, Uniden cordless phones and, now, Compaq computers.

Sabates' good fortune is the American dream come true, so much so that he uses his wealth as a marketing tool. Sabates, 50, lives in a 10,000-square-foot house in southeast Charlotte. He has two Rolls-Royces -- a Silver Shadow and a Silver Spirit -- and a stretch limo. He has an eight-passenger Beechjet, two twin-engine planes and a helicopter he owns with Charlotte auto megadealer Rick Hendrick. With Kyle Petty behind the wheel of his Winston Cup racing team, he has raised his visibility even higher. Like the products he pushes, Felix Sabates has become a brand name among manufacturers, one with considerable cachet.

"I'm a peddler," he likes to say. Only this peddler runs a company covering the whole Southeast, with six satellite offices in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia and product sales topping $400 million. But it's a tough business that will only get tougher. The fast-growing giants of retailing, especially Wal-Mart, want to cut out the middleman, replacing salesmen with satellite dishes so they can order directly from manufacturers. There are fewer doors to knock on as superstores drive smaller competitors out of business, and commissions are shrinking, going from 3% to 2% to 1% to, nowadays, a fraction of a percent.

To survive and thrive, Sabates knows that Top Sales must diversify its product line and expand its territory. With Compaq, he predicts his company will double employment and revenues in the next couple of years, forcing him to make the transition from being a big-time operator to managing a big operation. That's not going to be easy for someone with no formal education, a hot temper and a tendency to bite off more than he can chew.

Sabates boasts that he lost count of the schools he was thrown out of in Cuba. But the capper to his account of being "a rebel without a cause," as he terms it, is the day his father decided to throw him out of the country.

On both sides, his family was well-to-do. His mother's people were proud of their Spanish heritage. His maternal grandfather had been an executive with the Cuban National Railroad. "Mother's father wore a solid white linen suit and changed it three times a day -- never a hair out of place."

His father's father never had any airs to put on. He'd made his fortune peddling jewelry from horseback. By the time Felix came along, his father and grandfather had amassed a variety of businesses, including cattle ranches and sugar-cane farms, service stations, drugstores, jewelry stores, a car dealership and optical shops. "My father-in-law tells me they were middle-class people," Felix Sabates' wife, Carolyn, says. "He says they only had 22 servants."

Sabates says that his father finally sent him to one of Cuba's strictest schools, Havana Military Academy, in 1958, before the revolution. There, he ended up bunking with Fidel Castro Jr. Sabates took an instant dislike to the future dictator's son because he was "pompous, prim and proper. ...

"He slept in the bunk below. I slept in the bunk above, and I didn't like the little shithead. When Castro took over, I knew I didn't like Castro because I didn't like his son," Sabates says. Forget politics: "I didn't know the difference between communism or what."

In Havana a year later, "I joined the underground, and we burned a few buildings and a few buses."...