Read Online Do You Sincerely Want To Be Rich? by Charles Raw, Bruce Page, Godfrey Hodgson - Free Book Online Page A

When I saw the amount, I called Bernie in and said: "Hey, Bernie, you've got something there. You can really turn a dollar." '
        Perhaps Seymour Cohen was the man who really started Bernard Cornfeld off on the road to Geneva. In any case, Cohen declares stoutly that Cornfield was a 'great social worker… because of his ability to relate to people.' Others seem less sure. Dr Florence Kaslow, now an assistant professor of social work at Pennsylvania, says Cornfeld had a 'creative spark' and 'operated with youth groups in a way which was out of the traditional realm', but rates him 'just fair' as a social worker.
        Cornfeld's salary was only $400 or so a month, but at this time his interest in money seems to have been an intellectual fascination rather than a desire for consumption. Steve Adelman says: 'He didn't buy clothes. He didn't buy food. A snack to Bernie was a meal. He didn't smoke. There was always a bottle of whisky or wine in his flat, but it wasn't for himself. The only expense he had was gas.'
        Whatever the problem - some people suggest that the B'nai B'rith matrons thought the aza Sweethearts' Dance rather too swinging in Bernie's year - something brought the appointment to an end rather prematurely. Seymour Cohen says he cannot recall how Cornfeld came to leave B'nai B'rith. Edward B. Schifreen, says: 'Bernie wasn't fired. We made some arrangement.' There was, naturally, a collection before Bernie took off for New York. Suitably enough, they presented him with a wallet.
        Cornfeld returned as a serious recruit to the ips sales force, at a time when sales of mutual fund shares were about to touch the billion-dollars-a-year mark. By this time, at the end of 1954, Walter Benedick had four full-time coaches training salesmen at day and night classes.
        Several versions have given the impression that the eighteen months or so Cornfeld spent with ipc were somewhat undistinguished, but this can be a misleading impression. It is based on Walter Benedick's remark that Cornfeld did not bring in a large volume of shares for ipc personally, although he made some 'nice sales'. But his capacity for making sales was never especially important. While at ipc, he began to demonstrate a more valuable capacity for impressing his own personality upon groups of people whose trade in turn consists in impressing their personalities upon others. Bernie, as Richard Roberts recalls, was always the centre of events.
        'Whenever you rang Bernie and said: "Hey, what's doing?" - there was always something doing. He was trying to make some time with an actress, he was driving up to Montreal for the weekend, he was dating some girl from Manhattan. It was just like when he had IOS: if you wanted some action, you rang Bernie.'
        It was impressive, when other ipc salesmen were saving subway tokens, that Bernie always had a car. 'He used to keep it parked outside his house in Brooklyn. The keys were kept under the mat in the front seat. Anybody could use it. If you asked Bernie for it so you could take out a date, Bernie would say: "You don't have to ask me. It's yours. Take it, take it." '
        Cornfeld's prominence is the more remarkable in that it quite transcended the formal hierarchy which Walter and Ruth Benedick had worked out with some care.
        There were four grades in the ipc sales force which depended upon the volume of sales made: each recruit started as a Basic Salesman, rose to Advanced Salesman, then Senior Salesman and then Career Senior. With each promotion, the salesman received a larger share of the sales charge extracted from the customer at each sale. Above these four ranks, were three more: Supervisor, Group Manager and Branch Manager.
        In order to break into these upper levels it was necessary to actually recruit other salesmen, and promotion through them depended partly upon further recruitment, partly upon the volume of sales made by the Supervisor or