by Nik Richie
There was one slight problem: I couldn’t memorize the binder.
That’s all they wanted from me, to get the script down in my head so I could repeat it on cue during the meetings. That was a big issue for me because I didn’t like memorizing things, hated reading, and was always looking for the short cut. If you told me something took eight minutes to do, I would’ve been the guy trying to figure out how to get it down to seven.
I did my best.
I flew out to L.A. to train one-on-one in the field with Trey Smith, an established SAE with the company. The guy was the “rich black man” stereotype: good-looking dude driving an S-Series Benz. He wore $6,000 suits and carried a sick-ass briefcase. This motherfucker lived in a penthouse above Marina Del Rey, the kind of place that would get any pussy wet within thirty seconds because he had such good taste.
I was looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the skyline, soaking in the view, and Trey said, “This could all be yours.”
And I thought, Yes…yes, this is what I want. This will make me happy.
Trey was the complete Obama package, a playboy. Educated and slick, but he was also a chameleon. I learned this much when I started going to the appointments with him. If the business owner was black, he spoke black. If they were white, he spoke white. Asian, he spoke Asian.
In sales terms, this is called “mirroring the customer.”
“If they feel like they’re talking to someone like themselves,” Trey said, “they’re more likely to pay attention.”
Trey was using the same script I was, the big difference being that it sounded natural coming from him. It was like he was having a conversation that just so happened to be written. He threw in the occasional filler about going to Dodger games and vacations and stuff like that, but Trey always drew it back to that binder I couldn’t memorize.
He set the bar for what I had to become.
Within three months I was on pace to make 140K a year.
The shift over to SAE wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I was so obsessed with memorizing the binder. Then I realized I could rewrite it, make it my own. So I chopped up the script, redrew the flow charts, and made the information user-friendly. It wasn’t a script for any SAE. It was mine, and only I could use it the right way.
Personalization was the key to my success, and just as Trey had shown me, I became the chameleon. I learned to mirror whoever was across the table, and I even began wearing glasses to look more intelligent.
During the meetings with these business owners, I’d say things like, “I’ve never seen a company thrive so much in this economy. You should be proud of that.”
Which set up for the line I’d later say: “God, I can’t believe they’re ripping you off like this,” as I went over their bank statements.
Setup. Spike.
First I told them how well they were doing, then I brought it to their attention that they were getting fucked on fees and they didn’t have to take that. I made it seem like I was the best option they had, but it was never really about what I said or the numbers I showed them. It was the show. The performance. These little business owners that ran mom-and-pop grocery stores or stripmall people—all they wanted was to sit at the grown-ups’ table with a JPMorgan associate. They wanted to feel like they were taking the next step toward the American dream. For them, it wasn’t just about starting a business, but having something they could pass along to future generations. They had an ego, and much of my sales tactics were playing off of that.
When I talked to someone, it wasn’t so much a conversation as it was me breaking them down into their base parts: their motivations, their loyalty, their willpower.
I learned a lot about my capabilities by conning other people out of money. Capabilities that would soon come in handy for something bigger.
My marriage was on the rocks.
There was no connection. The job had all but killed the relationship, and it had gotten to the point where the only contact I had with her was my nightly phone call to check in. I’d ask how she was, if everything was okay, and then hang up before going out to the clubs or a restaurant or whatever I was doing that night.
I was good at my job, but good in my own way.
When NPMG sent out their next batch of trainees to shadow someone in the field, I never got any of them because I was off-script. I was the pitcher throwing sidearm when everyone else was doing it overhand. Basically, the higher-ups knew I was getting the job done, but they didn’t approve of the way I was doing it. Corporations don’t typically embrace trailblazers.
That’s when I got the call.
Lance Moore got hold of me on my cell to explain that NPMG was going to be doing some restructuring.
“What we’re going to do is bring you back to Scottsdale to run the floor at NPMG,” he said.
“What about Sean? I thought he was running it.”
“We’re going to send him back out to the field. You’re replacing him.”
“When’s this happening?” I asked.
“Immediately. You’re going to spend the next week learning his job and then we’re shipping him off to Orange County,” Lance said. “Based on how well you did on the phones, we thought this would be the best arrangement for the business.”
This arrangement that Lance spoke of would ruin everything.
Sean was pissed. Not at me so much, but he was disgruntled with the situation. He had been running the floor at NPMG for about three or four years, and now he was getting sent back out into the field. That meant having to leave his wife and kids, his home. Sean was going to have to uproot himself and live out of a suitcase like I had been doing.
For a week I learned Sean’s job, but he gave me fragmented information. He went back to being a slimeball motherfucker, setting me up to fail by giving me a half-assed orientation to the job. In his mind, if I failed at doing this, the company would have no choice but to switch us back: me out in the field and Sean back on the floor.
He thought he had the company turned out.
Now he was going to take their shot away.
In my first week on the job, every meeting set is fucking wood. We were getting complaints about how the SAE didn’t show up or that the business owner wasn’t even interested in getting pitched. So I had to repair everything, fixing all the stuff that Sean had broke. Damage control. Back when Sean was in charge of the floor, he just ran around being racist and crude and trying to fuck girls in the office. I was hovering over the phone reps, listening for any sign of interest. If there was even a chance that they were on the way to setting an appointment, I’d take over the call and play the management card.
“You have to take this meeting,” I’d say. “You’re currently losing thousands of dollars, and you won’t get another call like this for ten years. Five minutes with one of our SAEs is going to save you thousands.”
Meanwhile, Sean was back out in the field, and he was closing everything. Literally everything. There wasn’t one meeting that guy went to that he didn’t close, even the small ones with a tiny commission. Even the ones where he initially got a “no” on, Sean would wait outside the business and close them on the second attempt. He was closing, but all the other SAEs were slacking. There was a mutiny underway, and Sean was the root of it, I had learned.
The phone reps were tanking on purpose.
Sean had convinced the SAEs to tank the meetings.
He had poisoned everything under the pretense of cutting me out.
And the higher-ups were calling me, yelling, “You motherfucker, you’re costing us millions of dollars! You want to keep this fucking job or what?!”
Then Sean would follow up with a call of his own, saying, “I told you this kid can’t do it. You want the company to fold? You want the investors to ask for their money back? Bring me back and put Hooman out in the field again.”
My salary was based on performance, and my performance was shit. The bosses didn’t care if Sean did or didn’t influence the nu
mbers. They only looked at the bottom line: the appointments being set were at record lows, and for the ones that did get set, they were total wood. Both quality and quantity were low.
I stopped being money-hungry and became more concerned with the ever-increasing reality that I was going to get fired. It was a problem without a solution. I was depressed, going to Houston’s most nights to have a drink by myself at the bar. No flirting with girls or polite conversation with the bartender. For hours I would sit there drinking Jack & Diets, trying to figure out the problem, to make the numbers work in my favor. Then I’d go home drunk and pass out on the couch, repeating the process the next day. And the next day.
This is when I needed the escape.
Kierland Commons. A Sunday.
I was having lunch by myself at this sushi place called Ra: a Jack & Diet, California rolls (with fake crab), miso soup, and edamame. It was sunny and the patio was crowded. I was surrounded by tables of people talking about their weekend, their lives. Everyone was so happy, and there I was, eating alone and depressed about having to go back to the office the next day. I began to listen to my surroundings, the people. I eavesdropped on their stories.
At my two o’clock was a table of girls talking about Britney Spears.
At my seven o’clock was a group of guys dishing dirt on the night before.
One of the girls was saying, “Can you believe she shaved her fucking head? I can’t believe it, y’know. It’s crazy.”
And her friend responded, “I knoooooooooow, but I still love her. Even though she’s a goddamn trainwreck, I love her.”
Then a guy said, “Man, I totally fucked that chick in my hot tub.”
“Yeah, for $300 worth of blow I would hope that you fucked her,” his friend said.
Laughter. Then, a group of women in their late thirties were talking about their tits. Specifically, breast implants. At my eleven o’clock, one of them said. “I’m thinking about going 300…maybe 450 cc’s.”
And her friend said, “Oh my God, you’ll love them. My husband can’t keep his hands off of me now.”
Then, from somewhere behind me there was a table talking about douchebags that go to the clubs with holes in their jeans.
Another table was discussing some girl who might or might not have been a stripper.
All around me was gossip, and then the formula started to kick in.
I thought about all my friends that had gotten rich off the Internet. They were doing it in porn, but maybe there was another avenue I could take, I thought. Something more mainstream. Celebrities were mainstream, but it had been done to death. The last thing the world needed was more celebrity coverage. I wanted something more real. Reality TV was big at the time: America’s Next Top Model, The Real World, Joe Millionaire. There were so many reality shows cropping up, but after the production companies were done, even those seem staged. I was drinking a Jack & Diet, listening to these people talk about clubs and breast implants and about who was hooking up with who, and the equation was starting to add up. I was putting it together: civilian reality on the Internet.
Reality Internet.
41National Processing Management Group.
42Senior Account Executive.
43Code for: an appointment in which the business owner has little to no interest.
44Code for: nigger.
45Always Be Closing.
46I met Lance Moore through the club scene, we became friends, and the NPMG job was more or less his wedding present to me when I married my first wife. I’d later find out that Lance Moore wasn’t even his real name.
Posts
I put up a picture of some college girl doing coke in her dorm room at ASU. Another girl, a stripper actually, has sent naked pictures of herself to some guy that’s not her boyfriend. In Dallas there’s a doctor giving Tijuana hack jobs 47; the “after” photos show one breast much higher than the other, nipples misaligned, incisions that will fade into deep purple scar tissue. I put up an escort girl, a shifty New York club owner, an alcoholic degenerate.
You upload. I post.
You send me a picture of some guy out in L.A. attempting to buy his status with $500 bottles of generic vodka, and then I put it up for the world to react, comment, and judge. This person, the subject, gets to see for himself if he’s really as cool as he thinks he is.
You call him a douchebag, a forgy, a pretentious asshole. He’s the example of how the term “VIP” doesn’t mean the same thing it used to twenty years ago. At some point, VIPs went from celebrities and musicians to cubicle warriors and customer service reps. VIP used to mean that you were an actor or athlete or singer. It meant that you were rich and famous, and now we’ve got guys spending half their rent money trying to look the part. We live in the age where appearing important has eclipsed actually being important. Average people trying to appear exceptional. People spending $200 on designer t-shirts but can’t afford $50 in groceries.
It’s how the term 30K millionaire 48 was coined.
They had existed for years, but it took a Nik Richie to name them, examine them, break them down in a way that people could understand. Somewhere in your circle of friends was a guy that thought entirely too highly of himself, and rather than call him out personally, you sent him over to me.
That’s the process: You upload. I post. The public has their say.
So you send me a picture of some Jersey Shore tribute with the blown-out hairdo and bad spray tan, and the world gets to react to what they see. You send me a pretend model wearing a pair of Louboutin knockoffs, and the people get to tell her what they really think. This is the wake-up call, and it’s happening in every major city from coast to coast. Your night out could just as easily turn into a lifestyle review.
Guys like Anderson Cooper and Dr. Phil keep trying to differentiate between celebrity and civilian with me, but this all goes back to the original question: Does someone become a public figure when they start asking for attention or when they actually get it?
The answer is part of how The Dirty started.
I had seen it with my own eyes in Scottsdale: girls going out three or four nights a week, drunk out of their minds, doing coke in bathrooms, taking pills, taking anything to lose their sense of reality. These girls were going out to the clubs, shaking their shit like they were Britney Spears while dudes tried to buy their way into their pants. These guys would be posing with girls, with bottles of alcohol they really couldn’t afford, taking pictures and posting them to MySpace and Facebook, and it all had the tone of: Look at me, look at how important I am, how much money I’ve spent, how good I look, how much fun I’m having. Look at me wearing my sunglasses inside, my LV purse, my name-brand stuff. Look at my life. Admire it. Pay attention to me.
All of these people, every one of them, wanted to be public figures. They wanted to be in the spotlight. The center of attention. Like so many people in the world, they wanted the good life, and they were paying hand over fist to make it appear like they were living it.
The world was changing: you could buy status now.
On the Internet, you could tell your story in pictures.
You could pick and choose the things you wanted to show the world, and so it became a competition of who could be out at the clubs the most, appearing as if they were “living the life,” as they said. It became a cesspool of materialism and drugs and hooking up and photo after photo after photo of these brief brushes with glamour and luxury. It wasn’t enough to simply have an experience. These people of nightlife had to archive, display, and become billboards for whatever club it was they were at. They became self-promoting socialites and local celebrities.
You send me a guy in Orlando using his daddy’s credit card for bottles.
You send me a Midwestern model that sucks dick for drugs and booze.
I’m not a fact-checker or investigator. There’s no contact made with the subject in order to verify if they really contracted an STD from a certain professional athlete. The Dirty is simpl
y the other side of the coin.
Your Facebook photo of you holding up a bottle of Grey Goose in a club is intended for the public to think you’re wealthy and important. On my site, we find out how well the façade holds up, and it usually doesn’t hold up well.
The media and talk show hosts are always asking me why I’m the guy: What gives Nik Richie the right to put these people up? What makes him qualified to judge?
Perhaps I’m not qualified, but I’ve been to these places. Have seen the people. I’ve witnessed the worst and understand it more than most. These TV personalities like Dr. Phil and Anderson could never hope to understand girls like Leper and Alien. They can’t comprehend a person that trades their body off for drugs. They’re sheltered and out of touch and lack the point of view that a Nik Richie has. They understand celebrity, but they haven’t witnessed the celebrity-minded, the fame-chasers, all those people trying to appear more than what they actually are.
Maybe it’s a sign that we’re in the middle of a vanity epidemic, but as I’ve said before, if there was no market for this The Dirty would be dead. There would be no site and no Nik Richie.
Without you there is no me.
47Terminology referring to bad (usually discounted) plastic surgery.
48A person who makes roughly $30,000 annually but spends money like they’re a millionaire, typically on clothes, dinners, cars, and bottle service in an attempt to look important or rich.
31
I’m in Vegas again.
We’re inside the Hard Rock at a club called Vanity, and it’s really no different than the hundreds of other times I’ve done this: girls dancing or doing blow in bathrooms, girls approaching me to get their photo taken so they can post it online, either directly from their phones or days later once they’ve had a chance to Photoshop themselves thin and tan and whatever else they can’t afford to pay a cosmetic surgeon to do. These Pepsi-heads 49 and bottle rats 50 come by in steady waves all wanting a photograph, a drink, or my suite number so we can hook up later for an after-party or “some fun,” as they say. Most of the time that means sex, but occasionally (especially in Vegas and L.A.) that means doing a bunch of powder or pills, or at the very least, smoking some weed. Despite what everyone thinks, I’ve never been into drugs and have lately been saying “I’m too old for that shit” when they’re offered, and they’re offered nearly every time I’m out.
