Eddie Maalouf is an example of how far you can get when you consistently play to your strengths throughout your life and trust yourself at every move.
He has demonstrated his natural talent for sales since he convinced his father to let him work in his carpet business at age 15.
The young Eddie spent one week learning about the products available at his dad’s shop before his first sale. Four weeks later, he was selling more than the other four adult salespeople combined, despite only working on weekends.
“The other guys thought I was taking their sales, but I was just closing more people. My dad had to fire me because he needed people that could work the entire week and they wanted to resign because of me,” he reveals.
The Lebanon Deal
Eddie’s dad had several businesses in Lebanon, including a waterpark. As a result, he would spend around three months there every year.
He became passionate about fitness in college: “I was really into that. I was all about supplements, routines, pre-workouts, and all that stuff.”
Eddie realized the supplement market in Lebanon was quite underdeveloped: “There were like 20 stores of decent size in the whole country, and they didn’t have good stuff. So, I saw that there was a need in the market.”
“I’m convinced that things will come to you if you believe that your goal is not a big thing to attain and you make the moves to achieve it.”
Eddie recalls one of many times when that has happened throughout his life: “One of my friends from college was flying from Nigeria into Lebanon, and I offered to take him from the airport to his house. It was a four-hour drive.”
“His cousin also showed up, and we started chatting. It turned out that he was roommates with the co-founder of the biggest supplement distribution company in the US. Those guys were distributing around 200 brands, and I got a meeting with them through my friend’s cousin. What are the chances, you know?”
Eddie met with the distributor’s associate, which helped him book a meeting with every major supplement brand. He met them all at a fitness conference in Las Vegas.
With that said, it’s one thing to have crazy opportunities and another to take them.
He attended all those meetings after carrying out thorough market research of the Middle Eastern supplement market and determining how to introduce the products into that market. He knew precisely which supplements he wanted to distribute from each brand and everything those brands needed to know about the logistics.
In the end, he signed agreements to become the de facto exclusive distributor to the Middle East of the top 15 supplement brands in the US at that time.
Eddie recalls, “I was still in college so, before meeting them, I declined all their dinner invitations. I wasn’t old enough to drink, and I didn’t want them to know how young I was.”
Paving the Way for Paid Media Success
While the paperwork for his deal in the Middle East was being processed, he took a job at a supplement store in the US to learn about Facebook ads.
Later, he started working at a Lifetime Fitness branch. Eddie knew he wanted to have a thing of his own, but he took the job to better understand another side of the fitness industry: the gym market.
Two months later, he was the best salesman in the entire chain. “I was hitting my sales quota by the fifth day of the month and making more sales than the seven other salespeople on my team combined,” he recalls.
“I was signing up more people than everybody else because I came up with ideas for selling more. The funny thing is that I would share those ideas with my colleagues, but they couldn’t execute them as well as I did,” Eddie acknowledges.
The branch executives couldn’t stop making him offers to stay, but Eddie was clear about what he wanted. He boldly resigned and started selling paid media services to small businesses. Soon, this venture became 4Media Marketing.
Talent and Boldness Concocts the 4Media Marketing Recipe
“I sat with my team then and told them, ‘I’m in charge of sales now. No one is doing sales, so I’m doing it, and we will start treating this like an actual company. We’re spending money on ads, hiring more people, and developing systems and processes. We’re putting our foot on the gas.’”
“One of the hardest things we did was growing all of our different divisions simultaneously in only a year and a half. We developed different SOPs and automations for each. Even with all our divisions under one company, each has its workflows, departments, systems and setups. That was a pretty big feat to accomplish.”
From a young age, Eddie knew that he wanted to be successful and that the best way to do so was to play to his talents and become better at what was already working for him.
“I’ve always played to my strengths. Luckily enough, I’m good at sales,” Eddie asserts. “When you convince somebody to buy a bag of chips of a certain flavor instead of the one they wanted, that’s sales. It’s always been the same to me from a psychological standpoint.”
“If I could give any advice to my younger self, it’d be to think even bigger and go even bolder.”If you’re interested in knowing more about Eddie Maalouf’s exciting story and the services 4Media Marketing offers, you can visit his Instagram page or his agency’s website.
