Larkin O'Keefe, CEO MedTrak Services

Almost every Rainmaker can remember when the first drop fell. For Larkin O’Keefe, that was in 2000, a year after Kermit Fendler founded the Overland Park company specializing in pharmacy-benefit management. Fendler, the pharmacist, had the technical background. O’Keefe—the only other employee—held the company’s revenue fate in his hands as the sales guy.

Getting big clients to take a chance on a small, start-up company was challenging, he said, but when they signed their first large hospital group in January 2000, “I knew we were going to make it at that point,” he said. “They gave us the credibility we needed to really spring-board into the industry.”

That hospital group is still a client today. So are lots of other organizations. MedTrak grew from nothing to revenues of $43.7 million in five years. And five years later, the top line had nearly tripled, to $144.6 million. At the rate it’s growing, MedTrak will easily double from that base before another 5-year increment in 2014; it topped $238 million in 2011.

From 2007, when the economy was about to tank, MedTrak’s business has grown by 142 percent. Trace a lot of that back to the values that O’Keefe brings to the job. “I’ve always been a hard worker,” he says. “I started working at 14 and haven’t looked back.  I’m also pretty stubborn, which not everyone sees as a good trait—especially my wife—but in business, I think it’s helped me tremendously. If I get knocked down, it gives me more motivation to get up and keep going. For me, hard work and perseverance are the keys to success in almost everything.”

With every step of the company’s growth, he and Fendler—who retired last year, passing the CEO throttle to his wingman—adopted a philosophy of learning from their mistakes, refusing to dwell on them beyond that, and moving forward. “Every decision we made, right or wrong, we started by asking ourselves ‘Will this help our company grow?’ I think that question is critical in getting any new business off the ground,” O’Keefe said.

Like most Rainmakers, O’Keefe relishes both the battle and the metrics that tell you whether it’s going your way. “I’ve been in the same industry since 1993, and I still love coming to work every day,” he says. “I take pride in the fact that we’ve had double or triple-digit growth every year since the company started. That really keeps me motivated—trying to keep that streak alive.”

Health care is a sector in turmoil right now, but with turmoil come opportunities. “There are lots of changes going on in health care right now,” he acknowledges. But with the right product or service, he says, “Success is limitless. If you work hard and believe in what you do, anyone can be successful.”

Ginny Fiscella, Sterling Director, Silpada Jewelry Designs

Ginny Fiscella’s ties to Silpada date back to about the time the phrase “going viral” entered the lexicon. Coincidence? We think not. Fiscella has elevated the concept of jewelry-party sales into a high-revenue model, becoming the hands-down top producer for the Lenexa company built on a foundation of silver.

She has assembled a national network of sales representatives who have embraced her passion. Her success—like the successes of thousands who have followed her lead—is one reason Silpada was able to command a $650 million price tag when it sold to Avon in 2010. The company has made an art form out of the jewelry sales party
concept, and Fiscella is a master at it because she infuses her personality—and those of the co-founders Bonnie Kelly and Teresa Walsh—into the process.

“Bonnie and Teresa’s success was built on fun and connecting with women,” Fiscella said. From the start, they defied direct-sales orthodoxy by hosting parties without formal presentations. “They said there was no way we were going to succeed without one,” Fiscella recalls, “but now we’re at the top of the industry. In the party-planning business, cultural shifts happen, and nobody wants to come to a party any more and just sit in a circle and be bored for 90 minutes. When you put this jewelry on, you feel good, you look beautiful, and it can become contagious.”

Those parties often lead to new recruits for the legions of Silpada sales reps, and Fiscella has built a team of more than 1,500 strong. She’s personally recruited 150 into in a network that runs many levels deep, and all of those reps control their own incomes. To become a Sterling Director—Fiscella is the only one to earn that title in Silpada’s history—a team must generate $600,000 in sales in a month; her crew regularly does multiples of that.

See? The viral thing works. And here’s how it spreads: Like Kelly and Walsh, Fiscella rarely leaves home wearing fewer than a dozen pieces of the company’s jewelry. When she gets unsolicited compliments from a stranger, off comes a piece. That sets the stage for the relationship she wants to build.

“If you give, you get back,” Fiscella says. “But I never give away anything without getting contact information and giving my business card. It’s my job to follow up with them—that’s just Business 101. I don’t sit in my office and wait for people to call me and book parties—I call them.”

She has literally changed lives, putting women in control of their own fates and spreading the gospel of entrepreneurship.

“It’s crazy, but when you love what you do, it shows,” she says. “When you have passion and believe in what you do, you want to go to work and all money in the world wouldn’t make a difference.”