Larry Morgan was born in Superior, Wyoming, in the 1940s, the son of a coal miner. Eventually, he landed in Jackson Hole, well enough off that he could build his dream mountain home.
His friends call him “The Closer.” He’s a corporate dealmaker, high-stakes sales producer and, lately, a self-described best-selling author on Amazon with a book revealing how he made his fortune.
Despite all that, Morgan doesn’t think of his story as a true rags-to-riches tale — though he’ll acknowledge it’s an arc that’s hard to ignore.
“I never really saw myself as being poor, although my family was very poor,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “My father owned a tiny little cafe in Iowa, and we barely made a living. He always said, ‘We don’t make any money, but we eat good'.”
A Dusty Old Chevy
Superior today is a semi-ghost town in Sweetwater County. His family didn’t stay there long.
“My father was a coal miner during the war,” he said. “It was a strategic occupation.”
Two cave-ins later, though, and he was rethinking that strategy. The family packed up and moved to Charlton, Iowa, where he started a cafe.
“I always liked to work,” Morgan said. “So, when I was probably 12, he hired me to be the dishwasher. I had to stand on a pop crate to reach the sink and wash the dishes. But he paid me 35 cents an hour, which was the going wage for an adult.”
It didn’t take Morgan long to realize if he wanted to achieve his dream of owning a car when he turned 16, he needed a better-paying job. So, he kept washing dishes but also took a job at the nearby bowling alley.
“I made real good money in the bowling alley,” he recalled with a chuckle. “I got paid for every line. This was back before automatic pinsetters, so you had to set each one by hand.”
At the end of the night, he could usually count on some fairly large tips, but it was a grueling schedule.
“I went to work at 5 in the morning in the cafe and worked until 8 a.m.,” he said. “Then I went to school and worked at the bowling alley until midnight.”
Before too long, Morgan had saved the $80 he needed to buy a dusty old Chevy — his first car.
Iowa Was A Great Place To Be From
Morgan loved living in Iowa. He was in a small rural town he describes as just a few blocks apart, stitched together with the wonderful smell of freshly mowed hay.
It was a great place to grow up. It was a great place to “be from.”
But, if he wanted to make the kind of living that would afford a life, he realized it was not a great place to “be.”
For that, he decided he needed to attend college. Which meant he needed an even better-paying job than dishwashing and tips from the bowling alley.
That led him to become what he says was probably the “world’s youngest” encyclopedia salesman.
No, not Britannica, the top seller.
It was a smaller, lesser-known company called World Book.
“Most of the encyclopedia salesmen worked in cities,” Morgan said. “The doors are close together … but the trouble was most of those people didn’t have money or didn’t read books.”
Becoming The Richest Kid In Town
Traditional salesman advice says that to get to a “yes” you have to listen to a lot of “nos.” But Morgan didn’t want to indiscriminately knock on doors.
Every “no” felt too much like a bullet to his heart. He needed a better system.
“The World Book was designed for children,” Morgan said. “So I started cruising around my little hometown, and if I saw a bunch of bicycles in the yard, I knew I had a buyer because they had kids.”
But, he realized, that wasn’t enough to ensure a yes. He also needed to make sure the family could afford an encyclopedia.
That started him looking for not just bikes but Buicks as well. A family with a Buick in the driveway had money. And a family with both a bike and a Buick had a child on which that money could be spent.
Morgan also styled his approach so that he was practically closing the deal at the beginning of the sale rather than the end.
“I’d just walk up, knock on the door, and introduce myself,” he said. “And my opening line was, ‘Would you be interested in something that would help your children in school?’ Well, boom, what mother’s not interested in something that will help her children in school?”
The Multiplier Effect
Once the sale had been made, Morgan then did something else that ratcheted up his success. He would always ask the woman if she knew any other mothers who might also want their children to have the “World Book advantage.”
That usually produced a nice list of likely prospects, where he had a better than average shot at making more sales.
In no time, this thoughtfully targeted approach made him the company’s top salesman and he became, in his own words, the “richest kid in town.”
This job didn’t just take him to college. It took him there in style. He had plenty of money to trade in his old Chevy for a shiny new Oldsmobile convertible.
He didn’t know it yet, but he’d learned everything he was ever going to need to succeed in sales beyond his wildest dreams. Later, he’d use those same principles to close multi-million-dollar deals.
First, though, came a few wrong turns.
Learning The Wyoming Way
Navigating past those wrong turns is something Wyoming helped Morgan with.
“The most influential character in my life was my uncle, Ken Shelton,” Morgan said. “He lived in Rock Springs and was a real cowboy.”
When Morgan was 13, he ran away to Rock Springs to spend a summer and part of another year with his uncle. They’d go up to White Mountain to catch wild horses, fish and tell jokes.
Shelton was one of the best storytellers Morgan has ever known.
“For Uncle Ken, his stories didn’t have to end up the way they actually did,” Morgan said. “But they always ended up the way they should have. And that’s the way he viewed life.”
Morgan’s favorite Uncle Ken yarn is about the time he was roping wild horses on White Mountain a bit too long. He caught a wild mustang just as the sun set, was bucked off in the dark, and ended up tangled in his own rope as a storm rolled in.
He saw a nearby cave for shelter, but what he couldn’t see inside that cave was the mountain lion living there.
“Before he manages to finally strangle the mountain lion to death it bites off three of his fingers,” Morgan said. “Now, even the casual observer is aware that my uncle has all of his fingers. But when I brought that up, he says, ‘Yes, and that’s another amazing story, but I’m trying to finish this one!’ ”
Morgan sums up the wonderful lessons he learned from his story-telling uncle in a chapter he called “Never Sell Your Saddle” in his bestselling Amazon book, “The Closer: An Inside Look at the World of High-Powered Sales, Big Money and Big Egos.”
“The chapter ends up being a warning to people who are about to merge with a larger corporation and, for a few dollars, sell their life’s work,” he said. “They find themselves with nothing to do … In other words, don’t be quick to sell your saddle. Life’s a long, long ride.”
The Professor
A long ride is often filled with a few wrong turns. For Morgan, his first wrong turn took him to Northeast Missouri State University in Kirksville.
“I was really captivated by academia,” Morgan said. “And I’d always wanted to be a college professor. To do that, you pretty much had to have a Ph.D.”
Knowing that, he took an extra-heavy class load, determined to earn both a bachelor’s and a master’s at the same time.
“But the Vietnam War was going on,” he said. “And I had a very low lottery number.”
This all but guaranteed he’d get drafted into the Army. So, he took control of his own destiny by pre-emptively enlisting in the Marines.
Like many who served in Vietnam, Morgan doesn’t talk about it much.
“We’re all still conflicted over the Vietnam War, and so am I,” Morgan said.
After the war, he returned to his education, earning his Ph.D. at St. Louis University in child psychology — a notable accomplishment in and of itself, particularly given he was the first person in his family to even graduate from high school.
But it didn’t take long for him to realize his dreams of being a professor had been something of a fantasy. He taught for a year at the University of Wyoming, and was bored.
To solve that problem, he tried an administrative position in Southern California — and that was even worse.
Somehow, in spite of his best intentions, he had not landed in the right profession at all.
A New Door Opens
The solution came from a little problem known as San Diego traffic.
He was stuck in a sea of cars for 10 miles.
So, he turned on the radio and became a captive audience as a booming voice emerged from his speakers offering him a free trip to Lake Tahoe. All he had to do was look at a recreational land development.
“Free is a powerful word,” Morgan said with a chuckle. “So I went home and called the 800 number and then my wife and I decided to take the trip. We got the free trip to Tahoe, and that was the first time in my life I ever met a professional, hard-close salesman.”
The project, Tahoe Donner, was being developed by a larger-than-life entrepreneur named Justin Dart.
“He started Rexall Drugs and Tupperware and Vanda cosmetics,” Morgan said. “It was all pretty exciting.”
The property was rustic elegance of the kind that whispered wealth and success. It was electrifying.
In the beginning, the sales pitches were all low-key. But soon, pushier salesmen took turns convincing Morgan and his wife to buy.
“You accepted our free trip,” one of them said. “You said you could afford the price, and you agreed that if everything we told you lived up to what you saw, you would make a decision to buy before returning to San Diego. Isn’t that true?”
Morgan was reaching for his checkbook when his wife, Connie, interrupted.
“We didn’t say we’d make a decision to buy,’” she told the salesman. “We said we’d make ‘a decision.’”
The property was great, she added, but just too far away.
On the way back, one of the salesmen, named Cal Hackett, offered Morgan a new deal.
“I’ll give you $250 for every lead you give me that buys,” Morgan recalled. “I was making $1,000 a month at the college. Four leads is a thousand dollars.”
Morgan had a cushy, safe job so he wasn’t sure about taking that offer. But he was also bored.
Once home, he noticed an ad in the Sunday paper that talked about selling real estate in Lake Tahoe for $50,000 a year.
“I thought to myself, this can’t be a coincidence,” Morgan said. “This must be the project that I just visited. And $50,000 a year is a lot more than $1,000 a month.”
Enough For A New Car — Every Month
Morgan decided to answer the ad.
“When I called, they said, ‘Are you interested in selling some real estate in Lake Tahoe?’” Morgan recalled. “And I said, ‘Well, actually, I’ve just been up there. I just visited a project at Tahoe Donner.”
The recruiter wondered if Morgan had purchased a lot. When Morgan said, “no,” the recruiter seemed delighted.
“They thought that I meant I understood the project, but wouldn’t have to be talked out of my own lot,” Morgan said. “They figured I wanted to send them leads.”
“I said, ‘No, no, I don’t want to send you leads. I want to sell it myself. I want to be the guy doing what that salesman was doing,’” he said.
At first, the recruiter was interested by that idea. Until he found out Morgan didn’t have a real-estate license.
“His welcoming demeanor quickly evaporated,” Morgan said with a chuckle. “So I went off and got a real-estate license and then I started selling recreational land.”
That development has since turned into one of the largest homeowners associations in the United States, Morgan said.
“And I very quickly became the top salesman,” he added. “I was making probably six, seven grand a month and you could buy a new car for $5,000 back then. So that’s what really got me hooked.”
Becoming A Ski Bum
The real pivot in Morgan’s life didn’t come from a commission check, though. It came from a paperback book he picked up at random because the title intrigued him. It was called “How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World,” written by Harry Browne.
Morgan came away with one main point.
“Having a lot of money won’t make you free,” Morgan said. “But being free gives you the opportunity to make a lot of money.”
Within six months of reading the book, Morgan quit his job, divorced his wife, and hit the road to see the world.
“I became what I jokingly call a ski bum with money,” he said. “I skied all over the world. I traveled. I did whatever I wanted to do.”
And that was fine for a little while.
“I think I was 50 then,” he said. “That’s too young to retire. You can only ski and have fun and fish so much. And I’ve always had a real deep-seated entrepreneurial spirit. I’m incapable of doing nothing.”
Figuring Out What Comes Next
Morgan decided to buy land in Jackson Hole and build his dream mountain home while he thought about the next chapter of his life.
Building a home requires lots of lumber as well as other skilled people, which led him to make friends with the owner of a large lumberyard, as well as the owner of one of Wyoming’s biggest excavation companies.
“One day, the lumberyard owner said, ‘I think I want to sell my lumber yard,’” Morgan said. “And I thought, well, I have a real estate license. I can do that'.”
No sooner had he accomplished that than the excavation contractor decided he too wanted to sell. These werecommissions large enough to pay off the home Morgan had just built in Jackson.
Making those kinds of deals introduced Morgan to a whole new sales world — the world of mergers and acquisitions. And, just like that, he had a new career mode to explore — only this time it offered six-figure commissions.
And all based on skills he’d learned as a 17-year-old kid selling encyclopedias to Iowa farmers.
“It’s actually easier than selling encyclopedias,” he said with a chuckle. “And a lot bigger commissions.”
Morgan is 83, and still figuring out what comes next.
But after a lifetime of reinvention that began in a near-ghost town in Wyoming and wound its way back to Jackson Hole, he’s convinced of one thing. You never sell your saddle, and you never stop chasing the next chapter.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
