Flamboyant and tireless, Glenn W. Turner is to salesmanship what Billy Sunday was to revivalism. He built a tiny door-to-door cosmetics firm into a multimillion-dollar empire by stirring life's losers with a bewitching fast-buck gospel.
Turner gave up selling sewing machines to poor Southern rural blacks and became a distributor for a small cosmetics concern, but he soon wound up broke.
He then got a $5,000 bank loan and started his own cosmetics firm, Koscot Interplanetary Inc., in Orlando, Fla.
Even before he had a product, Turner had a small staff out recruiting distributors, who were asked to advance up to $5,000 to get in on the ground floor of a great proposition.
Amazingly, the recruiters found people willing to pay. The money began to flow in, and Turner was on his way.
He contracted with Kolmar Laboratories in Port Jervis, N.Y., to turn out a Koscot product line, which consisted of 104 items ranging from nail-polish remover ($1.25 a bottle) to mink-oil concentrate, used as a skin softener, which is priced at $10 for a two-ounce bottle.
Using Koscot's rapidly spiraling income, Turner went on to found such companies as Fashcot, which sells wigs, Emcot, which makes pink and yellow colored fur coats, and Transcot, a trucking firm. One of his companies sells a success-motivation course called "Dare to Be Great," which consisted of a recorder with cassettes and a notebook crammed with such power-releasing hints as "Develop a Positive Mental Attitude" and "Remember Everybody's Name."
Complaints about the course, which costs up to $5,000 to complete, brought legal actions in eight states. In Davidson County, Tenn., five "Dare to Be Great" salesmen were arrested for violating a law against pyramid selling. Since Turner was sole owner of his companies, he did not have to report his total sales volume, but with his usual extravagance, he estimates it as running into hundreds of millions of dollars.
