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Technology Stocks : General Magic -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Darla who wrote (2884)	7/22/1998 10:02:00 PM
From: Austin S.	Respond to of 10081

Do you really think PriAmerica Insurance Company, Amway, Kirby vaccuum cleaners and many, many encyclopedia and book companies (to name but a few) attained multi-hundred million to billion dollars in annual sales with great advertising campaigns? Not! I'm telling you, while Satchi was signed a mere three weeks ago, GMGC will not be devoting much of its budget towards Satchi (advertising and marketing) in the first year or so. This came from the horse's mouth. Instead, GMGC is aggressively pursuing resellers with multiple locations who must commit to a minimum of 8 outside sales representatives to call on companies, etc. The aggressive reseller commission/residual schedule will permit the resellers to hire virtually unlimited Portico sales reps on virtually a straight commission basis, if necessary. Think about it, if one reseller in say the metro-Chicago area (in which there are over 8,000 Realtors and over 20,000 attorneys were to activate a mere 4,000 new Portico subscribers to $50 a month packages (it will more likely be $100 packages) then the reseller will make a minimum of $160,000 in up-front spiffs (cash) and then about $20,000 a month or $240,000 a year in commissions off the gross revenue, which amounts to just under a million dollars over 4 years - just for these initial Portico accounts. You don't think this, alone, is tremendous incentive to sell, alone? It's a no brainer. With 75 resellers (with probably more than 200 total locations - and all in the big metro areas across the country) you will see 8 x 75 sales representatives, minimum, which is 600 sales representatives across the country selling Portico. (This is my best guess based on information I've obtained.) We really don't need any more than about 300 Portico sales representatives nationwide, IMHO, to do the job, (i.e., 400M new Portico accounts within 18 months). Just look at and compare LabCorp [ticker LH] for example. LabCorp has a mere 250 sales representatives nationwide through which it generates over 1.3 billion in annual sales with no advertising! And, LabCorp sells mundane lab testing services to hospitals and doctors' offices. This is but one of hundreds of similar examples. Another example, though somewhat different, is MicroAge [MICA], which does about 5 billion in annual sales through outside sales representatives. In my opinion, 400 Portico sales representatives, particularly in metro areas, targeting attorneys, company sales forces, small business, and Realtors can sign up 400M users in 12-18 months, thus generating mega dollars for themselves correlating to hugh revenues for the General. Therefore, I respectfully disagree with your hard and narrow opinion. All in all, time will tell.