Michael Cook aims to boost the financial health of clients and companies

By Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.

Please don't squeeze Michael Cook. After all, he's busy getting Charmin bathroom tissue and Crest toothpaste onto shelves and teaching sound financial practices to Cornell student peers and Chicago-area clients.

Senior Michael Cook's business career already is taking off. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography

For four summers, Cook has worked as an intern sales representative at Procter and Gamble (P&G), the Cincinnati-based manufacturer of household products. He also has helped save personal finance clients from ruin, started Cornell's only undergraduate investment club and, on Sunday, he will graduate with a bachelor's degree in applied economics and management from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Fresh out of high school, Cook became a sales representative for P&G on Chicago's South Side, servicing three small grocery stores. "That summer I learned that selling is not really selling. Selling is a partnership," he said. "It's working with someone to improve their business while improving yours."

At the first store he approached as a neophyte salesman, Cook studied the products on the shelves. Then he asked to see the store manager. As Cook tells it, the manager was so incensed that a freshly minted high school graduate was his sales representative, he kicked him out of the store.

But the manager later relented, as Cook recalls, "That ended up being my best store." All told, Cook says he brought in an additional $80,000 in gross sales for the three stores.

The following summer -- following Cook's freshman year -- P&G gave him increased responsibility, including part of Walgreen's Chicago-area pharmacies. He specialized in home-care products, conducting analyses and looking for ways to improve sales. In three months, Cook said, he and the P&G sales team helped increase Walgreen's gross sales by about $2.3 million.

In the meantime, Cook started the undergraduate investment club, the International Ivy Investors Quorum, affectionately known to the students as "Triple IQ." And it has enjoyed a 10 percent capital gain over the past two years. He also has conducted personal finance seminars for students in some of Cornell's program houses and dormitories.

And when he's not studying or making investments or selling household goods to major store chains, Cook provides his personal clients with financial advice in Chicago. At the end of the semester, he learned he had received a dean's fellowship to the Johnson Graduate School of Management, which he probably will enter in fall 2003, after working for a year.

During his third summer working for P&G, Cook handled Walgreen's hair and health-care lines. As part of a P&G sales team, he helped persuade Walgreen's to add the family size of Vick's Vapo Steam to their shelves, which generated $1.6 million in additional national sales for the company, he said.

Last summer P&G sent Cook to San Francisco to work as part of the national cosmetic sales team with the Oakland, Calif.-based Safeway grocery-store chain account. After an analysis, Cook and his colleagues convinced Safeway to carry more-popular sizes of P&G products, which added, he said, $10 million to Safeway's gross sales in the Oakland area and $42 million nationwide.

"That was a big summer," he said, "I crunched a lot of numbers."