Growing Up Promo - Danny Henderson - Proforma Graphic PrintSource

Danny Henderson is the self-proclaimed VP of Sales at Proforma Graphic PrintSource, a distributor company founded and owned by his mother, Linda Martinelli, based out of Corona, California. While Danny has been around the promotional products industry his entire life, he didn’t have any interest in making a career out of promo.  Fast forward almost 20 years, and you can find Danny closing deals on the golf course as a million-dollar producer who is more invested in the future of the company than ever before. 

Growing up, Danny’s grandfather owned a print company. His mom was working for the Los Angeles Police Department (often undercover) at the time, and would help out during busy times. After Danny’s sister was born, Linda began working for her father doing print sales, and later joined BT Office Products for the ability to add promotional products to what they could offer. Upon retiring, Danny’s grandfather gave the company to an uncle who was married into the family. “My mom had been involved in the business since day one, and she was the top performing sales rep year after year, so she was pretty bothered by that,” Danny explained.  “At the same time this was going down, she was also working hard to cut through some red tape to be owner-approved, and somehow discovered Proforma along the way,” he continued.  “She decided then and there to start a business of her own.”  22 years later, Proforma Graphic PrintSource is a successful, thriving business, with no slow-down in sight.

Linda qualified for Proforma’s Million Dollar Club (MDC), a prestigious recognition exclusive to owners and sales reps who achieve an annual goal of one million dollars in sales, in only her second year of being in business. This made her the first woman to hit MDC, and she quickly went on to be the first woman to hit Proforma’s Multi-Million Dollar Club. “My mom has more energy than anyone I know,” Danny expressed.  In addition to running her own business, she helps run her husband's forensic company, and she has three radio talk shows on top of that.  “I don’t know how she does it.  I have three cups of coffee and I’m still tired,” Danny laughed.

Danny’s unintentional career in promo really started as a kid, organizing fulfillment programs on the living room floor.  He remembers one Thanksgiving during his pre-high school days, where one of his mom’s clients, Forest Lawn Cemetery, had an event that called for all-hands-on-deck in order to deliver on time.  “Cemeteries don’t exactly take holidays off, so there we were packing up promo and helping my mom deliver them ON Thanksgiving day,” he recalled.  Fast forward to Danny’s post-high school days… he found himself attending college and working construction for a local company. Upon finishing a project on a residential house in Newport Beach, Danny’s boss turned around to thank them, while announcing he was retiring and the house they’d been working on was actually his own. He immediately called his mom and told her he needed a job, not knowing at the time that job would turn into a life-long career in promo.

“I wasn’t fully interested in it at the time, I just knew I needed a job,” Danny recalled.  He worked as internal support for about three years, learning some of the graphic design aspects along the way. At 21, he took a shot at outside sales. “I quickly realized nobody trusts a 21 year old to handle their marketing, so I went back to the inside stuff for another few years,” he said.

Danny eventually found his way back into the world of sales for Proforma Graphic PrintSource, only this time, with more experience and drive than in his first attempt. When asked what made him take the plunge and put everything he had into an outside, commission-only sales role, Danny candidly revealed that money was his ultimate motivator.  

“I was tired of being broke,” he expressed. “When you’re in sales, you have the ability to give yourself a raise anytime you want, you just have to work for it.”

While he also loves the freedom aspect of not being tied to a desk from 8-5, he acknowledges this in turn means there really are no days off.  “Vacations are no longer true vacations, and rounds of golf are never quiet,” he laughed.  

If you follow Danny on social media, you’ll quickly find he’s an avid golfer, and to say he frequents the golf course is an understatement. What you might not know, however, is he was somehow able to quickly incorporate his love for golf into his determination to grow his sales and expand his bank account. “Golf was my good luck charm,” Danny revealed. “If I sent out a large quote and didn’t hear anything for two to three days, I would go to the golf course and it would get approved.”  They say timing is everything, and Danny also realized that if he’d head out to the course on Fridays around 2pm, that was also when a lot of businessmen were hitting the course. This gave him the ability to create connections, and those connections often turned into sales. “Some of them have turned into some really big accounts,” he shared. “Some only wanted 12 t-shirts for their kid’s baseball game, but all in all, it’s really worked out for me.” 

While Graphic PrintSource is still 100% owned (and run) by his mom, Danny manages his own book of business his way, and his sales are completely independent of hers. He admits they tend to butt heads when it comes to the way they do things within the business. Danny wanting to do things ‘the new way’ and his mom wanting to do things ‘the way they’ve always worked for her,’ they maintain a strong mutual respect for each other and appreciate the assets they both bring to the table.  Danny’s positive contributions to the company, however, didn’t come without some trial and error and having to learn things the hard way for himself.  “I realized a lot can happen when you actually try,” Danny recognized.  “It took a few years, but I realized if I was tired of being broke, it was 100% up to me to put in the work to change that.”

Danny qualified for Million Dollar Club his first full year giving outside sales his all, and he has continued to make a name for himself by being more involved with the industry as a whole. 

When asked if Danny feels there’s a stigma attached to working for his mom’s business, from people both inside and outside of the industry, he said he does.  “That’s a true thing,” Danny expressed, “especially from friends of mine not in the industry who think that because I’m young living in Newport Beach, it must be because I work for my mom, or that I’m a trust fund baby. They don’t realize that straight commission means I’m truly on my own, and that I’m in charge of making my own money.”  Danny also recognized that detaching himself from that stigma, and in order to create his own identity so he’s not recognized only as “Linda’s son,” required different layers of effort and hard work. “For years I would blame people for my lack of sales by quoting the wrong item or whatever it may be, but I didn’t exactly go out of my way to suggest products and vendors,” he shared.  “I learned a lot when I decided to put work into this and really make something of myself,” he continued. “I’m not just pushing orders for 500 tumblers through anymore, I’m asking what the intention is behind them. I ask what they’re being used for and who the intended audience is. I’m suggesting other items and providing alternate solutions for what my client needs and what is truly best for their brand.”

I wrapped up our Growing Up Promo conversation by asking Danny to share his final thoughts on being in an industry he never intended to join, and what keeps him passionate about staying in promo. “Nobody intentionally comes into this industry,” he stated. “Everyone has a similar story of falling into it; everybody already knows somebody who knows somebody, and there are not a lot of strangers. I think that’s what makes our industry so special, and I think that’s what’s going to help our industry come back from everything this past year in a big, big way.”