Rusty Renfroe: Never Coasted

Recently retired McKesson area sales manager cared about his customers, his company and, most of all, his people

Jay Keene remembers his first conference call with fellow sales managers in 1995 or thereabouts. “Rusty was talking about just having a sales meeting with his team and how fired up they were,” he recalls, speaking of Rusty Renfroe, area sales manager for McKesson Medical-Surgical. “I thought to myself, ‘How cool is that, to have a meeting that is that successful?’” Keene is area sales manager for McKesson Medical-Surgical in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle.

In 2014, almost 20 years later, little had changed, he says. “I remember the last conference call Rusty was on. His enthusiasm, participation and concern for his reps, customers and McKesson were as strong as they were on that first call [as he] talked about what a great meeting he had, and how fired up his guys were.

“He never coasted. He never wavered with his spirit to ‘Do right.’ If you had listened to that call, you would have thought, ‘This guy is going to work another 15 years.’”

Renfroe retired from McKesson Medical-Surgical in May following a 40-plus-year career in medical sales.

“In a lot of people’s minds, a manager is someone who tells you what to do; he or she is the liaison between what corporate wants, and what your manager wants you to do in the field,” says Jay Nolff, account manager, who reported to Renfroe for something like 22 years. “But it doesn’t have much impact unless that manager is respected and is a leader. That’s where Rusty excelled.

“A manager can tell you what to do, but a leader believes in you. You wanted to do what Rusty wanted you to do.”

“Rusty shared with his reps his life principles and guidelines,” adds Nancy Deswysen, who retired as McKesson Medical-Surgical’s regional sales manager for South Florida two years ago. “He cared for them both personally and professionally. The impact was glowing.”

Navy training
Raised in Pensacola, Fla., home of a U.S. Naval Air Station on the Florida Panhandle, Renfroe served as a hospital corpsman in the U.S. Navy from 1968 to 1972. They were the Vietnam years, though he did not see action in Vietnam. “I got a lot of unbelievable training,” he says. “I started my college career at age 17 thinking I would be a dentist,” he says. “By the time I got out of the Navy, I wanted to be a doctor.”

In the service, he was land-based for a year or year and a half, then served at sea for two and a half years. “I was corpsman on a guided missile destroyer,” he recalls. He and a chief were the only medical personnel for a ship with about 350 crew members. “There was no doctor, no dentist. Sometimes you were opening up books in order to learn how to do something.”

The experience taught him a great deal about medicine, but it taught him something else – how to be decisive. “The Navy was where I started honing my leadership skills,” he says. “They were formative years for a young, 19-year-old kid.”

After serving, Renfroe enrolled in a pre-med program at Memphis State University, but decided against pursuing medicine after graduation. He had met his wife-to-be, Jane Vincent in Millington, Tenn., where the two married. By the time he was 23, they had a child. “I had to provide for a family, so I got a job in the medical field. It proved to be the right step for me.”

Relationships
He became a pharmaceutical rep in Orlando, Fla., for Tutag Pharmaceuticals. Two years later, he joined Healthco’s medical sales team in the Sarasota/Bradenton area. (Healthco was later acquired by Foster Medical, which in turn was acquired by General Medical…which in turn was acquired by McKesson Corp.) He was a rep for 10 years, then got into management.

It was a veteran rep, Ed Herring, who taught young Renfroe the importance of building relationships with the doctor. “He told me, ‘Whenever you set up an office, write down on top of that piece of paper, ‘Power table.’ If you do that, you’ll have a friend for life, because power tables are so much easier [than box tables].’” Another significant influence in his professional life was – and remains – Dick Moorman, now vice president of distributor relations for Midmark. With his ability to focus on whomever he was with, Moorman impressed on Renfroe – as had Herring – the significance of relationship-building. “Ever since, Dick has been a supporter and resource to me and my team,” says Renfroe. He credits Moorman with sending another outstanding manufacturer rep – Chris Huppert – his way more recently.

Leadership
Managing a sales force suited Renfroe well. “One thing I liked – and on which I prided myself – was the ability to retain customer connectivity, the ability to engage with the customer, as well as being in the field with reps,” he says. Coaching, guiding, mentoring his reps, and engaging with customers, was a formula for which he was well-suited.

“That’s where leadership comes in,” he continues. Working with reps, imploring them to ‘Follow me over this hill.’ That’s what I truly enjoyed, and that’s what I was blessed with doing as a career.

“To me, management means being a coach, a mentor, and, the older you get, something of a father as well,” he continues. “It means garnering the respect of your reps, so they believe that what we’re doing is the right thing, and that we’re doing it not only for the customer, but for the company and, ultimately, ourselves.

“The true leader says, ‘Here’s the vision; I am the voice for the organization and our team, and as a team, we have to accomplish this.’ The leader has to have that vision, and he or she has to believe in what they’re doing.”

One of the most critical skills facing the leader is gathering the right team around him or her, and that means hiring the right people. Successful reps have excellent communication skills, and are willing to travel outside their comfort zone to talk with customers and learn their needs, and then provide them.

Today’s leader must also work to keep his or her team in touch with each other, and fostering collaboration among them. One way Renfroe did this was the 7:30 a.m. conference call with his team, every Thursday morning. “Reps are by themselves in the field; you don’t get them in the same room more than two or three times a year,” he says. Networking – even if via telephone – is essential.

Networking with peers in management is a skill Renfroe developed as well, as he, Deswysen and Keene frequently collaborated on sales meetings and other projects.

But leaders themselves are only as good as the leaders above them, he adds. Of McKesson Medical-Surgical’s Gary Keeler, Renfroe says, “He has a presence and expectation and understanding of the sales force.” Keeler, who came from McKesson’s Red Line long-term-care sales division, was able to bridge the gap with primary care, he says. “I owe much to him and his support, and his willingness to allow everybody to develop fully.”

‘A manufacturer’s dream’
Nolff first crossed paths with Renfroe in 1989, when Nolff was a rep for a manufacturer named Q Med, which made a holter monitor to detect silent ischemia. “Rusty was a manufacturer’s dream,” recalls Nolff. “He was friendly, the kind of person you can talk to. And you knew that if he believed in what you were selling, he would garner his sales force and get behind it. That was my impression as a young, aggressive guy in the field – ‘This is someone I can work with and someone who can really help me.’” It wasn’t long before Nolff joined Renfroe’s team.

One of Renfroe’s strengths as a leader was the ability to manage reps based on their unique personalities and needs, notes Nolff. “He is really good at reading people and knowing what they need to excel.” Renfroe has another gift – the ability to cut through nonsense and tell his reps, “These are the top three or four things that I need you to do for me,” he continues. “He was able to put clarity and focus on whatever we needed to do when we woke up and went to work.

“And he was as much a manager as a counselor, cheerleader and personal friend,” says Nolff. “I could come in with a company problem or personal one, and he would sit me down on his ‘therapeutic’ couch and help me work through it.”

Renfroe taught him that relationships with peers and customers are at least as important as the nuts and bolts of job performance, says Nolff. Though Renfroe’s sales team excelled in the field, “he was more concerned about how successful we could be as human beings” he continues. “When that happens, when you feel that way, and when you know that the other person feels that way about you, success is a byproduct.”

‘Do right’
“They say that those who laugh will live longer than those who don’t,” said Keene, in comments prepared for Renfroe’s retirement party in Celebration, Fla., in June. “Rusty and I may live forever.”

In fact, the surprise retirement party – which spanned two days, to accommodate dinner and golf – was organized by Renfroe’s sales team, explains Nolff. They held it in Celebration, which was the location of a 2002 party at which the team celebrated their sales success and Renfroe’s selection as sales manager of the year. Among the highlights of the party: A DVD with photos depicting Renfroe’s career and friends, and a calendar featuring photos of reps with the theme, “What we were really doing – or what we wished we were really doing – during those 7:30 a.m. conference calls.”

In his remarks, Keene recalled sales meetings with Renfroe and Deswysen in Dodgertown, the former Brooklyn Dodgers training facility in Vero Beach, Fla. (It was at a sales meeting in 1987 in Richmond, Va., that the three first met.) Later, in recognition of their close working relationship and friendship, they were to be known as the “Three Amigos,” after the 1986 movie by the same name, starring Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short.

Keene cited some of Renfroe’s core principles, which Renfroe loved to quote, including: “Do right” (thanks to former football coach and sports analyst Lou Holtz); “Do what’s right, do the best you can, and treat people like you want to be treated”; and “Answer the three universal questions – ‘Can I trust you? Are you committed? Do you care about me?’”

“I have had the pleasure of not only getting to know Rusty and Jane, but his son Jason and lovely wife Vonda, and their grandsons, whom I have had the pleasure of watching grow up through pictures and stories from a proud granddad; Rusty’s sister, mother and father and many friends along the way,” said Keene. “This entree into his life is shared with few, and I am honored to be one.

“You can count yourself fortunate if, over the course of a lifetime, you have one hero/mentor who never lets you down,” he noted. “You can count yourself doubly fortunate if you have one friend who remains close and true over the years. In Rusty, I have both. I’m grateful far beyond these few inadequate words.”

Care about people
It’s said that people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care, says Deswysen. “And that was so apparent at the retirement dinner, when people got up and spoke from the heart about Rusty’s influence and impact on them.” More than one recalled that even when Renfroe insisted on a course of action with which the rep disagreed, those reps knew that he was always there for them, she says.

“Rusty mentored more reps through promotions than anyone else I know,” she says. The expression “came through Orlando” was known throughout the company.

“He was a father figure, in a sense, and while he got a sense of achievement setting goals, he did it in a loving way. He did it in a way that made people listen, because they knew he cared about them and listened to them.”

Rusty and Jane Renfroe were, at press time, preparing to move from their home of 23 years in Oviedo, Fla., to a new home in Franklin, N.C. With their son, Jason, and two grandsons – Cooper and Landon – in Seattle, “traveling to Seattle will be part of our retirement schedule,” he says.