At 68 and nearing retirement, Joel Christman did what a lot of people do as their careers wind to a close. He took stock of his work life.
In one sense, it was a simple calculation. Christman spent his childhood in Sandusky, Ohio, spellbound by the heavy equipment that carved roads out of the landscape or dredged Lake Erie. He passed his adult life selling the giant machinery that had captivated him.
So he sat down to do the math.
“A guy told me one time that he sold $100 million of equipment over his lifetime,” Christman says. “I thought I’d see what my group does when you total it all up.”
He started selling out of Caterpillar’s Peoria, Ill., office before becoming a district sales rep in Colorado. He spent the mid-1970s in Brazil, where he aided construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway.
But the bulk of his career unfolded after his return to Colorado in 1977, when his family settled in Greenwood Village, where he and his wife, Penni, still live.
He went to work for Wagner Equipment Co. in Aurora, where he dealt used equipment to the mining industry at first, then struck out into sales on the Western Slope. Ultimately, he settled in as mining- sales manager for Colorado, New Mexico and far west Texas.
For most of his time at Wagner, Christman oversaw a group of five salesmen for whom he served as sounding board and consultant. He felt fortunate that, especially in the homestretch of his career, he could rely on a stable of experienced hands.
He began his computation with 1981. More recent years were easy enough to track via computer, but the early ones required some manual figuring.
He did $5 million in that first year — which Christman regarded as a big number, even considering that these were big-ticket items. The equipment at the end of his career sold for $750,000 to $3.1 million per unit.
Economic fortunes fluctuated over the years. Christman worked through the oil-shale bust in 1982, when he saw a sale of $10 million to $12 million canceled after a Western Slope operation abruptly closed its doors. More recently, business has been on an upswing.
For his purposes, a simple snapshot of accomplishment, he didn’t adjust for inflation.
One other thing he didn’t adjust over time: his philosophy. He wasn’t breaking any new ground by resolving to do what’s right for his customers, even if it cost some money in the short run. But he stuck to it.
“He’s certainly admired and respected by his customers,” says his boss of 34 years, Joe Wagner, chairman of Wagner Equipment. “It’s a relationship business as well as a numbers business. And I think the relationship end of that is more important, really.”
When he totaled up the sales a few months ago, Christman came up just shy of $1 billion.
The number surprised him. But he pretty much kept it to himself.
“To me, it was just a number,” he says. “Just a billion dollars — wow. It was just my own little deal.”
It was, at least, until he let it slip to his 29-year-old son, also named Joel.
Young Joel was fascinated by the calculation. He found it even more interesting given that he also went into sales, dealing mutual funds for a Chicago firm.
He saw his father’s long career, spent largely with one employer and driven by a work ethic and humility, yield amazing results.
“What I’ve learned,” young Joel says, “is the value of the people aspect of it. That always seemed very important to my father.”
At the time of his calculation, Christman was a few months from retirement. He still worked personally with a select few customers.
On June 30, a Thursday in his last week at work, he closed the deal on a 349EL hydraulic excavator that pushed his total over $1 billion.
“The first of July, I totaled it up,” he says. “I guess I was selling to the end. That got me over the hump.”
So what does $1 billion mean in the often-imprecise accounting of a career?
It’s a milepost, a measure, a curiosity. A number. A big number. But it’s not the first thing Joel Christman thinks about when he considers the completion of his working life.
“It’s about what relationships you had with your peers, with your customers, with the guys I managed,” he says. “That’s the part I’m going to miss.”
Kevin Simpson: 303-954-1739 or ksimpson@denverpost.com
