Most Powerful Salespeople 2019: Transworld's Al Fialkovich

The Most Powerful Salespeople is an annual list from ColoradoBiz highlighting the outstanding performance of nine salespeople around Colorado. The 2019 sales standouts were selected by our editorial board from nominations submitted over several months on Coloradobiz.com, based on sales performance, persistence demonstrated in achieving or surpassing sales goals, and factors such as challenges surmounted or indications of exceptional effort to get deals done.

Al Fialkovich, 36

Managing Director, Transworld Business Advisors – Rocky Mountain

Last year Fialkovich was the top broker across the more than 200 Transworld Business Advisor offices, with commissions of $896,000 on 10 transactions totaling about $15 million in sales. At the same time, he oversaw $23 million in deal volume on more than 50 transactions for the business brokerage. Fialkovich and his wife, Jessica Fialkovich, launched Transworld’s Denver office after more than a decade buying, building and selling successful businesses in the wine, spirits and retail industries in Colorado and Florida. They launched their first business in 2009 when they were in their mid-20s and made a successful exit 30 months later.

“That’s when I learned I was pretty good at selling things. Sales is about doing a lot of little things right,” says Fialkovich, whose first experience as a business broker was to help his dad exit his business 16 years ago.

“My dad was a small business owner and didn’t know what to do with his business,” Fialkovich says. “He thought I was his exit plan. I was like, ‘No way, dude.’ So the first deal I ever did was his.”

Fialkovich gives the sense that he enjoyed the wine business but finds what he’s doing now more meaningful. He shares an encounter he had with a former client whose business Fialkovich had sold. “It was awesome because he gives me his card, and in big red letters on the back, it said, ‘RETIRED.’ I hadn’t seen him in a while; he’d lost about 40 pounds. He’d had really bad diabetes. And he’s like, ‘You saved my life, dude.’  Entrepreneurs go hard, and they forget to take care of themselves sometimes.

Favorite sales book:

“What I found really valuable was Sandler Sales Training. It’s not necessarily a book. You go to classes every week, and it’s more about repetition and techniques. It’s about consultative selling. And then two books: ‘New Sales Simplified,’ by Mike Weinberg, and – this isn’t really a sales book – ‘The Road Less Stupid,’ by Keith Cunningham.”

How has the sales profession been impacted by the internet, social media and increased access to information in general?

“I think you’ve just got to get face to face, get on the phone. We see a lot of people hiding behind email. I don’t deal with that. We’re more old-school. We like to get people in-person. It’s lazy to sit behind a computer … rely on the internet. My bad joke is, what would you be doing if Al Gore hadn’t invented the internet? What would we be doing right now? So go do it.”