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Tustin Ranch’s Ron Cummings, on camera in the studio of Sydney’s TVSN channel, is momentarily taken aback. “I’ve called to perv on Ron a bit,” the caller had just said in her thick Australian accent. Perv? It isn’t until later that someone explains to the skin-care entrepreneur that in Aussie slang, it’s a verb that means, “I think you’re hot.”

That itself isn’t so disconcerting, because, after all, Cummings is in the business of looking good. In his early 50s, he’s got the trim, athletic build that suits business casual attire, plus a lush mane of graying hair and a smile that gleams like fine china. But those details just enhance Cummings’ calling card—his skin—which looks almost preternaturally smooth and supple, even in a low-budget YouTube video. He’s a walking advertisement for the restorative powers of the products he pitches, especially as a guy who’s overcome the ravages of adult chickenpox.

But while Cummings enjoys the compliment, he prefers to keep the friendly caller chitchat to a minimum. This is a business where you get a few minutes of free TV time to reach millions of potential customers, in exchange for providing thousands of units of your product for the network to sell directly to viewers. All that matters is how often the phones ring, and how many units you move. That number is displayed on a studio monitor so that on-air pitchmeisters such as Cummings can see in real time how well (or badly) they’re doing.

“You’ll say something, and you’ll see the sales spike, and the producer will be saying in your ear, ‘Do that again!’ ” he says. And making the connection with viewers sometimes means wrestling the conversation away from a host who likes to control it, or a caller who just wants to talk. “You live and die by your sales per minute,” he says. “Nobody knows for sure how you’re going to do until you get out there. ... Sometimes, God bless ’em, they’ll ramble on and on. You can’t rudely interrupt them, but you realize that’s precious time going by.”

In no trade is the equation of time and money more apparent than for a TV pitchman such as  Cummings. His company, Newport Beach-based AminoGenesis Skin Care, has sold $30 million worth of products in the last two years during short, intense sales pitches on home shopping networks. He’s flown across the Pacific just to spend a few minutes selling one of his amino acid-laden rejuvenating preparations to an audience of presumably ruddy-complected, outdoorsy Aussie Shielas, hoping like hell they’ll call. The director talks into Cummings’ earpiece, pushing him through his gig while both keep an eye on that monitor’s second-by-second tab of units sold.

Cummings, who can make—or not make—tens of thousands of dollars in the time it takes most of us to find the remote control, is a man in the fast lane. When he founded his company 14 years ago, he was an ordinary Joe with an engaging smile who used his garage as a warehouse and peddled jars of cream from a cart in front of the Robinsons-May department store at Fashion Island, dreaming of being big enough to earn a spot at the cosmetics counter inside.

Millions of dollars later, Cummings has bigger ambitions. For the past several years, he personally has sold his wares on domestic channels such as QVC, the Home Shopping Network (HSN), and ShopNBC, and now is branching out into the global marketplace, from Turkey to Taiwan. In some countries, Cummings hires salespeople who speak the native language and trains them to mimic his carefully choreographed presentation, which he’s perfected down to the precise moment that they demonstrate the product. “It’s like a play,” he says. “They have to memorize exactly how it’s done.”

It’s an entrepreneur’s dream, he says. “Instead of hoping a salesperson at a store will know enough to tell your story to one customer, you’re able to go on yourself and tell your story to millions of people at once. ” But that high-stakes gamble also can be a potential nightmare of on-air glitches, inappropriate ad libs, and real-time callers with uncertain agendas.

Here’s how it works: A network typically invites someone such as Cummings to appear. The pitchman doesn’t pay the network for the airtime, but he does have to ship a large order of his product to its warehouse. Then he appears on camera to hawk his merchandise. If viewers like him and his product, they call and order it from the network, which then pays the company and keeps a cut for itself. Cummings only gets paid for the jars of skin cream sold; the rest are sent back to him, and he eats the shipping costs.

He went home demoralized, thinking that he’d blown his shot at the big time and knowing the network would return tens of thousands of dollars in unsold inventory. But he’d managed to move just enough units that the network execs gave him another try. Two months later, he went on at 3 a.m. for a six-minute stint. His numbers still weren’t good. “It seemed like the end of the road,” he recalls.

That’s why Cummings was startled to get a call from a product scout at HSN who saw potential in his early-morning debacle. The scout’s network wasn’t quite as stingy with its on-air time as QVC, and he figured that Cummings’ personable style—the one he’d developed working the kiosk at Fashion Island—might come across better in the network’s format. A few months later, Cummings again found himself in a green room nervously awaiting his 6 a.m. appearance. The 12 minutes went by in a blur, but when he returned to the green room, network executives hurried over to congratulate him. He’d sold $48,000 worth of skin cream, about $4,000 worth per minute—33 percent above target. The network put him before the camera repeatedly over the next two days, and on the plane home, a new reality began to sink in. He’d just sold $250,000 worth of products, and the network wanted him back in a couple of months.

But as Cummings quickly learned, TV pitchmen have precious little job security. Have one subpar outing, and you start hearing whispers that your numbers need to rise. There’s no malice to it. “When a person gets canceled, it can be a real downer for everyone involved,” he says. In the end, what matters is whether the public likes you. “You can be like a TV show that everyone [at the network] likes, but still gets canceled.”

Indeed, Cummings later had an HSN outing in which his sales inexplicably plummeted, and he found himself on the outside looking in. Fortunately, buyers at ShopNBC got wind that he’d just developed a new product, a wrinkle reducer called Gone in 60 Seconds. “By some strange bit of karma, I was getting yet another chance,” he says. This time he nailed it. Gone in 60 Seconds became one of the biggest-selling skin-care products in the network’s history.



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