Bob Leone has sold Mr. Copy to the Xerox Corp. for an undisclosed sum. | Stephen Whalen

Bob Leone doesn’t hesitate when asked what makes him a successful businessman.

And he is that.

He just sold his wildly successful Xerox Corp. agency Mr. Copy, which he built from the ground up during the past 15 years, to Xerox itself. For a lot of money. How much? He won’t say. He’ll continue in his job, and expects to add up to 30 jobs in the next year or so.

But he will talk about how he handcrafted his company into a dynamo in the copying industry. A Xerox employee for 20 years, he decided to set out on his own, not especially interested in spending the rest of his adult life as an employee. He wanted to run a business on his own.

So in 1994, he started his own Xerox copy agency. It turned out to be a good move. One year later he harvested $24 million in sales. By last year he had grown company revenue to $44 million. Now he has 130 employees in offices in San Diego, Orange County, Los Angeles, Oakland and Silicon Valley, Reno, Nev., and Portland and Eugene, Ore.

How has he done it? Nothing complicated about it, if you hear his take on it.

“People ask me, ‘Bob, why do you work so hard?’ ” says the energetic 58-year-old, who first came to San Diego by himself in 1980. “I just say, ‘Because of my parents.’ ”

Leone was born in Erie, Pa. His father worked for 44 years as a sheet metal worker for General Electric. The parents put Leone and his three siblings through college. When it came time to work, his parents taught him, “This is what you do.”

Sets The Bar High

So it never occurs to Leone not to set the bar as high as he can for himself. And he does the same for everyone that works for him. He makes sure everybody in the company has goals, and everybody is tracked to see they meet their goals. If they don’t, they’re gone. But he’s quick to cite his very low manager turnover rate of 5 percent. That, he says, shows they consistently perform and are rewarded. They like his system. So they don’t leave. Rank-and-file salespeople, he concedes, have a much higher turnover rate comparable to the industry average of 40 percent to 50 percent. But in the highly competitive world of sales, that churn is often part of the territory.

Leone has his employees focused on 13 repeated activities that have proven to successfully track and pursue sales. That constantly applied strategy, he says, “Makes us a sales generating machine.”

The main goal is not just to sell copiers, faxes and scanners, but an ongoing document service package. There’s more money in it, and customers like it because they don’t have to bother with the care and feeding of their machines and documents. It’s all done for them.