The summer after spending a fifth year at Endicott College to earn his MBA and play another year as the university baseball team’s star starting pitcher, Michael Nich entered what he described as a “horrific” job search.
It was 2013, the job market was tight, and although he sent out hundreds of applications, he received rejection letter after rejection letter—no interviews, no callbacks, nothing.
“I had the master’s degree, so the entry level positions didn’t want me,” Nich said. “Then anywhere that wanted a master’s degree, they’re not looking for somebody with no work experience. It was just really hard to fit into a bucket.”
Unsure what to do next, Nich began taking substitute teaching positions to pay the bills. While living with some of his friends in Salem, Massachusetts, he sent out an application to Barton Associates for a role in the marketing department. He was rejected—but in a twist of fate, he was encouraged to apply to an open account manager position at Barton, which he soon was hired for.
Today, over 11 years later, Nich has excelled in his role, holding the record for the highest sales of any Barton Associates employee in the company’s history—an impressive feat that recently solidified him as the inaugural inductee in the Barton Associates Hall of Fame. Earlier this month, Nich was celebrated with a party attended by colleagues that was filled with speeches from his superiors and friends. He even got to hang up a new plaque with his name proudly etched on it in the company’s Peabody, Massachusetts office.
“It was all kind of a surprise—it caught me off guard,” Nich said. “It’s nice. I’ve been waiting for the call from Endicott to induct me into the Endicott Hall of Fame. I figured that would come before I got inducted into a corporate hall of fame, but I’m still waiting on that one.”
Navigating a Tumultuous Career Search
Passionate about baseball, Nich always wanted to find a way to translate his love for the game into a career. By the time Nich ended his fifth year on the mound at Endicott, he was the school’s all-time leader in wins, innings pitched, and games started.
His original dream was to make it as a pitcher in Major League Baseball (MLB), but after a while, he envisioned himself working in baseball operations for a club, whether that be as a scout, or in statistical analysis.
But once Nich left Endicott, he found finding any job—not just one in baseball—extremely difficult. He stayed in Massachusetts, working landscaping and substitute teaching jobs at a charter school to make ends meet, all while blasting out applications for any position he thought he was a good fit for.
“It got to a point where I just wanted a job,” Nich said. “I wanted to do whatever was gonna hire me first.”
After a while, Nich’s friend, who worked in Barton’s licensing department, told him about an open Marketing Operations Analyst position at the company, which he applied for. He was rejected because of his lack of experience, but told about open recruiter and account manager positions, which he considered.
“I chose the account manager route strictly because the name had ‘manager’ in it,” Nich said. “As a 22 year old kid, I was obsessed with titles—which is why I applied for Marketing Operations Analyst: because I thought it sounded cool. I didn’t know everything in my skill set was gonna be geared great towards the sales role.”
Just a little over a week after his rejection from the marketing role, Nich found himself as Barton Associates’ newest employee, working to build relationships with medical facilities across the United States to help them combat staff shortages through placing locum tenens providers.
During his first three months at Barton, Nich encountered a watershed moment in his career—the Los Angeles Dodgers had responded to his application and offered him a scouting position on the West Coast. Torn between his passion for baseball and his budding career at Barton, Nich leaned on his family for support.
“I’d call my mom on my drives home and air out my frustrations to her; she was a great sounding board,” Nich said. “She was always the one to remind me: ‘You said, you’d give it at least a year. You don’t want to be the guy switching jobs all the time.’ So she made me kind of stick through that and then by the time I hit a year, I was fully functioning and off and running.”
Building Success in the Face of Adversity
The very first year Nich worked at Barton, he hit $1 million in sales, an accomplishment that he doesn’t think anyone had done by that point. By 18 months, he had finalized $3.3 million in sales.
Nich attributes his competitive spirit to why he’s been so successful in sales—he said he’s translated his motivation to win on the baseball diamond to wanting to be the very best among his colleagues at work.
“I saw the billing board when I was taking a tour of the office on my interview,” he said. “I thought to myself: ‘Whatever I need to do to get to the top of it, I don’t care. I’m gonna do it.’ Because I want to win.”
Outdoing other people’s sales numbers by a slim margin isn’t what Nich wants to do—in fact, he says “I want to beat people by a lot.
“It might not be the right attitude for everybody, but it’s just something that worked for me,” Nich said. “Throughout my entire life. I was always told that I can’t do certain things and that was some of the motivation that I always had. Even going back to playing high school baseball and playing AAU, I had a coach that told me that I wasn’t good enough to play in college. I wanted to prove people wrong. If you say I can’t do this, I’m gonna try and do it at a very high clip.”
While he still maintains his competitive edge, Nich says that his “why” behind his drive to be the best has shifted slightly.
“It started with the internal motivation of the competitive drive, and then my family became my focus,” Nich said. “And that, to me, is the most important thing in the world.”
Over his 11 years at Barton, Nich has moved up the corporate ladder, becoming a team lead and even moving to Las Vegas for a brief stint to help open Barton’s office there.
But once Nich and his wife moved back to Massachusetts from Las Vegas in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, he was struck with illness. Unsure what ailed him, he eventually received a CT scan that revealed a brain tumor that had been growing for about a decade.
Nich had surgery in 2021 to have it removed, and took a six-week leave of absence from Barton to care for his health. When he came back, he found adjusting to work again challenging.
“I was good at the job because I could multitask at such a high level,” Nich explained. “When I started to come back, everything was just a little bit slower. I had to essentially relearn a lot of my own processes of how I do things because I have to be hyper-focused on the task at hand. Now I can’t multitask as much as I used to.”
Although his health scare was exhausting and terrifying, Nich found a silver lining.
“The interesting thing is: that change of hyper-focusing on the task at hand, it actually made me, I think, better at what I do,” he said.
While he missed his goal of being the company’s top salesperson in 2022, the year he was undergoing chemotherapy, he still managed to be the No. 2 biller. Outside of that anomoly, Nich has been the top performer in 2018, 2020, 2021, 2023, and he’s on track to do it again this year.
Nich’s motivation to still perform came from within himself, as even company leadership was more concerned about his health than his numbers.
“Any meeting I had with them was about me as a person, not me as an employee,” he said. “I learned a lot about their character and them as people throughout the whole process. … The numbers didn’t matter when we had those meetings, and that means a lot.”
Today, Nich says he’s feeling a lot better. He still has quarterly MRIs, just to monitor the tumor in case it grows back.
“We just truck forward and figure it out, day-by-day,” he said.
Nich’s Advice to Job-Seekers
As someone who’s gone through a hard job search and has come out the other end extremely successful, Nich says he has one simple piece of advice for recent graduates who are looking to enter the healthcare staffing industry: work hard.
“The best advice is probably the advice that nobody wants to hear, which is just work harder than everybody else,” Nich said. “I came in here with absolutely no experience in anything related to healthcare and anything relating to sales. … There’s no substitute for hard work.”
Nich says that those who are looking to succeed need to put in the time and effort. He pointed to his early-career strategy of making many more calls to clients than his colleagues as an example of how putting in work prepares you for the unexpected and opens up additional doors to greater triumph.
“It goes back to the sports side of things—I had all the practice reps,” Nich said. ”I needed to be able to be successful when I was ready for the opportunity, when it came up. That way, nobody on the phone is going to ever catch me off guard.”
