Two years of doors: the mission as the cheapest sales training in America

The schedule is not a stereotype; it is a rulebook, and the Church publishes it. Wake at 6:30 am. Thirty minutes of exercise. Two hours of personal and companion study of scripture. Thirty minutes to an hour of language study for those learning one. Out of the door at 10 am, or 10:30 to 11 for language learners. An hour for lunch and an hour for dinner. Back by 9 pm, or 9:30 if a teaching appointment runs late. Lights out at 10:30 pm. Six days a week, with one preparation day for laundry, shopping and email home.

The rules around the day are stricter than the day. Missionaries work in pairs, occasionally threes, and must stay within earshot of their companion at all times; they sleep in the same room but not the same bed. Until February 2019 they could telephone home twice a year, on Christmas Day and usually Mother's Day; the rule is now a weekly call, text or video chat, with email on preparation day only. They spend four or five hours a week just trying to meet new people. The rest is teaching, and the teaching is mostly rejection.

Set that beside any corporate sales-training programme and the difference is duration. A company might give a new representative six weeks. The Church gives 24 months, and the representative pays.

Before 1991, families paid whatever a mission cost where their son happened to be sent, which ranged from $100 a month to $750. On December 1, 1990 the First Presidency announced a flat charge, effective January 1, 1991, of $350 a month for missionaries from the United States and Canada, citing a growing disparity in costs that had placed a disproportionate burden on some families and wards. The Church raised it to $400 in 2003 and left it there for 16 years. On June 27, 2019 it announced a rise to $500 from July 1, 2020 for missionaries from the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia and most of western Europe, with the amount elsewhere set by each area. Wikipedia still lists $400 for Americans in 2024; the record on whether the 2020 increase took effect on schedule is muddled, and I have not been able to settle it.

Two years at $400 is $9,600, paid by the family or, where the family cannot, by the home congregation or a general missionary fund. Nobody is paid a salary. A recruit at a summer sales company, by contrast, is promised the reverse: a Deseret News investigation in November 2021 found rookies told to expect $30,000 for a summer and one seller, Hadley Brooksby, who made about half of that.

Every missionary passes through a training centre first. The Provo centre, opened in 1978 next to BYU on 39 acres with 19 buildings, holds 3,700 at a time and teaches about 55 languages; stays run from three weeks for native-language assignments to six to nine weeks for a new language. There are 11 centres worldwide, from Preston in England to Kinshasa. The curriculum is a manual called Preach My Gospel, in its second edition since 2023, and the teaching includes role-play with trained actors. Most instructors are returned missionaries a year or two older than the students.

The headcount moves with policy. On October 6, 2012, Thomas S. Monson announced that men could go at 18 instead of 19 and women at 19 instead of 21, with 58,000 then serving; the number reached a peak of about 89,000 in 2013, fell back to 65,137 by the end of 2018, and dropped from 68,000 to 42,000 within months in 2020. At the end of 2025 the Church reported 78,596 full-time missionaries in 451 missions. Women could go at 18 from 2025. Pew's 2011 survey found 27 percent of American members had served, 43 percent of men and 11 percent of women; at BYU the figure is 97 percent of male graduates and 32 percent of female, and 45 percent of the whole student body.

The thing the mission teaches best is the thing no business school can teach, which is what to do with the fortieth no of the day, and the numbers on that are unambiguous, so it is worth setting them out in one run. The Church's count of convert baptisms per missionary fell from 8.03 in 1989 to 4.67 in 2005; in 2021 there were 168,283 convert baptisms and 54,539 missionaries, which works out at about three each for a year of six-day weeks. Mitt Romney, who served in France from July 1966 to December 1968 in what Wikipedia calls the only period of his life when most of what he tried was rejected, later estimated 10 to 20 converts in 30 months, and he was good at it: he became a zone leader in Bordeaux, then assistant to the mission president in Paris, and finished overseeing 175 missionaries in the mission's best baptism year in a decade. Clayton Christensen went to South Korea from 1971 to 1973 and came home fluent in Korean and, as he told Businessweek in 2011, with the material for a career at Harvard Business School. Gary Crittenden served in Germany before the Marriott School and a Harvard MBA, and rose to chief financial officer of American Express and then Citigroup, where in the crash he cut 75,000 jobs; in 2017 the Church made him managing director of its Missionary Department, which is a nice piece of circularity. David Neeleman went to Brazil at 19 and came back speaking the Portuguese in which he would later found Azul, now Brazil's largest airline. Stephen Covey served in England, was made the first president of the Church's Irish Mission in July 1962, and later trained missionaries across the eastern United States; his 7 Habits, which sold more than 65 million copies, was described by Christensen as a secular distillation of Latter-day Saint values. The Economist, in 2012, put it as a joke about how easy airline seats and life insurance must be to sell after two years of that, and the joke is the argument. Matthew Prince of Cloudflare, not a member, said the same thing without the joke at a Fortune conference in July 2023: returned missionaries are incredible salespeople because they have spent two years selling "the hardest thing in the world to sell". Aaron Skonnard of Pluralsight called the mission an incubator for the skills he hires. None of these men learned finance on a mission. They learned to keep talking after the door had closed, to live with a stranger for months, to run a small unit of 19-year-olds on no budget, and to do all of it in a second language, and those four things are most of what a first-line sales manager is paid for.

Utah County has 759,859 people (2025 estimate), a median age of 25.9, a population that is 72 percent members, and more than 70,000 students commuting to BYU in Provo and Utah Valley University in Orem. Every spring it releases a few thousand 21-year-olds who have spent two years knocking on doors, and an industry has grown up to meet them at the gate. It sells pest control, home alarms and rooftop solar, door to door, in other states, on commission, over a summer.

The biggest company in that industry is a Provo story. Todd Pedersen served a two-year mission, settled in Provo, and in 1992 started selling pest control from a trailer in Arizona with ten employees. He switched the same crews to burglar alarms, founded APX Alarm Security Solutions in 1999 with Keith Nellesen, renamed it Vivint in 2011, and sold it to Blackstone in November 2012. NRG Energy bought Vivint in December 2022 for $2.8 billion; it had 12,000 employees that year on revenue of $1,682 million, and by 2026 served more than two million customers. Recruiters elsewhere copy the model on purpose. Tom Stoddard, chief executive of Venture Pest Control in Atlanta, told a BYU-Hawaii student paper in November 2015 that his firm recruits heavily in Utah and Idaho and said, in the paper's words, "We look specifically for returned missionaries"; his first-year representatives, he said, earn $20,000 to $40,000 in a summer.

The family pays $400 a month for two years, and the alarm company gets the graduate for free.

The Deseret News looked at that industry in November 2021 and interviewed more than 20 current and former sellers. Sam Taggart, who built a consultancy for the trade, claimed $250,000 in his first summer and $550,000 in his second; an anonymous seller claimed more than $1 million. The rookies described 50 to 70 hour weeks, GPS tracking, deductions for breaks, a team culture enforced with airsoft guns, independent-contractor status with no employee protections, and repayment clauses; one owed $4,800 for leaving early. About half said they would go back. The same county hosts the headquarters of Nu Skin, founded in Provo in 1984 and selling $1.73 billion in 2024 through 1.2 million distributors, and Utah as a whole has at least 15 major multi-level marketing companies, the most per head of any state, a concentration scholars tie to the same missionary training and a doctrine of self-reliance. Members have a phrase for the initials MLM, and it is not a kind one.

• It teaches rejection tolerance, at a rate of roughly three or four conversions per year of full-time effort.
• It teaches a second language to most who go abroad, which is why nearly 75 percent of Marriott School students are bilingual and why Goldman Sachs had 1,300 staff in Salt Lake City by 2012.
• It teaches small-unit management: a district is four to eight missionaries, and a zone leader is 20 years old.
• It does not teach finance, product, pricing or anything about the employer, which is why the pipeline runs into commission sales and call centres before it runs into boardrooms.

The apprenticeship is real and it is cheap for everyone except the family. The open question is whether the industry that recruits at the gate is the mission's reward or its tax. A 21-year-old who has already done two years of doors for nothing is the easiest person in America to sign for a third summer of them on commission, and the Deseret News found that half of them go back. The Church did not design its programme to produce that. It produced it anyway.