Uh Oh Radio

Wohoo! Look at me adding photos to the blog. It's only taken me - what - almost a year to figure out how to do it. :)

So why a photo of a radio? Because this is apparently radio week for my little company. I got a call yesterday afternoon from a retailer who purchased my product for the first time at the Las Vegas show wanting to know if I'd be willing to come onto their Saturday radio show and talk about the product. Of course I jumped on the opportunity - despite it meaning I had to call in at 8am my time - and think that I came off sounding relatively intelligent. The great this is that after the tradeshow I'm in good shape with the "marketing sphell" for my product/company after talking about it for the past week. So I think it went well and I wasn't too nervous about it being a live call-in show.

And then on Thursday I have an appointment with a local am station to go in and do a "CEO Spotlight" interview with them (which just ought to show how desperate my city must be for new CEO's other than the "big" guys everyone knows). I think that it's a recorded interview which makes me a little more comfortable knowing that they can cut and edit my sphell into something brillant. I hope it also goes as well!

Vegas Rundown

I've got to keep this relatively quick as I'm in the Las Vegas airport waiting for my flight to board which ought to happen momentarily. Very excited to get home!

The show itself ended yesterday and all in all I think it was a pretty successful show. We ended up essentially covering booth costs via the orders that were written at the show but from vendors I've talked to who have been at the show in past years all say that they get many more orders post-show from retailers who were there. Our first day was actually stupendous and I barely had a moment to breath. We wrote more orders that day then we have on any other day at any other show and handed out so many brochures I worried that we'd run out.

However, the second and third days were a little slower with not quite as many orders written which is too bad as otherwise we'd have been on track for a new record. I do need to go back through my records though as we may have hit a record with the sales from this show (I can't quite tell if we did better at this show then we did at San Francisco in February). Given how many brochures we handed out though - and we only handed them out to people who specifically asked and showed interest - I'm hoping that we'll get a lot of followup orders that will make this the most successful show to date.

Interestly there weren't any sales reps walking the floor - or at least none that I saw - so I wasn't able to get contacts for sales reps which had been one of my goals at this show. If I remember correctly, the show I'm going to in October did have reps last year so hopefully that will be the case again this year.

Well, they're calling my flight so I ought to shut down. I'm definitely ready to get home!

Thinking Like Ace

Last night in my hotel room I got caught up watching Ace of Cakes on the Food Network. I don't know if you've ever seen it but it's probably one of my favorite shows and I highly recommend it if you enjoy watching shows about food (trust me - it's not your typical cooking show).

For those who may not have seen the series - it's about a cake shop called Charm City Cakes based in Baltimore MD that specializes in really off the wall celebration/wedding cakes. The type of stuff they make is probably more a feat of engineering as opposed to baking and always ends up looking phenominal. The staff is really a bunch of characters many of whom would probably not do well in any other work setting but thrive in the environment at Charm City Cakes and they're a blast to watch.

So how does this relate to entrepreneurship? Well it got me thinking about how the owner - Duff - always looks like he's having fun. Even when things go wrong - and they sometimes do - he never seems to get completely down about it and rather just approaches it with a "well, let's fix it and move on" mentality and that's what he and the staff does. Now granted, I know they also take a week's worth of footage and melt it down to one 30 minute show so there quite possibly is a lot that I'm missing but the sense is that the owner is having fun and, subsequently, so is the staff.

I think somewhere in the past couple of months I've forgotten the "have fun" aspect of entrepreneurship. Yes, it's very stressful to be working to build the company and knowing that any money you make this year is strictly based on what the company earns (and doesn't get thrown back into the company coffers) - but at the basis I started this company because I truly believed two things 1. there was a market opportunity for this type of product and 2. I thought I could do it better then most and have fun doing it. I still do believe those two things but somehow the "fun" aspect has fallen by the wayside.

So what I need to do over the next few days is reprioritize my short and long term goals and incorporate fun back into the business. Because if I'm not having fun then I may as well go work for someone else and get paid!

Heading out again

I'm in the final phases of getting everything organized (and then hopefully the house cleaned up) before leaving tomorrow for a quick weekend away and then more or less straight onto the tradeshow next week. I've gone through the list of things I'm meaning to bring 101 times and I think I have everything - but yet doesn't it always seem like something is missing? And at this point I feel like I've done everything humanly possible to make this show successful so keep your fingers crossed.

As for my main goals from this show - I want to pick up some sales reps for what I consider to be my "high profile" parts of the country which is a radical shift in business strategy from this time last year. And I'd ideally like to make 2x more then spent on this show. Well, in truth I'd like to make 3x more but by then we'll be hitting the very bottom of my inventory and I have another show to travel to in three weeks.

Wish me luck and I'll let you know how I did when I get back...

WSJ & the Coolness Factor

Two quick thoughts before getting on with my weekend:

1. The Wall Street Journal has an updated, new and improved, star-studded Entrepreneur Section (used to be called Startup.com). It can be found at the WSJ via this link: http://online.wsj.com/small-business/main?mod=4_1101
I checked it out this morning and it had some interesting web networking ideas some of which are applicable and some of which aren't at this point. Interesting nonetheless and definitely worth considering. I'm hoping this turns out to be as good as the New York Times Small Business Section so I'll have two new places to procrastinate at.

2. My dogs have officially joined Dogster (the friendster for dogs - www.dogster.com). Given that I don't have a Friendster or MySpace page it means that my dogs are now more hip then I am. As such, I've promoted them both to Director of Internet Marketing.

He's Done

I think my husband may be done with me. Not in a "call the lawyers it's time to seperate the assets" type of way - more along the lines of shaking his head and wondering what exactly he married in to (while knowing full well he went in with his eyes open).

Last night, right before bed, I asked him what he would think if I went into (another) business with a friend of ours. To his credit he didn't say NO right away and gave the brief outline I presented him with as much thought as anyone can while getting ready for bed, but I have a feeling that he was just shaking his head.

I'm actually not talking about starting up another "real" business - more along the lines of starting up a "hobby" business that could potentially bring in a little bit of mad-money for this friend and I to have while we continue to funnel money into our respective real businesses (she also owns a business). I also think it's one of those one-hit-wonder type of ideas that I could see doing well for a max of 24 months and then it's time to shut up shop. Obviously there are pros and cons with this new idea which I'm just starting to work through and no business idea is foolproof so there's always the chance that money can be lost...but it's an interesting idea nonetheless and I think this other gal and I have a good grouping of mixed skills and experience that could help make it work.

In the "real" business world - my funk has lifted and I'm back on track getting ready for an upcoming tradeshow. I'm pretty excited that the show is in Las Vegas only because I haven't been there since I was 20 (yes, too young to go to the casino's) and want to get a sense for it - though in truth I'm not much of a gambler (outside of starting up businesses). I'm also excited because I got the list of confirmed attendees for this show and it's a really good mix. There are certainly those who are outside of my business niche (reptile retailers...yick!) but there appears to be a good number who do fall into my classification so we'll see how it goes.

One of those moments

I'm sitting here waiting out the feeling like I've totally gotten myself in over my head. Nothing in particular set it off and the day was going along pretty well but all of the sudden I got one of those overwhelming rushes that was saying I'm totally out of my element and somewhat directionless. As to whether the feeling was refering to directionless with regards to life or the business I don't necessarily know - but I'm thinking (hoping) it was about the business.