the hundred dollar business

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A Stolen Treo

Saturday, December 9th. The day my well-loved Treo was stolen while I was manning the kiosk. For those of you who know how dependent I am (was) on that phone… it’s depressing.

I’m the kind of girl who leaves her keys in the car, unlocked, with the engine running, while I run back into my house (also unlocked) to get my laptop, which is sitting out of its bag in the front room in plain view.

In fact, during the summer, it’s pretty common for me to leave my house doors open, not just unlocked, when I go running or to a neighbor’s house.

So sue me. I lived in Rexburg, Idaho for way too long… one of the truly “small” towns left (even though there are 17,298 friends you haven’t met yet, according to the welcome billboard on one of its two freeway exits). Maybe not thoroughly small numbers-wise, but definitely small in street smarts.

(Yes, I also leave my clothes in the dryer at the laundromat– am I supposed to waste 45 minutes waiting for them to dry?)

So it’s no surprise that leaving a $400 phone out in the open on my kiosk desk, with 50,000 weekend shoppers walking by, didn’t seem like a really bad idea to me. It never occurred to me that one of them was a thug.

Karma has probably been racking up all those times that my car, house, and other misc. were never vandalized. But even though fate slapped me on the face, irony’s got my back.

See, the antenna had recently broken off my Treo, giving it the worst reception ever. I’d managed to wedge it back in generally, but on this particular day, it’d fallen off at home, and I couldn’t find it. Since I’ve always been fond of ’80s TV star MacGyver, I pieced together an antenna made from a paper clip, which was more like a homing device/ear-piercing gun than a cellular accessory, but props to me for trying.

In summary…

Suckers! Some quality phone you ran off with.

And when I found the antenna at my house this morning, it was the one bright spot in the whole experience. They may have gotten my phone… but they’ll never get the antenna!

So now my fellow mall/T-Mobile salesmen friends are trying to take advantage of my vulnerable phone-less status to work their sales mojo. But, since I know their tricks, I’m immune.

What does A Stolen Treo have to do with The Hundred Dollar Business?

Nothing, except that I was really frustrated by it, and it happened at the kiosk. Just more of the adventure, I guess. (Someone once said I’d make a gazillion dollars off each bad experience I have by writing about it. I guess he didn’t understand the economics of a blog.)

And now, on to…

Record-Breaking Sales

Can you believe this– today we broke $900 in daily sales!!! That is just amazing to me. It’s about 3x what we made last Saturday, which is probably a combination of the increased mall traffic + our improved displays, more products, and general awesomeness.

I know we set a daily sales goal of $1000, but I didn’t know how realistic that was. Now that we’re almost there, I can see how it will be possible, and what kinds of things we need to do consistently to hit that goal. (Especially the closer it gets to Christmas).

Way to go, all of us!

Chaos Galore

This “running-a-business” thing is funny. Every time I get past one hurdle, another smacks me in the face. At least, that’s how this is going. We have the sales thing going well, and now the growth-induced chaos has become stumblingly apparent, and I’m working full-speed at taming it.

There are so many details that we just didn’t think about it! Blame it on the lack of retail experience. Or the frenzied immediacy of the experiment. Or whatever you want. But any way you look at it, these details will quickly mount into friction & unpleasantness if we don’t take care of them.

(By the way, things aren’t last minute due to procrastination (whew!), but last minute due to the spontaneity of this whole thing. I don’t know that the results are any different, except that I don’t feel guilty about being a procrastinator, since it doesn’t apply).

For example, when we first opened last Saturday, I didn’t even think about having cash for the cash register. Doh! Kelly brought in some bills, which was good– but we didn’t even have coins the bulk of the day. How does something like that slip by unnoticed?

So, there’s chaos in things like that. Except, multiply it by 8 looong days, and several sleep-deprived people. That’s a huge opportunity for discrepancies, and they are definitely starting to crop up.

Though, I am trying to squelch the chaos through systematizing things. Kind of tricky, especially because I forget that I’m in charge, and that if I don’t deliberately organize things, it’s not going to happen by itself. Argh.

So anyway, I think that is the next phase for us. Getting things to “run themselves” as much as possible. I known a lot of really amazingly organized people, so I’ll be picking their brains. If you have any thoughts on this, let me know!

And, if you see a Treo roaming around with a paper-clip antenna, you know who to call. Er, e-mail.