The winter sick season… how many days till spring?!
Sorry I’ve been gone for a while. Our house has been hit with the latest stomach bug going around and it has been brutal. My littlest one started with it, then the older one has had it REALLY bad for days and today my husband has it. There has never been so much TV watching around here then there has been this past week. It’s so hard to focus on business when your heart isn’t in it. This must be what it’s like to go to a job you don’t like every day. It must be torture. Now I know and understand just how important it is to do something you love and how fortunate I am to have found my “something”. My head and my heart have not been “in the game” because I have been so worried and focused on the girls, so my business and work has really suffered. There is so much I “should” have been doing, but my job numbero uno required Grill Charms to take a little bit of a back seat.
I did have an exciting moment a few days ago. My hubby stayed home with the kiddies while I went to a Christmas party for a wonderful organization of which I am a business member. It is the Center for Women www.c4women.org I’m a new member so I didn’t know many other members and when I was walking in a gal in the group asked what I did and I said “I inventing the grilling accessory Grill Charms” and she said “I’ve seen those, that’s you?!!” WOW! Someone actually saw them in stores locally, and knew what they were!! That was a proud moment. I’m now in 4 stores locally, 1 store in
Denver and 2 online stores. I’m slowly but surly getting out there.
Last Sunday my mom watched the girls while my husband and I went to
Myrtle Beach as attendees for the day to a Gift and Resort Merchandise tradeshow. It wasn’t really my genre. It was a very beachy gift store oriented show, but we just went to see what a big trade show looked like and what people did for booths. For this show, it looked like most of the exhibitors were distributors. Their booths were FULL of stuff from many different companies. 1 booth for example took up an entire “block” and looked like a typical gift store at the beach all by itself! Not much else earth shattering in the world of business this week. My little one is on the mend so Monday I’ll get back out there full force. I’m thinking though that I need to save a lot of my sales calls until after the first of the year. I called a big online store and asked to talk to their buyer about becoming a potential vendor and the gal said I “to be honest, you should wait until the holidays; we are all very busy right now”. She made a good point. If I’m not in the store by NOW, chances are their crunch time is on, and they are too swamped to be very receptive to anything new right this moment. I’m in a good many stores, so I think I’ll just keep up the networking, spread the word and truly focus on wholesale calls and efforts after retailers slow down in January. I’ll have a good few months during the first of year to get everyone excited about carrying Grill Charms for the spring and summer grilling season. That’s the plan anyway!
Leslie Haywood, Founder and President of Charmed Life Products, Inventor of Grill Charms™ www.grillcharms.com
