Ready for another whirlwind installment of a day in the life of an insane mompreneur?!  Here goes!!!  Thanks to some wonderful help and warming up of a lead from a fellow Mompreneur Laura www.ontray2go.com I am now in a store in OH!  THANK YOU LAURA!  I’m thinking just for fun, I should try to get in every single state by the end of the year. That sounds like a great goal!   

So yesterday I’m driving around running errands and in the bank parking lot with my littlest one in the back (the older one had “school”) I get a call from my sourcing agent.  He wants to talk to me briefly about my upcoming
PO’s that are ready to be shipped.  Up until this point, due to time constraints I have only had a few hundred units airfreight to my house to fill demand from the holidays.  I knew this wouldn’t last so I had also put in for a larger production run of a few THOUSAND units to come ocean.  My sourcing agent called while I was just finishing up making a deposit at the window and the first thing he said to me was “Do you have a forklift?”  GUT CHECK MOMENT!!!  He sent over pictures of all my wonderful cases nicely and neatly strapped onto pallets and shrink-wrapped ready to go and it hit me… Pallets… Containers… Ocean Freight… WOW… No turning back now!!!  THOUSANDS of sets of Grill Charms are about to be loaded in
Taiwan on nice little vessel bound for….my garage??!!!  I told him not to worry, all is well, send them on!  (Just between you and I… I DON’T own a forklift…shhhhhh… it’ll all be fine just fine)  That will all make for some interesting blogging in about 30 days from now so stay tuned! 

Onto other stuff… Picture this…it’s about 6:00 last night and the chicken nuggets that are in the microwave are about 45 seconds away from dinging, the girls are sitting at the kitchen bar waiting patiently for their dinner when my business phone rings…. RING RING RING!!!  It’s an area code I don’t recognize, it’s after 6:00 but curiosity gets the best of me and I answer it anyway.  “Hi, this is So and So, a producer for The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch on CNBC”… I just about dropped the phone!  Weeks ago I had sent in a video to be part of his “American Dream Team”.  He then says, “we selected your video to air TONIGHT on the Donny Deutsch”.  I’m right in the middle of my out of body experience when the microwave dings, the girls yell “IT’S READY” and I get snapped back to reality just in time to SCREAM in this poor man’s ear “ARE YOU KIDDING ME??!!!”  I run into the laundry room leaving my poor starving children for just a minute so I do not pass out in front of them and also to get some information from this man that is now deaf in one ear.  I got the details, thanked him profusely and proceeded to finish making dinner while calling everyone I know.  At 10:58, I knew it was coming up next… the last segment of the show.…I was so nervous (even though I knew exactly how it would go… I made the video myself weeks ago!) but I still couldn’t look.  Donny did a brief intro and I actually truly hid my face in the pillow during my 30 seconds of fame.  I opened my eyes just long enough to see him to say “You Go GIRL!”.  I feel like a love sick teenager…DONNY SAID YOU GO GIRL TO ME!!!! AAAHHH!!!!  Needles to say my PR girls are burning up the computer with revised press releases to get out, links that have to be linked and all that other stuff that they do to capitalize on this little accomplishment.  In the grand scheme of things, and to probably just about everyone else out there, this is really small potatoes, but to a stay-at-home from Charleston who’s husband couldn’t keep his chicken straight, this is AWESOME!!!!  YAHOOOOOOO!!!!! 

OMG…. ARE YOU READY FOR THIS???!!!! ANOTHER PRODUCER JUST CALLED IN THE MIDDLE OF ME WRITING THIS BLOG AND THEY WANT ME ON THE SHOW FOR REAL!!!!!  Seriously… I’m shaking too bad to type right now… I really really think I need to go walk outside and breath.  I’ll write more later…. 

 

Leslie Haywood, Founder and President of Charmed Life Products, Inventor of Grill Charms™  www.grillcharms.com 

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