One Day Can Change Everything

In our lives we have days that have a certain significance ~ Good or Bad, that we will always remember. 

Some of the Best days may have been when you met your husband or wife for the first time, the day your children were born, maybe when you graduated from college, or reached a milestone in your career that you had been working towards.  Each one of those days may have changed everything in your life.

The other morning I woke up remembering one of those days.  I was 24 years old and I had been working with a serial entrepreneur since college.  His latest company created Marketing Videos for  accessory manufacturers in the home furnishing industry.

Recently we had taken on furniture manufacturers as clients such as Bassett and Schweiger Furniture.  One day the V.P. of Bassett was telling us about a problem he had been having getting accessories shipped to his furniture galleries.  The manufacturers wanted large minimum orders before they would ship their lamps, pictures or mirrors, which left holes in their room setups in the store, as customers bought the items to take home.

The VP asked if we could do anything, since we knew most of the owners of these companies.

We then talked to Schweiger Furniture and found they were having the same problem.

What if we could create a new company to solve this problem, broker a deal with these accessory manufacturers to create a "just in time" delivery system for these gallery programs and their particular items, and we would become the middle man to process the orders?

I jumped at the change to start a new company and run it!

The first company that I created was while I was in college ~ it was a balloon bouquet delivery business at USF and around the city of Tampa.  This one could be even bigger.

I knew I could process all the orders on a Quattro spreadsheet in my office and work directly with the manufacturers, who I knew already.

After a period of time of managing orders for Bassett and Schweiger, and everything was running smoothly, I wanted more business.

So I went to my partner and asked him to find me more clients.

He started calling around and heard that Sears was opening up free standing furniture stores called Homelife stores, so he cold called the buyer at Sears, and soon we had a meeting set up at Sears Tower in Chicago in the middle of winter.

We brought information with us showing them what we had been doing for the 2 furniture manufacturers and within an hour we closed a deal.

In that meeting we closed a deal that would give us ALL the orders for all their 736 Sears stores nationwide, as well as the 12 new Homelife stores they would be opening up over the next year.

We said we could do it, but it would take us a little bit to get our system set up to handle their business.

We left Sears Tower trying to figure out how to handle ALL that business.

Within a month, their first order arrived in the mail in buckets and buckets.  I had to figure out how to process them all into a computer system and send them out to the  manufacturers.

It was a $1.2 million dollar order!
 
In one day we closed a Multi-Million Dollar deal and Everything Changed.