SBA and Girl Scouts Interview

Did you sell Girl Scout cookies?

Yes, I did. Not anywhere near the number you've sold. And when I was selling Girl Scout cookies, I didn't have online tools or a marketing plan or a strategy.

Yeah, Digital cookie is an online program where customers can just do a simple click and they have some cookies. So there's a bunch of different things I did to print promote those sales, especially like social media making funny parodies to popular songs.

So what else? What else did you do?

I had business cards. I got pretty serious about it. Yeah, I remember asking for Christmas. Oh, can I have business cards, please? But it's actually a pretty helpful tool because they just have some contact information and I make sure with every customer when I'm delivering cookies. So here's my business card. You can come back, buy more cookies. And I think repeat sales is what helped increase those number of boxes. Some people bought like a whole case at a time.

Did they buy a particular flavor?

Well, I think Thin Mints, especially along with my favorite with Samoas and Tagalongs.

What do you want to do with a career and how do you think Girl Scouts is kind of helping you look at where you're going with your education or what you even might be thinking in the future you might like to do?

Well, some common interests that I'm noticing, I like are engineering and science and especially oceanology.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. So I think that maybe marketing could help somewhere in there for like, maybe say I'm at this company and they want me to sell something. Like I could help with that or maybe starting my own business.

So what about strategizing for your sales? How did you do that? Did you set a goal in the beginning? How did you work that? Because it's very important, you know, in business or whatever you're doing to set a goal and then have your plan follow.

Yeah, very important. Especially set a goal in January. I think it was more of a typical month to call like all the people that you know in your mom's contacts or to like go door to door. That was actually really handy because then also having cookies on hand too, like when you're delivering later in the month, like in early February, like have just. They can buy another box of cookies and. But yeah, pre order sales January and then the more cookies on hand and cookie booths, that was in like early March.

There's so much available today in social media that helps drive business, especially those businesses that are getting launched and just trying to get off the ground because you can speak directly to the public and it's a great tool that in years past you would have to spend money on marketing to get the word out about a product. So my advice to the kind of skills to develop is to thoroughly understand social media because that is clearly in your age group, social media for. For good purposes.

One more thing. Okay, so you ran a successful business in your previous career, and what did you learn from your successes and failures in that experience?

Wow. We don't have enough time for me to tell you all of that today, except that not to be afraid of failure, because every. Every step you take has a risk. Sometimes you'll succeed and sometimes you won't. And I mean, I, at one point in my career was bankrupt, so my husband and I lost everything that we had at one point. So that was a huge failure. But it's not so much how you fall, it's how you get back up. So you have to be willing to take risks. Not risks that you know are insurmountable or create issues for you that would be devastating. But take some risk. Don't be afraid to do that. Don't be afraid to raise your hand. Don't be afraid to volunteer to things that you haven't really done before, because you'll learn from them. So step out there. Step out there and do things. I don't think I have to tell you about that. You seem pretty much doing that yourself.

Try and try again.

That's right. Exactly right. You're awesome. That was fantastic. High five on that. Great. Good job. Good job.