This post is a little on the -may offend people- side but it’s from the heart. Remember that organizations people start are sort of like their children.
“I’m so glad you’re you, but you should really be more like me.”
This is something we all do. We thinly congratulate others of their hard-earned success only to give them a sharp left hook to the jaw of how they could enjoy so much more happiness if they had just done things a little more like we would have, if given their same opportunities.
I forgive others of the crime because I do it myself, but it’s a pretty egotistical way of communicating any way you slice it. But hey, we’re all a little egotistical
Blessed and rare is the soul that can talk to someone without offering advice. It’s nearly impossible to do. Try it, I dare you.
I’m an entrepreneur; not the drop-out-of-school-all-guts-raging-success-or-death type, more the kind that gets a college degree from a good school while running a business as a student. The mostly-guts type that will give it a boy-scout try before assuming that succeeding with your own business is for the lucky or evil.
So because most people have not heard of Parker Planners but they have heard of BYU’s accounting program, it is everyone’s job to tell me that my business is “nice” but I should really use that accounting degree for something useful. Thanks everyone, but next time I want to silence my faith and crush my own dreams I’ll go read despair.com posters until I start to believe them.
I love start-ups. As in small, brand new businesses with ‘a’ or a few founders seeing what they are really made of. It’s like systematic excuse genocide. People talk talk talk talk talk talk so dang much that I love to hear and even seek out stories about people just making it happen. I don’t care how good your idea is. Everyone has good ideas. I haven’t met a person that had nothing but bad ideas. The difference is if you are willing to bet the farm on your passion and walk the road of extreme happiness and extreme pain.
So here is someone I normally wouldn’t quote but he said this very well. Mark ought to know a thing or two about business even if it’s just from listening to the other keynote speakers where he himself is begged to speak at conference after conference. Call me an idiot but I’ve never written a formal business plan. I follow my heart. Lame and emotional as that sounds it’s all I’ve done since I started this company. We haven’t “failed” yet and I don’t suspect we will. Even if the company goes bankrupt I didn’t fail. I gained an advanced degree on what not to do.
Here’s a commercial I just finished for Parker Planners. I hope it can make a few people laugh, a few people join the facebook page, and a few more find a planner that is very useful for them.
Here’s the 4th installment of Parker Planners’ attempt to generate online sales through an interesting story about a guy running a planner company. Wooo!
We had a great comment come in from our website recently, here it is:
“
“Dear Parker Planners,
I received my planners and they’re even better than I expected. I used to get the old ones, but these ones are far better!
I go to Weber State University. In 2009, I took 17 credit hours at Weber, along with 4 extracurricular classes, and a part time job. These planners kept the planks on my life’s ship from shuddering through the storms that semester. I came through with a 4.0 GPA and was asked to be an activities chair of a large student organization because they saw how organized I was with my planner! Thanks a million.
Respectfully,
Eric”
Cool, huh? At the Utah 25 another person came up to me and thanked me for creating a great product. It’s great to hear that from our users. Also good that you have to work long, hard, and unrewarded before stuff like that gets back around to you. It’s surely not the praise that keeps you going, though, or I would have quit a long time ago.
Whooo! Just got back from Salt Lake and Parker Planners is officially # 21 out of 25 top student run businesses in Utah! Booya! We’re really excited about it. It was at the Grand America Hotel, the swkankiest hotel in Utah I’m pretty sure. When Eric first walked in he was pretty darn surprised at the fanciness, my parents, too. My mom thought she and my dad should stay the night there.
It’s the same venue as the Omniture summit thing if anyone remembers that from past posts. Way cool venue, super nice. There were a lot of impressive student companies there and I feel fortunate to be among them. Our table was with Craig’s Cuts, Craig was very enthusiastic and fun to be around. He told me about a professor at BYU that does charity stuff in Central America that loves my planners. He was thinking about using them for his students down there. I had no idea!
Neato. So no one won prize money or anything but supposedly other businesses from last year got contacted by news organizations and grew a lot from the attention and what not. We’ll see if any of that happens for us, who knows.
One thing is for sure, we have a lot of work to do. What made this last trade show so successful was that I think I talked to each and every one of our sales before the show. I spent two months strait on the phone contacting all the people on the list and asking them if they were going to be at the show. Many of them recognized us and fondly remembered my soothing voice. ha ha. They probably just remembered thinking it was odd that someone was really that excited about daily planners.
We need to do the same for the national show in Houston. It’s not 80 calls, though, this time it’s 800. And I only have 4 months to do so. I’m going to calculate how much $ I would need to get by for another year but I’m thinking I can take Parker Planners to the next level in 2011. I’d prefer debt over selling equity because I really don’t want someone telling me how to run my business unless they are some kinda miracle worker genius.
Here’s the award on my couch:
Here’s my parents, Eric, and I at the show:
The emcee was the guy from the funny spoof on the Old Spice commercials. He’s a BYU student and started off by saying “I don’t play football for BYU”. The video: here
Well it’s been a fun day. Fun also because the repairs my car supposedly needed before it would pass a safety check so I could register it were said to be a mistake by my mechanic. Nice. Got new tags, rock!
(see Weekend Update for the exciting pre-clusion of this post)
Benjie and I looked at her with blank stares. I’ve never sold anything at a trade show before. What do you do or give them? We didn’t have receipts or anything so we just got a stack of blank paper and started writing the order down and stapled her business card to it. She was from a college bookstore.
That gave us a lot more confidence and lessened our despair. From there people seemed to come right up, love us, our story, and our products, and we just kept on writing on pieces of paper until we had 19 of them. Going into this trade show we had 19 college bookstores on our roster so it was kind of funny that’s exactly how many stores we added. We’re thinking we’ll try again at this trade show thing.
Here’s our humble booth before the show started:
Here’s to winging it! We were happy with the show and our income exceeded the expense of the show, good deal.
My first semester of real accounting at BYU I had Doug Prawitt as a professor. He is easily one of the best educators I have ever come in contact with. The class was difficult but it was apparent he wanted us to succeed and did everything he could to help that happen. So many teachers want you to suffer through school just because they did and to them it’s a sort of demented rite of passage that is perpetuated by small minds.
Dr. Prawitt regularly puts a new quote up like this. I dig it. And I dug this one so I wrote “word up”
Hey y’all! I found out through my iPhone correcting me that “yall” is spelled y’all instead of “ya’ll” like I always thought. It makes perfect sense now. I was so blind.
This week has been amazing! Wow, so much fun and adventure. The trip to the trade show was more intense than I thought. The first 5 hours to Boise weren’t too bad, just a little rain and I was running on beef jerky and a pomegranate ‘naked’ juice graciously given by the lenders of the car. I would have been fine driving the VW Jetta all the way to Washington but my parents offered to let me drive one of their cars so I took them up on it.
I ended up driving the 2006 325i which was very very nice all things considered. First of all, you can cruise at 100mph and it feels like you’re doing 55. We didn’t go that fast the whole time but ya know, it’s nice to have it if you need it. Second, it has some pretty nifty traction control that came in handy when Benjie and I got caught in a snow storm in Washington. We couldn’t see more than 10 feet in front of the car. Intense it was. Sort of just crept up on us and I’m glad we made it out of there!
I picked up Benjie from work in downtown Boise, he works at Clearwater Analytics. It’s way cool, their office space is a floor of a taller building and they wear jeans and t-shirts to work. I’m so glad for that, I thought Benjie was getting all corporate-ed out and living under the tyranny of a no-fun boring-party poo-boss environment. Quite the contrary and that’s good for my homie.
For those new to Parker Planners, Benjie and I partnered in the summer of 2008 after Parker Planners was around for about a year. It was way fun to catch up and we had about 8 hours to do so on the way to Tacoma. Another super lucky (side story: see image below, yes, that is SUPER LUCKY ELEPHANT rice. I first saw it on my mission. Oh man that was good for many laughs) break was that our former employee Jackie Lau lives right in Tacoma now! She has a fancy marketing job with Kraft foods with company car and all that. She let us stay at her place which was super cool. We got there around midnight and left the next morning just after 6am. Quick visit indeed.
So we got the Hotel Murano (if you reverse the name like that it’s at least 14x more fancy than ‘Murano Hotel’) around 7am and it was mega artsy-fartsy. Loved it. Tacoma is a pretty cool city, lots of hills like San Fran and right by water like various other cool cities. Benjie and I set up our booth quickly and ate the free (ehh, kinda, we did pay hundreds of $ to be there) pastries and juice. People were busy body bees as they set up their stuff. It was fun to see. At 10am when the show was supposed to start we were primed and ready to talk about planners. The minutes felt like hours as an extremely slow trickle of potential buyers walked briskly, directly to the booths they needed to hit. Right past us. We then watched as a few more came and lovingly embraced employees at other booths. ? What? These people obviously have been doing this for years and already know each other. Can we be 20 years older and magically know all the college bookstore buyers, too? Huh? Who does this stuff anyway?
So after about 30 mins (2.2 eternities of stress and anguish) I thought we were doomed to be welcomed to a wonderful trade show and kick in the rear by a harsh reality that selling is harder still than I ever thought. Sigh.
THEN. Then a lady came up to us, she was younger, maybe late 20’s with some interesting piercings and tatoos. She was hip, funny, and seemed to like us a little. We talked to her for less than five minutes then she gave us a promising “I’ll take your info packet back to my boss and see what he thinks”. Oh good. Progress. Then after a few more comments from us she said “ok, I’ll do it, what do I need to fill out”.
Here’s installation # 3 from Parker Planners. I’m headed up to Warshington tomorrow to see some green plants. I’ll be selling planners, too. There are about 80 bookstores that belong to the Northwest College Bookstore Association. Yes, that charming association we all loved as kids. Ha ha, kidding of course. Watch out, Tacomans, Parker Planners be a-comin!
Here is Parker Planners post # 2 everyone! Enjoy the randomness. Today I ran into my friend Bryan Bennett on campus and we talked for almost an hour. He co-founded Mealdrop, a company that produces software to allow people to order food from their college campus eateries and have it delivered to a designated location close by for pick-up. Pretty cool stuff! He recently graduated and is giving it all he’s got. Fun to run into someone in a similar spot as I.
Today marks the day of this blog also becoming a vlog. That’s a video-blog. Once a week there will be a video of the proceedings of Parker Planners. I pledge to be brief, random, and interesting. I was doing a weekly newsletter for my partner and accountant and employee gone Kraft marketer person but I’ve decided this is much more appealing. The blog is called “Living the Dream” right? Well it’s about time I show the world the ups and downs of running your own very small business with dreams of making it big.
Ever heard of Jane Clayson? She was on Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and did ABC News. She covered the 1996 Presidential campaign, the OJ Simpson trial, and September 11. Yup. I was on facebook today and saw that one of my friends, Spencer Nugent, was feature on mormon.org with a neat video story about him, and Jane had one, too! Whoa.
Very cool how she views motherhood. What do they do all day anyway? Well yo momma raised you didn’t she? I side with Jane in that momhood is important, vital stuff.
My friend Janie Thompson knows Jane Clayson Johnson (married name) really well and told me a story about Clayson’s sister once. She and her husband both got law degrees and didn’t have children until their 30’s. Mormons are usually known for getting married while preteens and having 14 children, but I guess even peculiar folks like us are different from one another.
This is in reference to start-up businesses. I’ve seen this guy speak many times and worked Omniture’s annual convention twice. I have lots of respect for him.
Well my 17-day adventure is coming to a close. I’m flying back to Provo tonight from what has been a great get away and family fun time. Being in S. Utah and Surprise, AZ has been great. It was really cool getting to know my brother-in-law’s business better. I’ve resolved to make a few changes to my own company based on some things they do.
# 1 Actually pay myself
Parker Planners is profitable and going pretty well but I’ve chosen not to pay myself so it could grow faster and be a stable concern. Because I’m out of school and I work there full-time it’s time to reap a little of the benefits and take things more seriously.
# 2 Get office space!
Stepping in the door at Secure Source at 6:15 in the morning really had some power. You’re the only one there and you can do your morning routine in complete solace and your mind is super clear so you can organize important tasks and do most of them before most people are conscious! For Parker Planners it will be a challenge to find the right fit but it will be worth the hunt.
Oh yeah, we acquired a competitor, RMDaily Planner. The owner is a current BYU student and a cool guy, we agreed on a price before I left town and are closing the deal when I get back. We’re really excited about it. Should boost online sales.
So one thing I helped my brother-in-law do was learn web development. I made their website a while back and he’s working on a few of his own. One of which is a T-shirt company called spooftee.com. He’s got some funny shirts.
So now to dating. Why not? Ahhh, peoples attracted to each other. So my sister has a friend here in town that she’s always wanted me to go out with. It hasn’t happened sooner becuase one of us has always been in a relationship whenever I was in town. Now that we’re both single and I’m here she set us up. Muy fun. I’ll skimp on the details but man it’s cruddy when you meet someone neat and and they live mucho miles away.
My first retail customer for Parker Planners was the BYU Bookstore. Pretty lucky because the BYU Bookstore is in the top 5 in the nation in both floorspace and sales. I visited with Paul this morning and he told me some interesting stuff. He’s been in the business 28 years. He said of the hundreds of people who have come to him with small mom and pop products only 3 have succeeded and I’m one of them. Whuh? I had no idea. I have a lot to be grateful for.
I’ll just have to quote my friend’s blog again here. Remember to have fun!
Recently I talked to an old friend and it was really fun! I went to the world’s largest water balloon fight this morning and it was SO fun! Recently Parker Planners received more orders than I thought would come so soon, that was fun!
This picture is on my grandma’s wall by the kitchen. I imagine my grandfather put it up there because he had that kind of humor. They have lived in the same house since I have been alive, so this picture has sort of been a constant for me. It makes me laugh but also makes me think. Maybe it’s where I get my entrepreneur tenacity?
“No” is never the end unless you give up. I say that all “no” means is that you got their attention. The second “no” means that you might be serious, the third one means you actually want it, the fourth “no” means that you’re determined to get it, and the fifth “no” means that you understand persistence. There usually aren’t more than 5 “no’s”.
Remember that organizations people start are sort of like their children.
ha ha. They probably just remembered thinking it was odd that someone was really that excited about daily planners.
Parker Planners