Last year, I got a silkscreen machine and
I just love making these crazy tee shirt designs.
Cool right? So, I get this idea of selling
my tees in a booth over the summer and I'm
thinking just open a booth and tee shirts
will sell themselves. But, my uncle (he's
a successful business man and all) he tells
me I should make a business plan. I really
like my uncle but I'm thinking what a serious
waste of time, right? But you know, what the
heck. Summers still a ways off so I start
jotting stuff down. And it turns out there
are two places I can rent a booth close-by
that have a lot of foot traffic. The farmer's
market and the mall by my house. So, I go
to both places and I talk to some of the vendors
and I asked them about the foot traffic. I
crunched the numbers in my business plan and
realized that even though the mall booths
are much more expensive they actually have
less potential for teen customers than the
market. Weird right? So i figure out how many
teens my age walk by the farmers market booths,
how much my booth and tee shirt expenses are
and what do you know?With my business plan,
I have an idea of how many tees I need for
the summer and how much help I'm gonna need
at my booth. Great, right? Well, not so much.
Summer starts and turns out I love my tee
shirts but the kids just aren't buying. But,
there's this weird thing. All these baby boomers:
they love the shirts. So now what? In my research,
I had actually counted how many people over
fifty walked past every day. So, I changed
my business plan, reconfigured some of the
calculations, and what do you know? I knew
exactly how many more large size tees to make
and how many less small and medium size tees.
Thank goodness for my business plan. First
thing I did, I made a special tee for my uncle.
What do you know? He's a baby boomer too.
He loved it.
