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Today after I walked a couple miles, I went to the store to get some milk and orange juice. I went to a local Kroger store not far from our home. When I stopped at the last main intersection, there was this guy walking across the street pushing a shopping cart. My first thought was where did he take this cart from. He was walking so quickly it looked a bit comical. I don’t know why I was so intrigued by the guy. Once I get to the store, I go in and look around for my items. My favorite yogurts were on sale so I got a bunch. Well I digress.
As I’m walking around the store I see the same guy that was pushing the shopping cart only now he doesn’t have a cart. He is just walking around the store like all the rest of us. I recognized him, but I kept going.
After I made my purchases and loaded up the van, I head to the street. Now this is one of those busy streets where I hate to turn left on to. It is almost impossible and seems to take forever. When I get to the front of the exit, a car pulls into the lot and stops, then I see another car in the street stopped in the road sort of canted. I figured maybe these two had an accident. No big deal right? When I pull out, now I see what happened. The guy, Mr. Push a cart, is standing next to the car in the street and his forehead is all bloody. What the….? I make a u-turn and go back to see if I can help. When I get there, I grab my level #1 first aid kit and go up to the guy. Note: I’ll explain more about the first aid kits in a future post(s).
I start putting on a pair of rubber gloves from my kit, get a telfa pad and place it on his forehead and tell him to apply pressure. By now a Burton Police officer is arriving on scene and starts doing his thing. This officer, sees that I’m rendering first aid to the guy and doesn’t try to stop me. He even asks my name. I tell him and also tell him that I’m a Police officer. By now an ambulance is pulling on and I put away my kit and let them have at it.
This is probably my first time having to render first aid to someone in an accident outside of work. I can tell that all the years of experience really helped. The driver of the car. Oooooh wait. I didn’t say what happened right. The driver of the car is pulling onto Bristol eastbound at the same time this guy is crossing the street. She didn’t see him and clips him on his hip with the mirror. He jumps up to try and avoid the car and lands on his head. OUCH. Can you say speed knot. This guy is going to have a killer headache. He appeared to be OK and walked to the ambulance under his own power after they applied a cervical collar.
After he heads off to the ambulance, I check on the lady that was driving the car. She looked fine, but as soon as I ask her if she is ok, she starts panicking a bit. She’s all jittery, but I’ve seen this before. It’s an adrenaline dump due to the accident. I talk to her and try to help calm her down. I ask her if there is someone that can come help her out and she calls her mom. Well mom arrives, collects her daughter and the officer and I shake hands and I’m on my way home.
Not bad for an interesting evening. Just one of those things that you don’t see all the time. All evening I kept wondering. Was I so intrigued with the guy, because I was going to see him after he got hit by a car. Hmmmmm, makes one wonder.
I’ll talk to you next time constant reader and we’ll get back on task. Until then.
As I write this, it is just past 10:00pm and I’m putting items away from the mock table display that I set up in our dining room. For the past week, I set up and made various changes to how our table will be set up on this coming Saturday. I’m not sure if I detailed it but we are doing an event at a local Biker church that is hosting a Breast Cancer Awareness Ride.
It really helped to have our first event to be relatively large, multi-day event. Not that it made this setup simple, but it is a lot easier to put things together for one afternoon than it is to make sure we have provisions and inventory for three days. I’m looking forward to seeing what this experience will bring. In addition to it being my first, it is the first event of this type for this church as well. We will all be learning about the experience on tomorrow.
I always feel like I didn’t make up enough items. All day I’ve had to remind myself that we do have the ability to make up items for people and we can always either take orders, that can be fulfilled later or direct them to the website.
At the Back to the Bricks, there was one lady, that wanted a black bracelet with neon yellow stripe. We didn’t have one at the time and I encouraged her to go to the website and remind me that I’d spoken with her. I even measured her wrist so that we would be set on that end as well. I wanted to really help her out, but as I’ve said in previous posts, we were completely swamped on that last day. I just didn’t think it prudent to take an order and have no real time frame I could give her to return. In hindsight, I wish I would have taken her order. I could have made the bracelet, which I actually did, and sent it to her. I wish she would contact me about the bracelet. It’s not just about the money or the sale. I really like seeing the pleased look on peoples faces when they wear our items. Perhaps the universe will direct her our way. I really think she would love the bracelet. I do.
Next time, Constant Reader, I’ll tell you how things went.
This is a new paradigm for me. At the same time it is something that I’ve had a curiosity and interest in. With this business, I have the perfect way to effect a little change and do our part to help those that have been stricken by this debilitating disease.
My wife grew up with a very close neighbor that died in her early thirties due to breast cancer. This happened over 20+ years ago and it still lives in my wife’s heart to this very day. I can imagine a few of you reading these words might have had similar situations with someone close to you. Be it a wife, mother, sister or close friend. It could have even been a man that was affected by the disease. I remember years ago, hearing of the actor, Richard Roundtree speaking on his struggles with the disease.
I feel honored to have an outlet where I feel we can do some good. During the month of October, with any paracord item sale with the Breast Cancer Awareness theme, we will make a donation to the Susan G. Komen, for the Cure Foundation. I’ve researched their website and find their work inspiring. So often, I’ve heard of the cliche of ‘giving back.’ It seems to be a code word to make people feel better about themselves if they have a measure of business and/or financial success. I look at it more as a transference of energy. With the good energy coming me, it is my responsibility to give it back out to the universe in any fashion that feels right to me.
Constant Reader, see where I go from here.
Although I do want to go further into the details of the website and how I developed it, I would be remiss if I ignored such an important sequence of events as the first internet sales.
I have put a lot of hours into developing the craft of paracord item making and it is an extremely big deal to me to have people take the time to spend their money without even knowing me. I don’t dismiss the personal sales that I’ve had with people, but it is something quite different to entrust someone, many states away with essentially your money and time. I want their experience to be more than they expected. I want them to leave away with their purchase and feel like the least they could do would be to tell a few people they know about paracordsandmore.com, Jeffrey Washington and his family.
Years ago I sold various things through eBay and had probably 400 or so personal sales that I dealt with. I was primarily selling McFarlane action figures, Scale Honda Goldwing motorcycles and a few other things that I found interesting. It was exhilarating at times to package all the sold items, haul them to the post office or UPS store and see them go off to their next destination. My wife and I had a great experience and I’ve found that has helped me a great deal with this endeavor. I was telling my oldest daughter, Alyssia just this morning that it helped to do those sales as it doesn’t feel so new to me now.
With all that said, each of the first sales, I greatly appreciated. I included a small extra item to both of them as my appreciation. I hope they will enjoy wearing their items and will consider coming back to visit the site and Etsy again. Actually in terms of the Etsy sale, that customer did come back. When I checked my email today I saw that she ordered another Thin Blue/Red line bracelet like she did a week ago. I was very pleased to see this person come back. I imagine that person didn’t like the item or the service they wouldn’t have come back. I look forward to more return customers just like this one.
I’ll see you again next time, Constant Reader. Till then.
Today is October 2nd, 2012 and it’s a beautiful warm day here in mid-Michigan. Earlier today I was alerted to an email that I had received. It was notifying me that I had just received an order via the website. At first I didn’t look at this with much fan fare, but then I remembered all the work that went into making the site in the first place.
Coming up with the look and theme. Integrating a shopping cart, a unique challenge, and making sure all the pieces worked together all meant something.
After I set up the cart on the site with Paypal, I used their Sandbox feature. What is sandbox you may ask. Well let me enlighten you, especially since I just learned about it recently myself.
Constant Reader, that information will follow on the next post.
The whole, Bikes on the Bricks event went quite well. We sold many items. Met a lot of great people, and gained a few new friends. What more could we ask. We even got an invite to another event in the coming weeks.
My children were able to come along and were a tremendous help and my wife even threw her hat in the ring and came along. She not only came along, but she appeared to enjoy herself and was a wealth of information and suggestions.
I am truly grateful for the individuals that suggested that I do this in the first place and the other individuals that stepped up and were a tremendous help. I’ve often heard of people that are in business, getting lots of negative from family, friends, and co-workers. I would have to say that I’ve had the exact opposite response. So many people have stepped forward and helped me in many ways, big and small. I wish there was some way to truly repay them.
All I can offer is my eternal gratitude and honor their encouragement with making this a solid growing business as much as I am able.
We’ll see what next time brings, constant reader.
Really it wasn’t. The translator, says, he wants to get several so he can send them to his family. So I start helping him pick out various bracelets. All three of them liked my King Mummy Double Skull key chain. I had two that I displayed more prominently on the table today since they weren’t getting any attention the previous two days. They asked if I had some more. Darn…I wish I did. The translator guy bought one of these key chains and the other guy that was talking to my daughter bought the other. Right then I regretted I didn’t have another 10 or 20 of them. Lesson learned. At a biker type of event, have more of these types of items ready.
Well I help the guy that I’m talking to pick out a total of 6 bracelets. My daughter helps the third guy pick out 5 items. WOW. This caught us off guard. We had to make one bracelet for guy #3. Another lesson learned. Don’t be surprised by what people may say. In hindsight, if we hadn’t been caught so flat footed, we might have been able to sell many more. Another lesson that I learned…get over being shocked pretty quickly. After everything was over and they came back and got the bracelet we had to make for guy #3, we may have been able to sell more if we simply asked the question. They were obviously primed to make some purchases and we could have brought in some more sales.
Many lessons were learned with this particular event. Goes down in the book of notes to discuss in the after action report with the family.
Constant Reader. I’ll see you next time with more. Take care.
Sounds like the perfect thing to hear when your selling something. I thought it was a joke and I was waiting for he punchline.
Let me back up and tell you what happened. We had a nice lady come by and inquire about a patriotic colored bracelet with a white ribbon. She wanted her friend to see it and said she may buy two if her friend likes it. She said she would leave her husband at our stand. As collateral I guess, while she took the bracelet to her friend.I thought this was funny, but he went along with it so who am I to talk.
A few minutes later, she returned with not only her friend but also a couple other people. She wanted one for her friend and herself and the two guys wanted one as well. With this order we needed to make 3 identical bracelets.to go along with the one we had already. Around the middle of taking this order, I spot three guys, peeking around the other folks, looking at our table. Not really surprising, as it happened several times throughout the event. Then the people would either buy something or keep going. Well these guys waited until the previous four left. They approached the table and I could tell immediately only one of them spoke fairly good english. The other two spoke very broken english and they were all fluent in Arabic as far as I could tell. As they were looking around, Alyssia and I got to starting the other bracelets we needed to make. Well I’m looking down at the bracelet that I’m making and I glanced up and saw the guy closest to me making a circular motion, sort of over the whole table. The guy, or translator, in this case says out loud, “He wants one of everything.” I almost started laughing, because I think its a joke. Then I look at their faces and could tell right away, they weren’t joking. So now I’m not joking either, right. I stand up and ask, for the translator to tell me what he has in mind.
Tune in next time, Constant Reader, to see what happened from here.
After we got everything set up on day three, it was pretty slow for some time. The motor officers, were busy on their bikes, getting in their last practice preparing for their skills competition that would be later in the morning. Many of the other vendors, were slowly putting their stalls together. One thing I saw that I guess I could have done if I wanted was to leave the setup as it was and covered up everything with a tarp and lowered the canopy. I didn’t think to do that, but I will keep it in mind for the future. It wasn’t too difficult to set up since we had done it the previous two days.
While we were waiting in the morning, the Mayor of Flint, Dayne Walling walked by our booth. I think he recognizes me from our union negotiations with the city, but I’m never sure. Either way, he stopped by and chatted for a few moments and we chatted about the event. We even joked that between the two of our families, their isn’t one tattoo, motorcycle, leather vest or anything. We both came to conclusion that we are pretty square compared to most of the people and bikers that were at the Bikes on the Bricks.
The first customers we had were a couple ladies from a local Biker church. Personally I had never heard of such a thing, but I was intrigued by the thought of people being in church with sunglasses and chaps. We chatted with these ladies the previous day and they both said they wanted a particular bracelet but didn’t have any money on them. Well I had heard that before so I didn’t get overly excited. Well, they came back on day three and said they were ready to buy a couple Breast Cancer Awareness Bracelets. Of course we took care of them and they even invited us to be one of the vendors at a Breast Cancer Awareness Ride that is to be based out of their church in early October. I told them I would put some thought to it.
Tune in for a new chapter next time, Constant Reader. See you then.
As I was reading this I realized I had jumped into day three (3) with no warning at all. Let’s take care of that, shall we.
My wife wasn’t feeling well at all when she awoke on day three and decided to stay at home and rest up a bit. Jorden and Ashley decided to stay home with her just in case she needed a helping hand. They were also tired from the previous 2 days and I could definitely understand that. I always have to remember to be thankful for any help I can get and they were a tremendous help.
My oldest daughter Alyssia did come along and we packed up and headed to the Downtown. Once there, I spoke with “Bob” and asked him about setting up today. I had hoped to avoid the near fiasco (my fault) from the previous day. Well, catastrophe averted. Neither Bob or his wife, Carol, had a problem with us setting up at the same spot that we were at before.
It may be obvious why I asked my children to go along with me. As of this writing, our children are 19, 17, and 12. Definitely old enough to learn a thing or two about business and what better way to have them get totally immersed in the endeavor than with their “Pops”. As I’ve said in other posts, this is a lot of a learning experience for me. Although I’ve done some things in business before, I haven’t really done much with them since they’ve been old enough to remember and know what is going on. My style of teaching is totally hands-on. It was the way I was taught in my job as a police officer and I consider it to be an excellent way to learn quickly. It can be scary as hell at times, but the lessons can be so valuable. During this whole process, I’ve explained what I was doing and encouraged them to give me their opinions. I’ve always felt that we can always learn from each other and they appear to appreciate that.
Tomorrow we’ll go into a bit more of how day three went in more detail. Until then, Constant Reader.
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