Do Cool Sh*t (17 page)

Create a unique and engaging video that introduces you and your business to the press. You can easily use iMovie to edit a short video and the quality is excellent. Deliver the video in a creative way. For example: Put the video on a little external pen drive that you can gift to the writers and editors along with a note. If these editors and writers don’t want to download a video from someone they don’t know, you can give them a DVD that is also creatively packaged with handmade touches.

Create your own box with something weird—like what we did with the IV bags—or with something useful and repurposed inside that is relevant to what you are trying to do. Packages are always fun to receive, and it will make your idea stand out from the many others they hear about every day. You can find weird things to buy at dollar stores and thrift stores and places like Film Biz Recycling (filmbizrecylcing.org), where they repurpose things from film sets instead of throwing them in landfills. Put your items in a box along with your invitation, catalog, or menu.

Always have an ask.
Make sure that whatever method you use, you state clearly and concisely what you are asking of them: to come to your opening or launch and/or to set up a meeting or call with them.

STEP 4:
Personally hand deliver your own press packages.

It will save you money (every parcel delivered in Manhattan by a bike messenger costs about twenty-four dollars), and it is a way to meet the writers and editors when you are dropping the packages off. Great opportunities always arise when you put yourself in the position to have these opportunities.

STEP 5:
If you do meet one of the writers or editors, after you hand them the package, give them a hug!

It will completely throw them off guard and sometimes disarm them into actually being friendly and open to what you have to share. (Obviously, use your own judgment here. If the person looks really grumpy or angry, maybe stick with the firm handshake and a big smile! But choose to go in for a hug if you can!)

STEP 6:
Try to get an e-mail address to follow up.

Following up is critical in closing the deal. Sometimes writers and editors get really busy and even if they liked you, they may be bogged down by their own deadlines and very distracted
,
so a gentle nudge the day after you meet them or deliver the goods can be really helpful. And if you don’t hear from them still, follow up a week later. And then every two weeks until you finally hear back. Unless they tell you otherwise, continue to follow up with them. Persistence pays off!

A great way to remember to follow up is to use the free Gmail plug-in called Boomerang. Its function is to bring your sent message back to the top of your in-box so you don’t forget to follow up.

Gmail has another great plug-in called Canned Responses (go to your Gmail settings and you will find the plug-in). If you are pitching the same thing over and over again to many different people, rather than having to copy and paste the same message continuously, you can simply click on
CANNED RESPONSES
and it will automatically put in the text you want in the body of the e-mail. It will make follow-up and sales calls so much easier!

STEP 7:
Write a cute note (sign it yourself!) and flyer all apartments in your neighborhood.

Explain your business idea sincerely and why it’s an MB product for the customer. Do everything it takes for people to get to know you and want to root for you. It worked for that cute café a long time ago and it will work for you too!

The most important thing to remember is to keep going! Don’t stop pushing when you raise the money, and definitely don’t stop pushing when your doors open or when you launch your product—that’s when so many people quit, but that’s only the beginning!

Getting people to learn about your concept and fall in love with it is a challenge, especially if you can’t afford to hire a PR company. But you
can
do it yourself, you just have to be tenacious and wake up every morning with the plan to get people to know about what you’re doing.

11

DISASTER LAUNCH

How to Win Back First-Time Believers After Big Mistakes

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

—T. S. E
LIOT

I
could feel my breath quicken and a tightening sensation build in my throat. The voice on the other line shouted, “I am never ever ordering from you again! And I’ll make sure my friends don’t either.”

Before I could respond, I heard a click.

Wow.

I checked the other orders. They were backed up by more than an hour and a half. I glanced at my overwhelmed workers, who were doing the best they could but were still so new to this job that I couldn’t blame them. I had hired the pizza makers only the week before and they were not prepared for such a big rush right away.

The phone was ringing off the hook. Every time I picked it up, it was another person calling to complain that their delivery was late.

I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself down. This was so much harder than I thought. At this point, all I could do was put my head down, keep going, and get the customers their food as fast as possible.

How in the hell was I going to get through this one?

My parents always said
that “there is a time for everything.” There is a time to study, a time to play, a time for dinner, a time to clean the house, a time to meet someone, a time to get married, a time to have kids, and a time to become a doctor (my parents never stopped hoping).

When my friends or I would go through tough breakups, we would often say to one another, “It just wasn’t the right timing for you guys.” When one of us interviewed for a job we were excited about and didn’t get it, we’d say, “The timing wasn’t right. Maybe a better job is just around the corner.”

It probably wasn’t a surprise to anyone that I ultimately became an entrepreneur because I’ve always much preferred to march to the beat of my own drum and take charge of my own time. I would show up to social gatherings late, I would usually be the last one arriving for meetings (oops!), and I never cared too much that my parents wanted me to be married by twenty-six and have a child by thirty. I just did my own thing.

So, as though the gods of time were keeping score and accumulating bad karma for my lack of respect for time, it all came down
hard
when I opened my first business.

It was one of the most difficult lessons I’ve ever had to learn.

I was advised by Rich Wolf to have a “soft opening” before trying to get press to cover my restaurant. I would quietly open my doors and iron out the kinks for a few weeks and allow my new staff to learn their jobs and get comfortable in the day-to-day operations. It was the time to receive initial feedback from customers and fix any issues that came up. Once everything was pretty much ready, we would have a grand opening and scream from the rooftops that we were open for business.

But I was so excited about getting the press interested in covering my little pizza shop that I didn’t heed Rich’s advice and delivered my press boxes earlier than I should have.

The first big article came out in
Daily Candy
a couple of weeks before I opened. When it was published, I was high-fiving myself, sending a link to everyone I knew, happy that the restaurant was featured in a noteworthy online media outlet. The little idea in my head was actually a newsworthy article? I was proud and beyond thrilled.

What happened next was far from thrilling; it was more like a horror film.

When I got to the restaurant on the very first day we opened our doors, about fifty people lined up outside, excited to taste “the perfect food.” Wide-eyed and a bit incredulous, I hurried in to my restaurant to get it ready as my phone was already ringing off the hook and I had a dozen voice messages from people asking when we would be open.

Really?
Daily Candy
was this powerful?

This was the original location of the restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and unlike our current one in the West Village, it was set up as mostly counter service where people would walk up, place their order, and either sit down to get the food brought to them or wait to take it out. We only had eight tables in the place and we weren’t set up for delivery yet. We had hired the last of our staff the day before, and while most were hired about two weeks prior, they didn’t really get any training until the week before we opened, since we had still been waiting on some equipment to come in.

The night before our opening, we prepped eight trays of pizza dough (which was about sixty-four pie crusts), we had the fresh, homemade marinara sauce ready, our organic mozzarella grated, and the toppings sautéed and ready to go. Since it was our first day, we had no idea how much to prepare, so we put together only a couple of two-quart buckets of each ingredient. According to our consulting chef, that should have been enough to get us through the first week. But we weren’t considering what would happen if the press we’d been hoping for actually worked.

I felt unprepared. It was like I was a kid playing grown-up and all of a sudden, I had lots of other people playing the game with me. It was weird and surreal that people were lining up to buy something from my new business. It hadn’t even really sunk in yet that I even had a real business.

The more pressing problem was that I was completely clueless as to how to handle this mess. I never dealt with customers in a restaurant before. This was going to be a big learning curve for me, and unfortunately this would cost me some of my customers.

I felt better that Chef was with me to set everything up and train the new staff, but even he was overwhelmed by the turnout on the first day. Neither of us had thought to prepare for this scenario.

The process was incredibly bumpy on our first go-round. Aside from the normal first-day problems, like getting the hang of taking orders and filling them quickly, and learning how to use the new cash register, and making the pizzas from scratch, we also faced logistical and layout issues. Our to-go bags, paper plates, and napkins were two steps beyond reach of the employees, adding too many wasted seconds to the process. Our assembly line wasn’t perfect (for example, the sauce and cheese were placed on the wrong side of the toppings), which added precious minutes to the process, and the distance from pizza prep table to the oven was too wide, resulting in a few burned elbows and arms as we tried to place the pizza into the 650-degree oven.
Owwwwww!

It felt like our entire staff was walking waist-deep in snow, trudging uphill with a heavy load on our backs. All we could do was keep going and pray it would end soon without something horrible happening. The whole experience was truly painful. And the customers weren’t having any of it.

At first, the line of customers seemed to only keep growing, but after a while, many people in the back of the line grew frustrated and left, some of the customers who already paid and were waiting asked for their money back, and those who did manage to get their pizzas, got them so late, that they were grumbling and most likely walked away with imperfect (and cold!) pizza. In our attempt to move things along, we may have pulled the pizzas out of the oven a little too early and we all knew that if the food wasn’t good, they wouldn’t come back. The whole thing was an epic disaster.

Once we finally closed our doors to the public that night, our team came together and we talked about all of the things that went wrong and tried to celebrate the few token things that went right. We moved the plates and napkins so they were within reach of the cash register. We moved the sauce and cheese to the left side of the toppings so the assembly line flowed properly; we prepped a lot more food so we didn’t have to worry about running out; we went over the cash register details again. One by one, we went down the list of bottlenecks. We spent the rest of the night soothing our wounds (both figuratively and literally!) and tried to get as prepared as we could.

The next day and then the following two weeks went gradually better and better, but that
Daily Candy
article really did its job and we still had so many people coming in, we felt as though we were trying to mostly keep pace in this game of frightening catch-up instead of feeling as if we were in the lead and strong. If only I had listened to Rich and that article had been written two weeks later, we’d have been in much better shape.

This was certainly not the way we wanted to start—a thousand steps behind. But one thing was for sure: I would never underestimate the power of a good review again.

I knew for sure that we lost a lot of customers in the first two weeks. People had sworn to us that they would never come back and that they would tell their friends about their bad experience with us. Comments like these stung, and when they were written online, the sting lasted even longer. I came to learn that making mistakes like this was part of the learning process and the only thing to do at that point is to pick yourself up, fix what was wrong, and move forward as fast as possible.