Fail to Prepare, Prepare to Fail

Making Money from Kanye West in College (Part 4)

Read Part One

Read Part Two

Read Part Three

"In preparing for battle i have always found that plans are useless, but planning is essential"Dwight D. Eisenhower (Former American President and Army General)

*Below is a REALLY bad attempt by me to photoshop a pair of shutter shades on to Ike, after spending more time then i would care to divulge on this endeavor, I just drew them on crudely in Paint

Hindsight is a weird thing, considering the idea was a success it is weird looking back that my biggest fear was probably that we would pay our supplier and either we would receive nothing or else we would receive defective or poor quality product. I had a friend last year who this happened to, he payed about €150 for product and never got his product or a refund. I was always pretty confident I could sell the product once it arrived.(actually this is a lie, thinking back i was always nervous I would have unsold glasses in my room for years and in couple hundred euro debt!)

When I woke one morning in October and there was a delivery guy at the door I leapt out of bed and raced down the stairs faster than the Christmas I got a Sega mega drive (actually this is probably a lie as well, Flash Gordon couldn't of got close enough to ankle tap me that morning!). Anyway....I signed the form and ripped open the box. Buying the slightly more expensive product from America had paid off, as they were high quality and glowed under UV light. (This was crucial to our success and was why even months later when availability had become a lot more widespread I had customers paying up to €25 for a pair that actually worked glowed, because the marketplace was inundated with cheaper versions). As market research (and also for the craic) I wore a few pairs on nights out to see what reaction they would get. The response was unbelievable!, nearly every person in the nightclub would comment, and while some were negative (who does that guy think he is?) there was an overwhelmingly positive response with many people me asking where I'd bought them. I was now really looking forward to selling my product, the gig was still a few weeks away.

At this point I was very satisfied that after years of coming up with ideas for business's and making money (and let's be honest, we all have them) I'd finally "put some money on the table" and followed through. Win or lose I was glad I'd taken the chance, as

Henry Ford said "You can't build a reputation on what your going to do".

We now began planning how we exactly we would sell the product. We knew there would be Police there and what we would be doing would probably be illegal. We were basically hoping that we were so obviously small time they'd ignore us. Debate at this point centered around; would we sell the glasses? and how would we sell them?. We agreed that we should get two additional sales people (and specifically girls, seen as we were two guys and we wanted a balance, PLUS hot girls seem to work at promoting radio stations!). The gig was suppose to start around 7 with the warm up act. So we thought that if we sold glasses from 7-10 and offered the recruited staff 50 euro it would be a pretty good deal all round. We would sell all our glasses and they would get almost twice minimum wage for easy work.

I have just consulted the notebook I used at the time to do calculations and planning of sales, I will now rewrite word for word what is in note book. " Selling period:7-10, 180 minutes, to complete sales we need to sell 2 a minute - 1 person, if 4 people = sell 1 every 2 minutes". Selling one every 2 minutes seemed a lot more realistic and we had plenty of contacts in Dublin, the gig was on a Sunday night so we didn't think getting staff would be a problem.

However college work now took precedent and the next few weeks were pretty hectic with assignments and tests. The weekend the college work was done naturally we went out to celebrate on the Friday night. The plan was to recuperate Saturday and get ready for the concert on the Sunday. As it turned out though some friends were heading to Australia and were having a going away party on the Saturday night. We went to this and naturally didn't get too much sleep, so were not best prepared for the the most entrepreneurial day of my life to date!.........Part 5