I brought Mike the mentee with me. He was an awesome salesman! That kid is great, he’s fearless and will sell planners to anyone.

We added a few more stores and spoke with other current customers like Deseret Book. Fun times.

Here’s Mike selling like a boss.

We’re buff.

Feel the power of the planner!

You definitely don’t see this every day. Especailly in Utah!

The show was a success and we had a great time. Trade shows are fun and it’s always great when you learn new things from people in your industry.

The last few days of my life have been mind-expanding and literally life-changing. I recommend travel to places that are in every way different than what you’re used to. You grow, you learn, you love people more, you earn a respect for life and those who have more/less than you, and are given a vision of the sacrifices of literally millions of people who have gone before whose efforts improve your life at the current moment.

New York City is all that and a bucket of chickenchips. It’s the real deal. I love this place. The people I’ve encountered are so genuine and dedicated. The food is amazing. This is in part because if they don’t perform they’ll go out of business almost immediately and then it’s someone else’s turn to dish out mama’s recipes to the masses. Talk about economics. In this place it most definitely is survival of the fittest.

The Nation Stationery show has been fun. I love trade shows; meeting and working with like-minded people is so fulfilling. The first day we only made one sale, but I got to use my new credit card reader from Square! What a cool company; they have truly changed the world and how it does business. I can’t think of a more useful or empowering tool for small business in 2011. The buyer was a small family-owned bookstore. Benjie and I talked to a ton of people, nearly everyone that walked by. Very little immediate success compared to the last show. We were pretty darn discouraged.

(double-stick taping planners to your head is lowest of the low, folks)

It’s times like this where you wonder if all your big dreaming really was for the birds. Hard not to feel like the kid standing in front of a borrowed Ferrari with his eyes shut.

We made another sales board like last time and even lowered the number we had to get for everyone’s 20% discount. Only 100. For a show with something like 8000 buyers that should be nothing, right? Turns out stationery stores rarely carry planners. And the ones that do are hesitant to buy something in a declining market. There you have it. A super fun trip to New York scorned buy a lame-sauce kick off to what should have been our most successful business venture yet.

Is this the end of Parker Planners as we know it? Does the train run over the beautiful damsel? Will Benjie and Ethan be able to dig deep and pull from their car salesman genius and football beast roots?

No, yes, and yes. Too bad about the damsel but we kept on keeping on and were rewarded in the form of conversations with some of the largest retailers in the world. I can’t post here which ones or what they said but suffice it to say we have a few conversations to finish when we get home. I was shocked today at the show. I have a page full of business cards that, if we struck a deal with any of them, Benjie and I would be able to live anywhere we wanted and drive whatever we wanted.

Bigger risk, bigger reward.

Ok here’s a great NY story for you now. Hold on tight ’cause this one’s pretty dope-a-licious if I may be so nerdy.

Sunday. First day of the trade show there’s a hotty two booths down. She’s got the kind of looks that make her virtually unapproachable by most men’s standards. Bombshell. Why try?

Monday. Benjie and I got to know the people around us a little better including hotty McHotstuff. Turns out she lives in LA right now and has had a fairly successful career in film, TV, and commercials. She’s done theater and soap operas in NY, commercials and movies in LA, and a some modeling. Probably a jerk? Wrong. Cooper is way cool. Surprisingly cool, actually. We got a picture.

Tuesday (today) was a great day at the show and Benjie flew home (less great, you can’t leave the booth with just one person there plus he rocks). Because I was all by myself after that our buddies next door offered to bring me along to have dinner with them which was so kind. They are some of the most interesting and and generous people I’ve met in a while. We went to a great Greek place in downtown Manhattan. That restaurant was for real. Greeks ran it and the food was very very good. Oh so yummy and my hosts even offered to pick up the tab which was like rain from heaven. They called it my “celebration dinner” for starting conversations with those big-box retailers.

Wow I just love life right now. I love how you think you know what you want until something way way better happens. Can’t live without a certain thing in your life? Can’t be happy until X or Y happens? Wait until the big man upstairs gives you A and B and you’ll wonder why you ever wanted the first thing.

Cooper is so awesome, we happened to have about a 40-min bus ride (probably traveled 2 miles) from the convention center to Times Square-ish where we got to chat. She knows a lot about show-biz and was really engaging to talk to. One interesting fact I learned was the soap operas are filmed with virtually no practice. Because they’re on nearly every day of the week you get the lines the night before and just spit them out the next day, usually in one take. it’s what makes them so goofy. I think she was on As the World Turns for a while.

Yeah, not every day you hang out with well-cultured and mega-beautiful actresses. She plays some mean violin, too. It was an attention-grabber for their booth at the trade show (as if she wasn’t already).

OK so back to some NYC fun. Benjie and I tried to save on expenses where we could so lodging of course was one area where we got creative. The first two nights (for Benjie anyway. I missed my flight in SLC so I took a red-eye and got in at 6am Saturday morning) we stayed with a friend of a friend who lived on the 6th floor of a building up on 174th street. pretty nice place, fun. Sunday night was a mystery until Saturday night so we booked a Super Motel 8 in NJ across the river from the convention center because it was only $109 per night instead of $200 like the cheapest place in NY. It was a bit of an adventure in and of itself.

We took a shuttle thing through the Lincoln Tunnel under the river and popped up in North Bergen where our delightful hotel was. Plus side: hot shower, ironing board, two beds, complimentary breakfast, shuttle back to NY, etc. Strange/Needs Improvement Side: wireless internet didn’t work so we asked the front desk what was up. They came to our room with their own laptop, showed us that his computer was working, denied any claim (changed the subject) that the laptop was modified at all and refused to let us check any other room for a signal. I don’t know about you, but when when an iPhone 4, an iPad 2, and a new gen Macbook can’t get wifi it may not be our devices.

Strange/Needs Improving Side (cont): The internet worked in the lobby so we went out there to do some webbing. While there several people came in asking for hourly rates. Yeah I’ll let you figure that one out. Plus the bed sucked.

Good times, New Jersey. Thanks! In defense of NJ I did meet a couple very nice ladies from Princeton at the trade show.

and . . . it’s not even over yet. Here I lay on my airbnb.com bed typing away through some nice high-speed internet in East Villiage New York. It’s like a dream. I wonder were I’ll be when I wake up.

As a grande finale of the whole thing, a special dance number performed impromptu in Central Park filmed by my never failing business partner Benjie.

That’s right, folks. We are back from the great state of Texas where Parker Planners saw it’s first national-size trade show. We had a blast, it was so much fun. The place was huge. There were about 1000 companies selling things to college bookstores and about the same number of buyers there. Our humble booth was in the new exhibitor pavilion and we had quite a few visitors. We’d like to welcome our newest friends to the family of Parker Planners. We added 46 new stores around the nation. We now sell to great schools in Hawaii, California, Texas, Louisiana, Iowa, Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Maryland, North Carolina, Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and many more!

Benjie and I were fortunate to be able to stay with my sister to help us feel a little more at home. Texas has a pretty crazy carpool lane. #1 it’s nearly impossible to find the entrance, #2 once you’re in the HOV lane there is no escape, high concrete walls on either side. And #3 when you achieve the feat of driving on it you feel a great sense of rock flowing through your veins. It’s like eating helium. Or nitrogen. In solid form, but way better. Because it’s like 2 stories above the rest of the road you get to look down at all the poor traffic-experiencing folk. Poor folk.

The show went well and it was quite the adventure. One of the most fun parts about it was all the other vendors there. Nestle had a booth where I got to try a bunch of new flavors of beauty. They had horchata, jamaica, and tamarindo. If you’ve ever had friends from Mexico you know what those are. I liked the horchata pretty good. Also a got a free pink rubbery watch which I gave to my sister, a ream of paper made from sugar cane, and a booklet made -literally- of elephant poo. Yes. It’s called Poo Poo paper. Non-believers click here. We made some great contacts and are excited to fulfill all the orders.

I also got to see Blake Mycoskie speak live. He’s the founder of TOMS shoes. He did a great job and I really want to incorporate his style into my business or a future business. A week ago on Tuesday April 5 was national no-shoes day. I didn’t wear shoes for that day It was great. Going to the grocery store was pretty cool, ha ha.

Here’s me at our table. We had candy, worked well.

The three of us. We brought Boston the intern on this trip to help sell.

One product at the show was a toaster that burns your school logo onto the piece of toast. Nice.

Thanks for reading! This week we just surpassed 300 fans on facebook and the peasants rejoice!!

We’re still working hard on the iPhone app and it should be out in about a month. Hold your breath it’s going to rock.

Ethan

“This is Ashley again. It is actually a cool story how I heard about the planners. An RM [returned missionary for the LDS Church] was at the University of Botswana where I was serving at the time, and couldn’t stop talking about them and how awesome they are. So when I got off my mission in December, I ordered some. So, your planners are a big hit, even in Botswana, Africa!”

She did a review on Parker Planners and sent us a link!

NYU Student reviews Parker Planners

Enjoy!

If you can name that tune first you’ll get a planner of your choosing! See the website for info on that. Also, you have to let me know how you found the video and our company.

People seemed to come right up, love us, our story, and our products, and we just kept on writing sales 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:

Love,

Ethan