Blanked

My friends thought I lost my mind when I laughed at this jar of pickles for a good 5 minutes.

Speaking of Dill Wholes, my store got blanked today. We were open from 9 AM to 11 PM and didn't make one sale. We ran a bunch of credit checks and spoke with a lot of people who either wanted to shop around or that just wanted to wait until after Christmas to buy a phone. To add a little salt to the open head wound, Joe G wanted us to call in every hour on the hour and if we were late by a few minutes we would be called and questioned as to why we didn't follow orders. Luckily I was to report to Jackie who is the best, but I still don't like having to call every hour and say, "Hi, no sales. Goodbye." It's like getting kicked in the ribs after being knocked down. I got a lot of important stuff done today, but not activating a single phone is just painful. I got our advertising campaign started, wrote up this week's schedule (which is sooooo hard to do when you've never done it. It seems so easy from the outside), and did a little marketing to the stores in the mall that get discounts. This disgrace won't happen again once our name is out there, but people who want to get sprint phones don't know we exist yet and are going all the way to Allentown or to Scranton. I believe whole heartedly that we will do at least 3 activations a day once we are known. If we could do 5 a day it would be great, but 3 would pay the bills and keep me from firing people. I don't know how much I'm making a sale for certain, but I know Joe G and I had said $30 a sale I do personally and $20 a sale anyone else does. I am not particularly happy with those numbers because of all I have to give up to make this work, but I am going to have to take what I am given until I have ground to stand on in a argument about how much I'm worth. I just took the last half hour and put my FU business skills to good use and figured out what we have to do at the store to be profitable to the company. If we spend nothing outside of rent, hourly wages, and commisison, with me working 70 hours, Rose working 48, and everyone else working 20 hours a week we will break even averaging 2.4 activations a day. I am sure there are other factors involved with how we're paid, but I was told once what the company gets for an activation and I used that as the standard. I know we get paid differently depending on credit rating and plan, but if that is the average pay per activation, we only need to average 2.4 a day to break even. If we activate 3 a day the company makes "decent" money and if we do 5 the kiosk makes a ton of money. My goal has always been 200 activations a month. If we hit that, Joe G should be singing my praise up and down because he will be a wealthy man. If I hit the 200 a month mark I should be doing alright for myself as well, but I think I'll be able to negotiate some better terms for myself if I get close to those kinda numbers.

I think dynamic spread sheets are the most fun thing I learned in the Dolan School of Business. You can really learn a lot financially by putting everything into numbers and being able to change little things and see what affect they will have on the big picture. That is the only reason I was financially happy at Millersville when I was coaching. I put my pay and all my expenses into a spreadsheet and figured out that I was making enough money to put some in the bank even with all my monthly expenses. I even included a bunch of money to waste on whatever the hell I wanted every week and I still made out with a few grand left over at the end of the year. I think I'm going to send Joe G the spreadsheet I just made and see what he thinks of my awesome business knowledge in all it's glory. I guarantee he calls me up and tells me how it's flawed and how we have to sell 10 a day to make a penny, but I'm proud of it just because it works and gives me a decent idea of what every sale means to the company. It even helped me figure out how many hours I can give my employees if we hit a lull in sales or hit a hot streak. Oh well. I'm going to sleep so I can get up and activate at least 2.4 phones. BOOYA!