10,000 Cooler Bags - Big Mistake
When you accidentally add an extra zero to a number, it’s kind of a BIG deal!
I know first hand when I accidentally ordered 10,000 cooler bags instead of 1,000. It’s a long story, but let’s take my major mistake as a form of encouragement that we can fail and keep moving forward.
I remember pulling over on the side of the road in Kaphulu area near the babysitter drop off and just started crying. “What the heck did I just do and where the heck is this all going?” I thought. I called my husband who calmed me down and then called my mom followed by my mentor and others asking everyone I knew who had a home if they had space to hold just a few hundred cooler bags (which in truth are pretty dang huge boxes)! I kept hitting my forehead saying “OMG Erin! Seriously OMG Erin!” I couldn’t believe I made such a simple, yet major mistake!
Thank the Lord we found homes for it all including multiple garages and the lesson learned was to not rush, check my work, and have someone else check since I tend to make mistakes on numbers and dates pretty frequently.
The opportunity now (at that moment), was to figure out a way to “get rid of” as many cooler bags as possible. I told the team we were going to run a year-long promo that for every $___ a customer spent in our store, they would get a cooler bag for free! It was a really SWEET deal and everyone was stoked. Initially I was bummed because I knew how much those bags costs and I was losing money every time we gave it away for free, but all I could do was try and focus on how happy it made people in that moment.
The hope for our future was, there was 10,000 advertisements out and about at work offices, school cafeterias, picnics, soccer and baseball games, and more! We were bringing peace to our world, one cooler bag at a time. And there were A LOT of them! :p
And what we found was that at the end of 2018, it was one of our best years of sales in the store. I’d like to think it was because of this mistake and the amazing free gift with a minimum purchase. I’ll never know, but I now know to always double check my numbers and be sure I don’t add an extra zero!
erin’s tip:
If you make a mistake, find the lesson learned, the opportunity now, and hope for the future. 10,000 could end up being a good thing. And if YOU have one of these cooler bags, now you now the story. Let it be a reminder that mistakes are part of growth.
