“Where did you get this guy!?”-Tales from National Stationery Show 2015

It was 5:00 AM. My wife, not very happy about waking up just to wake me up(I am a heavy sleeper) kicks me out of bed and I am off!

Showered, shaved, clean dressed. I was on a mission. A mission to sell!

This was the first show that the Baron Fig team was doing together and it was exciting and nerve wracking. I had to be in Queens at 6:30 AM to load up the car and get over to Jacob Javits Convention Center.

You see, we do a lot of things all at once. While 99.9% of the booths were setup on Saturday we were one of the last ones to setup. We also were one of the more quickly thrown together booths(this is what happens when you have a small team doing tons of things at once!).

It looked good, but we all knew it wasn’t perfect. It was something we would need to expand upon with time.

So there we stood, four dudes(our female CFO didn’t start until the following day) in a cramped booth while other booths had 1–2 people and were either girls or a mix of guys and girls.

As people walked by and barely looked at our booth or looked and the minute we said hello scampered off, I knew we had a problem. I told the rest of the team to take a walk and let me see if I can figure out a strategy. The last thing I wanted was to bombard people and scare them off!

After about 45 minutes of minimal hits one of the Co-Founders came back. We chatted a bit about what I was doing, what wasn’t working and we decided to change the booth a bit and to do something different than everyone else. Give away our Apprentice notebook for free!

Let me repeat that. We gave away free notebooks. Not only did we give away free notebooks. We did it with a boyish ‘boys will be boys’ style.

I literally stood in the middle of the four corners(we had a corner booth) holding notebooks going “Whoooo wants a free notebook! How do you say no to a free notebook?! I don’t know anyone who says no to a free notebook!”

I would even catch a brief glimpse of a person’s name on their name badge and add that in! “Jason wants a free notebook!” “Adam couldn’t say no to a free notebook!”

The glares from the exhibitors around us felt seething. Some chatted friendly with us but others took a few days to warm up to our tone.

Our idea could have gone 1 of 2 ways. We were either going to flop and flop hard by turning people off of the books and the brand or we were going to knock it out of the park.

Judging by the stacks of business cards I walked away with, people coming up to us asking what sales experience I had or “where I came from” and the one job offer I received at the show I think we knocked it out of the park.

Time will tell!