Business Tips I Learned from Planning a Baby Shower

After the surprise wore off, the first thing I thought of after my stepdaughter told me she was pregnant was pink sparkly popcorn. I’d seen it online and tucked it away in a corner of my mind, in case I ever needed to throw a baby shower. And now I was! So I ordered 3 gallons of the pink sparkly popcorn. Do you know how much 3 gallons of popcorn is? Neither did I. But it is A LOT of popcorn.

The following week I ordered 50 pre-packaged party favors of fruit punch popcorn. Because apparently I hadn’t learned my lesson, and also it tasted amazing.

The baby shower turned out wonderful. I did a spring carnival theme that knocked everyone’s socks off but cost twice as much as it should have. Worse, I caused myself and my party assistant a huge amount of unnecessary stress. Plus, I am left with a lot of popcorn. A LOT of popcorn.

I did (finally) learn some lessons. These tips will do double duty for your business or your next baby shower.

Create a solid project vision and work backwards.

I started with a ribbon and worked forward. Bad idea. I had no baby shower theme until I saw the ribbon. It had light pink, bright pink, and lime green dots, and it reminded me of a spring carnival. From there I added in every single thing I could think of that had anything to do with carnivals — cotton candy, corn dogs, cupcakes that looked like little buckets of popcorn or sundaes or snowcones, alternating pink and white curtains for a backdrop, a ceiling tent made from plastic tablecloths. That was all fine, but then I got carried away and started adding in everything I saw that would fit into any baby shower — pink butter mints, chalk painted mason jars, towering floral arrangements, “It’s a Girl” mailbox balloons.

Every time I walked into a store to get one thing I spent another $100 buying ALL THE THINGS. My beleaguered assistant finally asked, “Are we doing carnival or floral or shabby chic?”

Takeaway: There is not one right way to set up a project or even your business, but what isn’t going to work is cobbling together multiple pathways that don’t really complement each other. Decide at the beginning of your project what the end result is going to look like, then execute that vision, rather than starting a project and throwing in anything that looks like it might work.

Present your most glamorous product and people will ooh and ahh — and then they will move on to what they actually need.

Hands down, the hit of the party was the popcorn cupcakes. They looked exactly like little buckets of popcorn. Everyone asked about them. They wanted to know if we made them ourselves (yes). They wanted to know if the popcorn was real (no, it’s marshmallows). They stood in front of the cupcake display and whispered to each other about them. And then, almost every guest chose a plain cupcake.

While they were fun to look at, it was too much of an investment to eat a mound of torn-up marshmallows to get to the cupcake. And all anyone really needed was a cupcake.

Takeaway: It’s fine to show off a little, so go ahead and stretch your skills and bask in the compliments. Offer a top-shelf product just to show that you can. There are clients that will be drawn to that, who will feel that you are more professional because you can offer that popcorn cupcake (or your products’ equivalent). Just be prepared to sell them a plain ol’ cupcake once you land them.

Outsource when necessary.

We decided to make our own cake pops and cupcakes. We even did a trial run that went really well. This was a GREAT idea! We felt very resourceful… until 4:00 a.m. It was 10 hours before the shower began, and I couldn’t figure out why the sticks kept coming out of the cake pops.

Also, it was insanely expensive because I don’t routinely make cake pops, so I didn’t have any of the equipment or supplies. I’m too embarrassed to tell you how much 20 cake pops cost me, even if people did rave about them.

Takeaway: If you’re going to incur a huge cost in equipment or training for a one-time project, consider outsourcing to a resource who knows what they’re doing and has the equipment to do it. You’ll save time and money, plus you’ll avoid unnecessary stress.

Make a to-do list. Better yet, make a Gantt chart.

As silly as it sounds, I didn’t make a list until the last day, when I wrote down the remaining missing items. I had promised my assistant I would make a Google doc with task dates for her, but I never did. This meant we spent the last 12 hours before the party (meaning we worked all night) completing simple tasks that could have been spread out over the week (unpacking piles of Amazon boxes, putting together display stands). Some things didn’t get done at all (baby picture display of the expecting parents).

Takeaway: Gantt charts allow you to break a project out into phases and set task dates, which is very helpful when you have numerous people working on one project. If you don’t do a Gantt chart, do something, anything that gets those tasks out of your head with dates assigned to them.

Delegate, delegate, delegate.

While we were doing simple tasks during the last 12 hours, my assistant said, “Even if you didn’t do a list, you could have just texted me and asked me to do some of this. We had plenty of time.” True, I could have — but delegating does not come naturally to me. I usually don’t start delegating until the 11th hour, when I am desperate. The end result was me calling out orders to family members who came to help, a mere hour before the shower started. It all (mostly) got done, but oh the pain.

Takeaway: Delegate early and often. Delegating is not just distributing tasks, it’s also about cutting back on stress and the errors that can happen when people are rushed.

About Kathy

As Editor-in-Chief of How2Conquer, Katherine has over 25 years of experience and ensures our clients get professional editing and top-level design work. Her innate research skills lead her to look everything up (she’s Googling you right now), which is handy for staying up to date on industry trends. Known around the office as She Who Tamed the Google, Katherine can, in fact, find a needle in a haystack. Her guiding principle is: Given five minutes and an Internet connection, I can accomplish anything.