bread + butter business report #2

We held our 3rd bread + butter business meeting on Friday night. Emma arrived with an agenda, and did a great job of keeping everyone on topic and moving the discussion along. We are finding that this is very important, as we always have a lot to talk about, but the kids (and some of the adults) have very short attention spans. One member of the O’Rourke family, who shall remain nameless, actually hangs upside down from her chair, with her ponytail touching the kitchen floor during certain parts of these meetings. Here are the highlights:

Sue reported that at the end of our second week, the blog had close to 800 visitors and over 1,800 page views, and we are starting to see some sales. The fitted cap sleeve T-shirt is our most popular product so far. We see spikes in activity when we send out email blasts and post messages on facebook, which we started this week.

What we learned during week 2:

Katie – You have to think carefully about how you promote the business (i.e. when you start promoting, you want to have good results to report and that can be tough when you are just getting started like we are).
Emma – It’s fun to work as a family because everyone is good at something and you can focus on what you’re good at.
Sue – Web activity relates directly to our outreach efforts, but more hits do not necessarily translate into more sales.
Tom – facebook will be a powerful tool for us, but we need to figure out how to use it most effectively.

What we need to focus on during week 3:

Formalizing our mission statement for the bread + butter project and developing crisper messaging; Registering bread + butter as a business (completed on Saturday – see video); Finding and opening a free or low cost business checking account to process donations and keep our finances in order; Additional outreach and decisions on food pantry partners in each New England state in time for expansion at end of October; Research how to submit a video to iCarly website; Research submission to NBC/American Express Shine a Light grant program for small businesses; Send a bread + butter T-shirt to Ashley Tisdale (does anyone know her size?); Make the gift card PDF that we talked about last week that nobody made

Thanks to our bread + butter supporters:

We have many people to thank this week, including Sue’s cousin Tina for help with making our logo into a Vector File; Katie at the Daily News for writing a great article about our project; Katie at Box and Bow for helping promote our project at her store; Our friend Bob, who referred us to a lawyer friend of his for questions about trademarks and copyright.

Stay tuned and keep spreading the word.

-Tom


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