Today was day 5 of 8 of Operation Get Profitable (OGP) where I visit 10 salons a day for 8 days.
Today (Tuesday) involved a couple special challenges. First, I had had a long list of time-sensitive things to do yesterday, and since most salons are closed on Mondays, those are my days to do whatever non-sales work needs to be done. Unfortunately yesterday my 5 month-old son was sick and I had to keep him home from daycare, meaning zero to-do items got crossed out. This list of things included things like “fix highly visible bug” and “fulfill promise to existing customer”, so I can’t really justify putting four days of sales work ahead of these things in the priorities.
Another challenge was that I woke up with my son at about 4:45 this morning and didn’t go back to sleep, and since I’m a total baby, I can’t operate like that and I knew I would eventually need a nap.
I might have chosen to take today to do my coding work, but one of my car’s front wheels has been making this disconcerting buzzing sound which I suspect to be a bearing, which I understand can be dangerous if not fixed, so I have to take my car in on Wednesday to have that looked at. This means Wednesday is probably mostly shot sales-wise, so I might as well use that day for coding. So I decided to use today for sales. I feel like this stuff is all just excuses not to do the scary sales work and I’m being irresponsible, but I guess the actual responsible thing to do is to get my car fixed and not kill me and my kids, so intellectually I know I’m prioritizing things correctly but my gut tells me I’m stupid and lazy. Fuck you, gut!
Luckily for me, I did my visit planning last Friday, so today I didn’t have to spend any time or effort thinking about where to go. I visited Rockford and Sparta, Michigan, and hit a total of 5 salons before I felt like I was out of places to go (some of the places on my list were closed, out of business, or just obviously too small), and at that point I came back home and took a nap.
By the time I had taken a nap and eaten lunch and everything, it was about 2pm. Oh yeah, another thing that fucked with my day today was that I had to fix a flat tire on my bike because tomorrow when I drop my car off at the shop I’m going to have to have my bike available so I’m not stuck twiddling my thumbs at the shop all day. So as much as I didn’t want to have to fuck with fixing my bike tire today, I had to do it. Unfortunately I had bought the wrong size inner tubes and I had to go back to the bike shop and get the right ones (after furiously trying to finagle a too-small tube onto my rim for about 20 minutes like a pathetic idiot), and that ate up, I don’t know, about a billion years of my time. By the time that was all over it was too late to do any more sales, so I just coded the rest of the day, and wrote this blog post.
So today was somewhat angrier and less productive than normal, but hey! These last 5 days of sales have en masse been more productive sales-wise than any 5-day period in Snip history, so I don’t feel too terrible about it.