Bad Idea #5
Author: MillionaireFailureThe 5th best failed business I’ve had is a great one!
Any way the name of my 5th biggest failure is:
Pants Down Advertising!
Tagline: “Where do you go to catch a “captive” audience? You go where their pants are down!”
horrible, I know but I really thought this one had a chance.
The Opportunity!
If you haven’t figured it out, we were advertising in the bathroom. Yes, you walk in, you find an open stall and you sit down and, BAM there it is, the Pants Down Advertising board, a perfectly fitted plastic board mounted to the inside of the stall or over the urinal. This was a great idea; I even invented a plastic board more of a frame that held an 11×17 inch piece of paper perfectly that was used to print the upcoming info for a local college. We basically told the student what was happening in the next two weeks!
I gave a majority of the space to the college for free; in order to sucker them into letting me put these damn boards everywhere and then sold advertising spots to local businesses. I went so far to have a Plastic injection mold made, spent about $25,000 on that part.
The First Sales Pitch!
I had to present to the local College campus board, which was easy I’m a great presenter, no lie, the old ones on the Board hated it, but the Campus Board is run by students, and when they voted, they loved it! I secured a 1 year contract with them and begun put the boards up everywhere.
The FAILURE!
Everything was great… until the first night. The first problem was I didn’t think of telling the janitors, and neither did anyone else, not that I’m blaming anyone, but hey I thought there would have been a memo or something! So the janitors didn’t know I was authorized to put them up so they spent the entire first night taking them all down! Wow, that was a waste of about $500, and a whole day’s worth of my time. You see the problem wasn’t that they took them down; the problem was I didn’t know they had been taken down until one of my advertisers went to see what they were paying me for and there weren’t any ad boards! Holy $h!t! (Sorry for that) I had to rush to the College and find that 100% of the boards had been removed from their place and had been tossed in the garbage the night after!
The FAILURE cont.
I then had to go through meeting after meeting and talk to the facilities manager and then to the janitors to find out what had happened and then reapproach the Board with the janitors concerns, they had some and they were valid, each night they use a pressure washer to clean out each bathroom. Problem was my Boards weren’t water proof, like ok? So I had a choice either redesign them or take them down, or actually not put them back up, so I made the most logical choice, I redesigned them, reproduced the boards and hung them back up! The problem was I had wasted so much time the year was almost up and by the time it came to renew the contract, the College Board choose not to renew the contract.
The MillionaireFailure Lesson:
If your lucky enough to get a signed contract, be ready to perform, and if you fail make up for it with enthusiam and then change quickly and give 110%.
March 10th, 2008 at 10:39 am
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