Only Mexicans go to Taco Bell
After a brief negotiation period, many renditions of a business plan and answering a plethora of mundane question, I reached a tentative agreement with the private equity group that wished to purchase the healthy lifestyle frozen pizza brand I had developed. The equity group had recently purchased a pizza manufacturing facility from a larger consumer packaged goods company and was looking to find an opening into the frozen pizza category. They currently only sold through the refrigerated meat and deli categories and wanted a piece of the much larger and lucrative frozen pizza category.
Welcome to Fantasy Island!
Me and my Shadow, were scheduled to meet up with Eric, the company’s northeast regional sales manager; a truly kind, smart, hardworking guy from Boston for some planning and several retail grocery appointments. The day before our retail meetings, my shadow thought it would be a good use of time for us to sit in the lobby of the hotel to work on sales projections for the new pizza instead of the prudent practice of conducting store checks. Store checks are the practice of visiting as many stores in a retail chain as possible to familiarize yourself with the product mix, merchandising and other specifics of the retailer that you are going to call on the next day. In other words, be prepared to have an intelligent conversation with the retailer.
When You See the Southern Cross for the First Time
I still had that dull headache from dehydration and sleep deprivation when I boarded the afternoon flight to Launceston, Tasmania. We had arrived in Melbourne from Los Angeles one-day prior and even though I had the chance to swim off some of the kinks in my back from the long flight at the Balgownie Estate pool, the fog of jet lag made everything seem surreal. Just a couple of weeks prior to my departure if you had told me I would be travelling to Tasmania with Jack Hanna’s Into the Wild film crew I would have thought you had lost your mind. Read more
