This post is about persistence. After obtaining our bouncer we were both trying different variations of ads, just trying get people interested in renting our bouncer. It wasn’t working; no one was renting. We weren’t even getting likes on our posts. To be perfectly honest, it was pretty discouraging. I know there’s a saying that Rome wasn’t built in a day (and neither was your body, right Tony Horton?) but it seemed like we weren’t making any traction at all. We had one rental lined up after a few months and it was a coworker of Jeff’s. Our ads weren’t generating conversions. A conversion is where a person who sees the ad decides to buy (in our case rent) the product. Jeff and I met and talked over the challenge of getting our bouncer rented. We knew we had to make a move to flip the script and get some traction in our business. This is when Jeff reminded me of an idea he had a few months ago. He wanted to add to our inventory a secret weapon that we can use to up-sell our bouncer and differentiate ourselves from the others. Or it could be used to “sweeten” the deal when renting out the bouncer. What is it you ask? Well, if you guessed cotton candy machine you would’ve been right! I wasn’t keen on investing more money into the business at the time because we hadn’t made that much yet, but I knew at the same time we couldn’t just sit around and hope and pray for things to change so I agreed. Boy, was I glad I did! Getting a cotton candy machine was probably the TSN turning point of our business. Well, one of them at least. It definitely helped fuel the second major hurdle we ran into - creating a successful ad to entice customers to rent from us. I’ll get to that part in a minute.

After doing some research and finding the cheapest and most reliable cotton candy machine, we placed an order for one. We told a few friends and family members about it and we immediately had an order placed for it the same week it was coming in! Also around this time, Jeff showed me the ad (the second factor I mentioned above) that he had been working on for a few days. It was much, much better than any of our earlier ads. I remember reading it the first time and feeling my party wouldn’t be successful unless I had a bouncer (need) and it also made me feel like I had to rent a bouncer soon otherwise someone else would rent it and I would miss out (urgency). Now, I know you’re thinking I’m biased because Jeff is my business partner (and you’d be right to think so) but the proof is in the results: once Jeff started posting his ad that he put alot of thought and based off refinements from earlier ads, the orders started coming in! We were getting fully booked on our weekends and we were having to turn away orders! After 2.5 months we had already made back our initial investment. Now we had to decide: what’s our next move? Should we stay with the one bouncer and ride out the rest of the year or should we do something else to grow the business?

What do you guys think we did? Comment below! One lucky winner gets a 10% discount code from my store The Lazy Shopper . See you all next week and good luck!