Making that Moolah

As part of starting up a company, you need to put money in to get anywhere. We all know this - it’s nothing new. However, nobody wanted to spend money straight out of their pockets, because we’re students. And you know what that means. We’re broke. You look in our company bank account and you see nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero. And that’s kind of a moral bummer for the team.

So I thought, wait a second, light-bulb moment - fundraise. We had about 5 meetings after school, in winter, in England, where it gets dark at 4pm, on the what, where, when and how (you already know the why). And then inspiration struck - food. Why hadn’t I thought of that sooner? I mean, who doesn’t like to eat? We’d sell around school (because going to an all-girls school we know how much we can eat), we needed the money as soon as possible (we need moolah baby) and we’d raise the money by going around at break and lunch waving junk food under people’s noses (and being all around kind of annoying).

So we did that. We bought chocolates, crisps, cookies, all the junk that you could imagine and that teenage girls would flock to. Selling can be quite easy if you know a few tricks. Know who you are selling to and what they want. I know my school and the students in it; we are quite a small school. Every year students complain about the school canteen’s prices and options, but nothing ever changes. So I just thought, why not give the overworked student body of my school what they want?

Keep a relaxed, friendly and approachable air around you. Smile, keep your body language casual, start a conversation. They’re more likely to buy something off you than if you try to force it on them in a hurry. People were actually more likely to buy more than what they originally wanted.

Keep the price of the things you are selling higher than you originally would sell them at, but not insanely high. If people buy at that price, great! But you can also do offers for them. This makes them feel special or that they got a good deal, making them more likely to buy your products.

I quickly found the cookies were doing the best, selling out at break or within the first 5 minutes of lunch. So we restocked focusing on them, buying chocolate chip, double chocolate and white chocolate cookies. The money was rolling in and it didn’t seem that hard to sell them. We had raised around £100 in the first couple of days of selling.

We should have known it wouldn’t last. We got an email from the head teacher stating how we could no longer sell in school because we were ‘competing’ with the school canteen. I mean sure our selling point for the cookies were that you could get bigger, not rock solid, cookies for less money. But everything else we sold wasn’t being sold in the canteen. It wasn’t really our fault people bought from us and not the canteen, if they sold things that students wanted, people wouldn’t have bought from us. However, we were told to stop selling at the school.

But did that stop us? No. I started selling from my coat pocket: the chocolate and sweets in one coat pocket, the money in the other, trying to sell everything before any teachers would see. Reminding them not to tell. But after a few days it was getting too hard, the teachers were coming out of the staff room, and we couldn’t trust that nobody would talk. So we had to stop, and it was back to the drawing board brainstorming ideas on how we could make more money.