August 2023 Blog Topic: What was your first sale as a business owner? Share about it. If you are NOT a business owner: Share a time when you supported a small business and the experience.
By Cheryl Clark with Clark Strategies
I am going to divide this up into two stories. Why? Because my first sale as a business owner was so dang long ago – I don’t think I even realized I was in fact in business.
I was working as a taxi dispatcher in Smiths Falls, Ontario (small town, retirement town feeling) and had stopped working for Chrysler, Canada. I had a computer. I had dial-up internet. I had learned so much about HTML, email programs, ICQ, and other geeky things of the time. (It is not lost on me that some of you will be like, “What the heck is HTML and ICQ?” I’m old.) I’ve always been a learner and hope I always am. I found many folks were asking me how do I do this, and how do I do that – during conversations. I knew the answers. (Yay for me!) Before I knew it, I was going into people’s homes and sitting beside them watching them type emails to their grandkids and family members not in the local area. I mean literally watching them painfully one-finger-type a warm hello message, making sure they filled out the “to” field properly, had a connection via dial-up to the internet, and made sure when they hit send the symbol spun until it was gone. My first side gig! I must admit, in reflection, it was neat. Watching mostly elderly folks embrace technology and send simple messages, “Hello. I love you. The weather is nice.” Then they’d sit in awe that a family member was going to get said message on a screen! It was a riot listening to the LAND LINE phone calls of them saying I just sent you something! Boy oh boy.
Story number two is when I knew I was in business for myself, and I knew beyond a doubt it was my livelihood, and I HAD to make money. Funny how that changed the energy. I don’t remember who my first sale was purchased by, nor do I remember many details about the ‘job,’ but I do remember the internal dialogue, though, and to this day I have to say this ‘ghost from the past’ can still surface saying the exact same things it said back around 2006.
Say you take their money, and they don’t like what you do. Oh my gosh! Did you charge too much? Did you charge enough? Are they going to be happy? Can you really do what you said you would do? How will you know if they are happy? Say they are miserable? Then the dialogue of – this amount of money needs to pay this bill and ugh I still have that bill and this financial obligation – how am I ever going to get more clients to pay what I need? Can I really do this? Is this worth it?
I don’t recall what year I learned about mindset, internal dialogue, laws of manifestation, and how the universe works, but THANKFULLY I learned! This ghost of the past can be quickly silenced and starved for attention when I lean into what I know to be true and what I have learned. 17 years later, here I am. 17 years later, still putting one foot in front of the other. 17 years later, still serving clients for the exchange of payment (called a sale). I say it that way intentionally. I don’t go for the sale. I go for serving the client, and, in turn, I get the sale.
We got this.
