Congratulations to us!
 
As you know, our Rite Aid meeting was this past Friday and it took me all day yesterday to "recover" from a rough plane ride coupled with being under the weather a tad. 
 
Now that I have a little energy, I decided not to wait until tomorrow to give you the nitty-gritty on how the meeting went.
 
The meeting was about 20 minutes long but it seemed like we were there forever and a day. We met with the buyer who handles the "health supplement" category.  Her name is Diane.  Nice lady.
 
At first I thought she wasn't really interested in taking a male enhancement supplement intoRite Aid until I realized that she could really care less what the hell the product is as long as it has a high mark-up and isn't offensive to their customers.
 
I will tell you...one day (soon) when you get your opportunity to pitch to a buyer at a nationwide chain, you'll have to (1) know the inside and out of your product, (2) sell them on why your product is different than others like it, and (3) negotiate contract points from terms to cost per unit.
 
There's good and bad in everything...even things that seem "good."
 
How can getting a multi-million-dollar contract/order from Rite Aid be bad?
 
When any large company wants Net 120 terms, that's bad.  That means they'd get a ton of our product and not have to pay for it for 4 months.
 
And guess what that requires?
 
Yep, you guessed it.  Kick-ass business credit where we could "float" them these ridiculous terms.
 
And I'm not willing to do that.
 
The other thing Rite Aid (and others like it including Walgreens and CVS) wants is a national advertising campaign, usually in the form of nationwide television commercials.
 
And I'm not doing that either.
 
Been there, done that with television commercials and it's just not an effective means of marketing.
 
The good news is that they want our product in as "strips" meaning that we will put our product on a plastic hanging strip of 10 - 12 packages and they want to put it in the "men's grooming" or "child/parent planning" department.  (I'm guessing that's where they sell condoms and the like.)
 
This will require no national marketing/commercials on our part which is exactly what I wanted.
 
So...was this meeting successful?
 
I would say so...since we will be putting our product in sometime next year in the form of "plastic strips" rather than how we originally intended.
 
When it comes to large chain stores, you can't "bow down" to what they'd like you to do.  As with Rite Aid and everybody else, they want you to advertise their store for them.  They want you to pay big marketing bucks to drive people into their store.
 
So if I had a Trim Spa type of product with an Anna Nicole Smith and I did national commercials, they would have taken us instantly.
 
This is why I like doing things "small" using my "drug dealer plan," which I explained at my most recent 2-day boot camp seminar.  You don't need to go nationwide with a product and go into extreme debt putting out commercials, floating Net 120 terms, and buying boatloads of raw materials that you have to package when you can stay small scale and rake in $100,000 net per month.
 
And if you need more money than that then we have a problem with your financial management skills.
 
Also, I should mention that once one chain Rite Aid takes us in with the plastic strips, the rest are a piece of cake.  We'll have Walgreens and CVS by the end of next year.
 
Did we do a lot of "work" to get here?  No.  Did we have "connections" to pull this off?  Absolutely none.
 
We just picked up the phone and made some calls.  Then we sent our product sample in upon their request.  It was no more difficult than that.
 
Okay, I'm going to take a nap now.  Now that I think about it, we've really kicked ass in the past year on this project.  Time to rest a little.
 
See you at the top!
 
Your mentor,
 
Monica Main
www.MonicaMain.com