Summer Clearance 50-75% OFF at Little Lords and Ladies !!! Newsletter July 2009

People ask what's the difference between an Entrepreneur and an Employee. You gotta be 50% self-motivated, 50% fearless (or Faith-full!), and 50% crazy.

Here's an absolutely true allegory of what I'm willing to do for you, our customers :-) When I say our store is *not* like other stores and our staff is the best around, I really, sincerely mean it... We're by no means perfect, but we'll do our best for you every time :-)

I received an email from a Brixalot.com customer (my other business of LEGO Birthday parties :-) on Friday (July 3rd) stating, "Please send address to pay for upcoming event July 6th. Thnx!"

No prob. So I look on my calendar and strangely enough there's no appointment slated for July 6th. OK. My office manager (the amazing Jerrilynn from LLaL's story hour!) just moved to New Mexico (sniffle, sniffle) so she must have missed the entry.

No prob. Calls to the daycare go unanswered, as do emails (holiday weekend, no surprise). OK. I'll search for previous emails with details... Nada. Or search for her name. Zip. Or search for the daycare name, location, date? Nilch. Whammy. Nothing.

No prob. Definitely strange, though. So I get the address of the daycare from her email and leave Sunday night at 11pm (after helping put my boys to bed, developing a mini-Brix Club cirriculum, and loading the car - when else do you think I have time to do these things???), delivering 4 bins of bricks to their doorstep so they'll have it the morning of July 6th. Drive 1.25 hours to Frederick, MD, from Herndon. Finally get to the GPS destination... to find out it's a gate. To a military base. Ft. Detrick, to be exact. And it's now past midnight and it's closed, naturally. Oooookay.

No prob. Drive around to find the only thing open that time of night (thank goodness for Sheetz). The main gate is 1 mile thataway. Thanks. Now it's 1am, I'm driving up to a military base in the middle of the night with 4 unmarked bins of LEGO bricks packed into my Malibu. To say the least, the two Officers were skeptical, at best. After a full car search, pouring out a zillion LEGO bricks from the bins to prove that yes, indeed, they were only filled with more bricks, a gazillion and one questions as to why I wanted to leave 4 unmarked bins outside a kids' daycare, and a call to their Chief Officer who had never heard of a LEGO delivery service, I was turned away. Bottom line: wait till they open at 7!

OK, could be a problem.

It's now 2a.m. Perhaps I have the wrong place? Fire up ye ol' Blackberry and surf the web to confirm... and naturally their website wasn't compatible with Blackberries. Called Charlene (amazing woman I married :-) and have her surf and sure enough, it's on a military base so it's the right location.

To further complicate matters, I have an 8am meeting with my boss and a 9am meeting with a Vice President at Orbital. IF I can get on the base at 6:30 and IF I can make it back home in rush hour traffic to change into work clothes and IF I can make it back to Orbital I'll have no problem.

So that's what I did :-)

Slept in a 24hr McDonalds parking lot for 3.5 hrs, got on base at 6:15 (deliveries are common in the a.m.!!!), delivered by 6:20, got home by 7:40, practically stripped to my skivvies before reaching the front door to change inside, got to Orbital by 7:58, and got to all my meetings.

Piece of Cake :-)

Now imagine what I'm willing to do for our consignment store... What's the diff between Biz people and Employees? Charlene says it best: "Where there's a will, there's a way."

And it helps to be 50% crazy :-)

Brian