Introduction
Before I was able to start college I had to fix the company my mother owned, as it was losing money and in danger of going out of business. In my narrative essay, I explain how I struggled to keep the company afloat and how my efforts helped to keep my mother’s business away from bankruptcy and back into profit.
Body
During my time prior to starting college, I was tasked with making or breaking my mother’s company. She was trying her best, but she was driving my grandfather’s firm into the ground. I only had the time between finishing High School and starting college to help the company. I took a year out to give myself more time, but it was still tough.
The company he left her was a pewter jewelry and novelty item company. It was a form of nickel-free hypoallergenic pewter that was used to make fashion jewelry, pins, cufflinks, and a whole host of other novelty items you may find at tourist spots.
My first thought on how to rescue the company was to start selling the pieces myself. The people the company sold to were shops, market stalls and online vendors. They got the products at a wholesale price and sold them on for a profit, but the number of customers had dwindled to the point where my mother’s company was no longer turning a profit.
I tried selling them on market stalls and at car-boot sales, and even though people were interested in the lovely designs, I made few sales. I then tried online selling but my website turned no business and the other online traders were selling on places like eBay and taking away any chance I had of selling on eBay myself.
I designed a web spider that used Google to mine email addresses. After two days, it compiled a list of almost two thousand email addresses that may have had an interest in my products. I spammed them with emails but only made one sale to a donkey sanctuary in Scotland in the UK.
After such dramatic losses from my sales efforts both online and offline, I took a job at a local supermarket chain in the administrative offices. Fixing my mother’s business was still on my mind, and at one point I gained unauthorized access to the systems that communicated with the other companies the supermarket owned–one of which was a small mall.
I emailed a suggestion to a senior executive about selling my mother’s products in a novelty shop and cut through a lot of red tape in order to gain an interview with the purchasing department head. She finally, after the interview and three weeks of phone calls, agreed to start selling the pewter in the shop. My mother’s company used the profit from repeated sales to make a more effective marketing campaign and the company was saved.
Conclusion
I believe my success through such a struggle came because the idea of success was always on my mind. At no time did I think that I was going to fail, and all of my waking thoughts revolved around getting my mother’s company back on its feet. I succeeded through the fact that I never believed I would fail.
