Madeline the Sales Rep

(To listen to an audio recording of Bill Farquharson reading his latest blog post, click the embedded player or download the linked mpg3 file.)

A lot of my back-office work is done by my 15-year-old daughter Madeline. She does the work that I can’t stand to do and it gives me an excuse to give her $100 a month, which she generally has already spent or borrowed by the time I get around to giving her a check. Most of the work requires only 5-10 minutes a day and it involves entering the daily check-in information from my various training programs.

Every once in a while, I have a special project that Madi accomplishes while sitting in front of the TV and helps her to save up for her various planed purchases or trips (such as the trip to Paris that she is currently taking in June). Until recently, I paid Madi per hour for these projects and she labored through the work without showing a great deal of enthusiasm, so I had to constantly ask her, “Did you get it done yet?”

This week, however, I decided to give Madi a new project and test her sales skills. This week, I promoted her to Sales Rep.

OMG, what a difference!

The task was to promote my new “It’s About Time!” training program. I gave her a list of 577 clients and she was to send each one of them an individually crafted e-mail, telling them about the program and encouraging them to sign up. Instead of paying her by the hour, this time I paid her handsomely for each person she could convince to sign up.

Like I said: OMG, what a difference!

It took Madi exactly 10 seconds to do the math and understand that she could make some serious coin if she could get 10 or 20 people to enroll. Every 10 minutes after that, I’d get an e-mail update or a new idea for what else we could do to sell this program, or a message that read, “How many have signed up?”