Marketer of the Month

Please pardon this little detour into a little fatherly pride…

As many of you know, in addition to my day job of irritating liberals I’m also a marketing consultant to small businesses.  As such, I’ve been driving down to San Diego once a month to attend a marketing meet-up of usually 50-60 small business owners hosted by my marketing “coach,” Henry Evans, author of The Hour-a-Day Entrepreneur.

Each month, three or four of those business owners give a 3-minute presentation outlining a new product or service or marketing campaign they launched over the previous 30 days.  After watching and listening to the presentations, the rest of us vote for Marketer of the Month.

And I’m proud to say I’m a two-time award-winner myself.

Anyway, I’ve been taking my eldest daughter, Kristen, with me for the last year or so as part of her homeschooling education – and believe me, she’s probably learned more in these meetings about how to market and sell a product or service than most marketing majors in most colleges and universities in four years.

And yesterday, her 15^th birthday, Kristen entered the Marketer of the Month competition.

She and her friend Mindy are trying to raised $7,500 each to participate in a 7-country European educational tour this summer as Student Ambassadors with the People to People organization.  And together the three of us developed a fundraising package to help them get sponsors.

It’s pretty unique, and the “backpack” theme of the package was all Kristen’s idea – though I did help with the copywriting and will be billing her for my services! :)

Last night Kristen became the youngest person ever to compete in the competition. And although she didn’t win (I’ll be sending Tonya Harding to the winner’s home this weekend!), I gotta give me kid a lot of credit for showing no fear, capably making her first public sales presentation in front of a bunch of seasoned business owners, and overall doing a fine job her first time out.