[Side Note to this blog: Megan’s summer internship ended on July 31, but due to the fact that she was here when this blog series idea began and we LOVED her first job story, we are still sharing this with you. We very much miss Megan, here at Transformation Marketing. She was a fabulous intern and about the sweetest gal you could ever meet! Best of luck with your last year of college, Megan! Keep in touch!]
My first job was a dash of accident, a hefty dose of luck, and partially (read: mostly) due to my insatiable sweet tooth.
Around the age of twelve, I had started helping out my mom at her local coffee and antique furniture shop for the summer. Nothing too laborious, just watching the store while she ran errands or making coffee for people if she was preoccupied. You know, free child labor. In my extraordinary amount of spare time I eventually got into baking cookies. For some strange reason, it was very difficult to find people to consume my mass amounts of black charcoal frisbees. Thank goodness for family – they were ‘happily’ the guinea pigs for my catastrophic cookie creations.
I’m not sure what happened, if it was all the experimentation and practice or some sort of miracle, but I one day suddenly became a cookie baking wonderwoman. When people no longer needed dental work after attempting to consume my cookies, I felt encouraged, began selling them at my mom’s shop, and went on a baking spree. Eventually a woman approached me asking me if I would like to bake her a massive amount of cookies every week for her workplace as well as my mom’s shop. Of course, as a twelve year old that was unable to legally work at a real business, I graciously accepted.
I baked cookies of various sorts for this woman for roughly six months or so, I think. Once school started back up my life was a whirlwind of flour, homework, and pom poms and I could no longer keep track of time or days or months. It was a wonderful, sugar-coma inducing experience. I gained a lot of knowledge and basic skills that have followed me through my employment history and school work.
Things I took away from my cookie baking business:
1. Time Management
Time management became an issue for the first time in my life. I had to start setting aside time each week to buy cookie supplies, bake, and package my goods. This was, and is, a hard lesson to learn. I pulled many late last minute nights baking cookies until I figured out that I just had to manage my time better. Learning time management, for me, also meant learning how to say no. Yes, I would love to do ten thousand fascinating things at once, but I simply cannot. Learning to say no both to others and to myself has been a hard lesson to learn, and it started with baking cookies nine years ago.
2. Packaging
I learned that the packaging of a product is imperative in part of the sales and customer service. Every week, I packaged the cookies as if they were a present, or a gift for this woman who was paying me to make them. I just felt like it made it all around a better and more memorable experience for her and was just more pleasant. The presentation of a product is huge in both making yourself look good and creating something impressionable for your customers.
3. Customer Service
Your relationship with your customer is so valuable. So, so, so valuable. Developing the type of friendly relationship with your customer where they are comfortable telling you what they think you can improve upon and you can explain your process are both important things. While you may not always take the advice of your customer, knowing what their concerns are is very important.
4. A lot about cookies.
I played around with so many different tricks and did so much research on the science of baking cookies. The result was better, higher quality cookies because I spent the time and effort in trying to create a better product for my customers. So basically, if you have any questions about how much flour or what kind of butter to use, I’m your gal. But I learned to use my resources whether that was purely physical experimenting with different ingredients to figure out what did and didn’t work, conversing with other people who loved to bake, or using the world wide web to my advantage. My passionate research infinitely improved my cookies and taught me the value of taking research and learning into your own hands to improve something you care about.
All in all, while I’m glad I’ve moved on from baking cookies fervently every weekend I gained a lot from the experience and it was a wonderful first job to have (: