How Full is Your Hopper?

I have this really cool old fashioned popcorn cart in my living room. I bought it a few years ago when I was thumbing through a Sky Mall catalog on a red-eye flight home from Vegas. It’s gorgeous, big and red, stands on its own, and makes really good popcorn.

There’s only one thing wrong with it:
It doesn’t make any popcorn unless you put popcorn kernels into the hopper.
Plus, you have to keep buying popcorn.
The nerve.

So, what do you have in your hopper? 

Every business has the proverbial hopper. Maybe you’re making the same assumption when it comes to wondering why you’re ready to roll, and business feels slow, or nothing is happening. Hey, that’s not right! After all, you put all this time into it, invested in samples, bought even more samples, perhaps you were a top seller, had a great past season, and/or a long list of reasons justifying why you got a cart and nothing is popping.

If you don’t keep loading your hopper with prospective business leads, nothing is going to pop no matter how bright and shiny your products are, and no matter what your past sales history!

Bad news: kernels don’t jump into the hopper by themselves, no matter how much you think they “should.”

Good news: business leads don’t all have to be new! Business is all around you, people you know, the people they know, people you’ve done business with, old hostesses, old customers, home party cancellations, postponements—stop waiting for the kernels to jump in by themselves and gather them instead.

Bottom line:
Concentrate on filling up your hopper, and keeping it full. The more you have in there, the more likely something will pop!

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