Stop Running Bake Sales

My dad taught me something that changed how I think about business.

When I was in elementary school, the PTA decided to raise money for a new building. They did what everyone does: organized a bake sale. Spent a whole week on it. Ordered ingredients. Baked brownies. Reserved tables. Created volunteer schedules. Coordinated shifts. The works.

Homecoming weekend arrives. Parents work the booth all day. Everything goes perfectly. They count the cash at the end.

$1,500.

Days of planning and labor. Dozens of volunteers. Fifteen hundred bucks.

Then my dad picks up the phone. Calls the three largest donors from the last fundraising event.

"Hey, we're building this new building. Can you chip in $10,000?"

"Sure, no problem."

That's $30,000 in three phone calls.

He calls it "bake sale mentality"—the trap of optimizing small, repeatable transactions when one big move would solve everything.

We fall into this constantly in business.

You're grinding on conversion rates. Testing landing pages. Tweaking email sequences. Celebrating when you close three deals in a week instead of two. Meanwhile, there's probably one relationship, one partnership, one conversation that would make all of that irrelevant.

I was talking about that this week.

My podcast co-host Peter is speaking at an event with the Chief Marketing Officer of AppFolio—a publicly traded company in the property management space. Peter runs Crane, a property management community.

He was telling me about his sales, his close rate, the usual stuff. I poked him.

"Why are you worried about converting prospects one by one when you're literally sharing a stage with someone who has direct access to thousands of your ideal customers? What if you spent the next month figuring out how to do one deal with them instead of closing fifty deals the hard way?"

One partnership. One integration. One co-marketing agreement. Problem solved forever.

That's the difference.

Bake sales feel productive. You're doing something. There's activity. There's momentum. You can measure it. But you're still making brownies.

The phone call to the big donor feels scary. What if they say no? What if you're not ready? What if you don't have enough traction yet? So you don't make the call. You make more brownies instead.

Here's what to ask yourself:

Who's the AppFolio in your world? What's the relationship you're not pursuing because you're too busy optimizing the bake sale? What's the one deal that would make your current strategy look quaint?

Stop baking. Pick up the phone.

Yallah Habibi,

Jon

P.S.

this is hands down my FAVORITE review we’ve ever gotten. Five stars, but some CHOICE words for me. It really makes me reexamine my whole strategy.

(Not really. This is who I am.For every one of those I get, I get five of these)

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