~by Haley Lynn Gray~
For several years I was a troop leader to three Girl Scout troops at once. My biggest job across all three was being the cookie mom.
One year, I had 48 girls who sold a combined 22,000 boxes of Girl Scout Cookies. That’s a real operation — ordering, inventory, deliveries, money, and a lot of very excited children.
But that isn’t the strangest thing I’ve done with my MBA.
The stranded cookies
That year, a new gluten-free flavour came out. Plenty of troops ordered it enthusiastically — and then discovered it wasn’t selling.
Some of them had effectively marooned themselves. They owed more to their council for unsold cookies than they were ever going to make in troop profits. For a group of girls who’d worked hard all season, that’s a genuinely miserable outcome.
So I stepped in and took their leftover gluten-free cookies as a transfer.
That meant I then had to sell large quantities of a flavour other troops were really struggling with. I took in about 70 cases in total — including 24 cases from one troop, and 50 from another troop two hours away.
In less than two weeks, I’d shipped more than 50 cases to other Girl Scout troops all across the country. The post office started to wonder what exactly was going on at our house.
And every single case sold. No troop was left stuck with them.
What it taught me about business
It turned out to be one of the most useful business exercises I’ve ever done.
Inventory is risk. The troops that got stuck ordered based on excitement, not demand. Every unsold case was money tied up in something nobody wanted yet. It’s exactly the same in any business that holds stock.
The problem is usually distribution, not the product. The cookies were fine. They were just in the wrong place. Somewhere, other troops had customers who wanted gluten-free cookies and couldn’t get them. My job was simply to connect the supply to the demand.
Solving someone else’s problem is a business model. Those troops had a painful problem. Taking it off their hands was valuable to them — which is really all a business is. Find people with a problem, and solve it better than anyone else will.
Persistence sells. Seventy cases don’t move on one phone call. It took follow-up, asking again, and not giving up when the first few people said no. Most sales are really persistence, and cookie season teaches that faster than any sales course.
Sales is a skill, not a personality. Watching 48 girls learn to sell — most of them nervous at first — is a reminder that nobody is born good at it. You get better by doing it, a little braver each time.
Why I did it
I stepped in to be a sister to every Girl Scout, because I could. I understood what needed to happen: the cookies had to go. And if they hadn’t sold, they’d have gone to a local food ministry rather than leaving any troop stuck with them.
Problem solved. And an MBA put to work in a way my professors never imagined.
Here’s more on what leading Girl Scout troops taught me about leadership.
