Written in 2014.
My daughters once again outdid themselves selling cookies this year. Between them they sold 7,195 boxes, including gluten-free ones that didn’t count toward their official totals. One sold 6,115; her official total was 4,750. The other sold “only” 1,080. They both passed a lifetime 10,000 boxes this year.
Beyond my own daughters, several other girls in the troop passed 1,000 boxes, as did a number of girls from other troops who sold with us. Not everyone who sells with us reaches 1,000 — but if a girl and her parents are willing to put the time in, I’ll work with them to get there.
So what do I do differently that produces those numbers consistently, across girls who aren’t mine?
What takes it to the next level
- Find out what each girl is actually trying to achieve. A trip to Europe? Savannah? To sell a lot, or not much at all? The answer changes everything that follows.
- Cookies are available for the whole season. If a girl wants to pick up stock in the final week, we still have stock. An enormous number of troops effectively stop after the first weekend or two because managing inventory is a nuisance.
- Offer a wide range of booth options. We find businesses that will let us set up outside for the entire season, and we run booths seven days a week.
- Book the booths through a shared signup — my troops first, then any other girl who wants to sell with us. Nothing is worse than surrendering a good booth halfway through the season because you couldn’t staff it.
- Credit visiting girls properly. Boxes transfer back to their own troop and their cookie manager gets the money and the donations that belong to them.
- Let girls set their own goals. Sell if you want to. Don’t if you don’t. Both are fine.
- Explain how the troop bonuses work and what the troop average has to be to trigger each one.
- Show them exactly how much they make per box.
- Explain every prize tier in full, including the alternate structures that kick in at higher volumes and what those points can be exchanged for.
- Get parents finding and securing new booth locations.
- Count cookies, money and tally sheets together every Sunday night.
- Keep a spreadsheet updated weekly, so every girl knows exactly where she stands at any point.
It isn’t about one person selling a lot. It’s about helping more girls sell more, and learn the skills — inventory management, cash handling, marketing, sales technique, goal setting, tracking their own progress. They also get extremely fast at loading and unloading a car.
What that list actually is
Reading it back, that isn’t a cookie strategy. It’s a sales organisation, and a better-run one than most small businesses manage.
Every item maps onto something a company either does or wishes it did:
Individual motivation, established first. Asking what each girl is working toward is the thing most sales management skips. Targets get set centrally and applied uniformly, and then people are surprised that the same incentive produces wildly different effort. Someone saving for a specific trip behaves completely differently from someone who is participating because their friend is.
Supply continuity as competitive advantage. Most troops run out or stop bothering. Staying stocked for the whole season isn’t clever, it’s just persistent — and it captures all the demand that arrives after everyone else has gone home. The business equivalent is being reachable in August, or answering the phone in the week between Christmas and New Year.
Fixed, repeated distribution points. The same locations, every day, all season. Customers learn where to find you. This is the least glamorous marketing strategy available and it reliably beats cleverer ones.
Transparent unit economics. Showing girls exactly what they earn per box is more radical than it sounds. A remarkable number of salespeople in real companies cannot tell you what they make on a deal, or what the business makes. People optimise for what they can see.
Complete incentive information. Not just the headline prize — every tier, every threshold, what each is worth. Partial information produces people aiming at the wrong thing.
A weekly cadence with a physical ritual. Sunday night, everyone counting together. It’s reconciliation, but it’s also the thing that makes the numbers real and shared.
Visible standings, updated weekly. Every girl knows where she is. Most employees have no idea how they’re tracking against anything until someone tells them, usually too late to change it.
And a genuinely non-zero-sum stance. Girls from other troops sell at our booths and the credit goes back to their troops. That looks like generosity. It’s also why we can staff booths seven days a week, which is why the numbers are what they are.
The part that transfers best
If I had to pick one thing from that list for a business owner, it would be the combination of transparent economics and visible standings.
Most small businesses have neither. People don’t know what the company makes on their work, and they don’t know how they’re doing until a review. Then owners wonder why there’s no urgency.
Girls aged nine to sixteen, given both, sell thousands of boxes of biscuits in a few weeks. It isn’t that they’re unusually motivated. It’s that someone bothered to tell them how the system works and where they stood in it.
In short, it’s more about learning business and life skills than about the cookies. But if you want to sell a lot, I’m happy to mentor you.
