Reality Show

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November 10, 2005

Mapquest…causing havoc among potentials.

Alopeciahope: Part 1

About a month after the audition at Jillians, Entrepreneur$, The Reality Show sent me an email stating I had been chosen to attend the call back session and I would be on the “yellow” team. I started doing as much research as I could on Entrepreneur$, the Reality Show, Bob Winstead, www.realserioiusbusiness.com, and any other name I had heard on that first day. I wanted to make sure this was real and not some type of prank. The date of the call back had not been given in the initial email. I contacted the person who sent the email and The Producer, called me back. He was very professional and a compassionate voice came from across the phone. He remembered who I was from the auditions, which gladdened my heart. I asked if he would advise me as to the date of our next meeting because my husband (Dave) and I were to drive to Ohio for vacation. Well, wouldn’t you know that my vacation and the call back date were the same!! Attending the call back or going on vacation was a hard choice. However, Dave and I believed that every opportunity was important if I was serious about becoming one of the final sixteen, and developing my business into a great success.

Dave flew to Ohio the day before my “call back”. Since I had to take him to the airport I decided I would drive the directions I had pulled from www.mappoint.com and www.mapquest.com for Capital Events Center for the meeting the next day. Let me just tell you I was VERY glad that I “tested” the directions. Both mappoint and mapquest were WRONG!! I returned home and researched Capital Events Center more and found a better way for me to get to the site. Had I not made that little exploration the day before, I would have been at least 2 hours late on Saturday.

One of my closest friends, Diane, came to visit me that weekend to celebrate my being part of the call backs for the show. She and I were like two school girls “playing the what if games”. We were also monitoring the weather channel carefully due to Hurricane Bonnie causing major rain in the area and Hurricane Charley was not far behind her. I kept thinking surely The Producer would postpone this meeting. I diligently checked my emails and awaited a phone call about a potential change. Weather reports were telling of locally flooded areas. However, I was determined since I changed my vacation for this … I was going.

Driving the back way to Capital Events Center was no easy undertaking. There was standing water EVERYWHERE. It was raining so hard on Hwy 98 that I could barely see to drive. I left at least 2 hours before I needed to in order to give myself enough time. I did not want to be late. It was a good thing I allowed so much drive because it was needed.

Once I arrived at The Capital Events Center, I did not find many people. More and more people gradually arrived a tad frustrated stating the directions they pulled from mapquest and mappoint were really bad. This meeting was in Raleigh and people I spoke to had driven from Burlington, Atlanta, Sanford, Pittsboro, Greensboro, Fayetteville, Clayton, Chapel Hill and many other areas. Possibly the location was to test our determination as entrepreneurs. If the location was not a test, I am sure the weather was!

Once the lights, cameras, and people were all together…. The action began. We had a great master of ceremonies, and a few instructions from The Producer about what would happen next. We were instructed to move into the rooms with our teams (by colors). I found my way to the room with the yellow team. Our instructions were to decide on a liaison, develop a business plan for this company that was to be called EventsLeader, and gain $1000.00 worth of sponsors for each of us to move forward personally to the final 16.

That Saturday there 300 people called back. My yellow team had 27 people. We started discovering that we had all been close to each other in the line at Jillians. The “Broker” became our yellow team’s liaison. She was dynamic and successful plus she had already had a meeting with The Producer concerning the t-shirt sales so we felt she would be the best person for the position. Over the course of the next month our group dwindled to about 8 active “members’. We met once a week in the beginning and many times a week towards the end of the challenge. The active members on our team were the “Broker”, “Robin”, Nataki Kambon, (business plan writer and web designer), Ty McDuffie (a great marketing person), Micah Fox (a college student and great web designer), Tony Marshall (a college student and great graphic artist), Lisa Ellis (a very successful Raleigh realtor), and me (a project manager by trade with a passion to give hope to others losing their hair).

Our team put forth a lot of effort. We started discovering where our strengths were and how we could use them to function as a team. Knowing that the end result was one winner, we all knew we could be up against each other at the very end. However, a good business uses each person’s strengths. There were doubters in the group and usually ended up making their own choice not to return. Some people felt it took too much time, some people felt it was a scam, others felt they had to put the energy into their own business or job. There were various reasons that our team went from 27 to 8, but those of us who wanted to stay did so. We started researching www.citysearch.com, www.yahoo.com, and www.msn.com to see what our competition was like. We also wanted to make sure we put our competition in our business plan so we could show how we would differ. We had our own website, made our own credit card type of cards to promote EventsLeader, had the graphic artist develop all of our team’s posters, signs, etc. We each took different parts in developing the business plan with the “Broker” doing the financials. As a team we worked together to try and raise funds so each of us could move forward. We had an awesome team, and felt everyone contributed strongly in this “first challenge”. Our team participated in a fall festival in Apex NC where we painted faces and raffled items we had collected (golf tickets, restaurant gift certificates, t-shirts, spa certificates, dolls, and more). It was a chilly windy day that we were there trying to raise money. Not all of our team members could attend, but they gathered many of the raffle items. “Robin” tried hard to get us a space at a Carolina home game in the area where students gather, but campus rules prohibited this for us. We were excited about this possibility and knew it would go well with “Robin” signing autographs. “Robin” also did a radio show during football season and told about the show and our team. Our team did a huge yard sale in Clayton, NC that went fairly well, and we did another Fall Festival in Clayton.

The Fall Festival in Clayton was a REAL experience. The weather had called for rain, rain, and more rain. We wondered if we should meet to do the festival. It was pouring rain at my house in Durham (about an hour away from Clayton). Tony, the graphic artist, was in Virginia at the time and drove two and one half hours to the event that day. Once we were all set up at the festival the rain started pouring. This day became a comedy of errors. Ty came and brought his two girls. We all started huddling in the middle of our tent. The tent covering us, had to be manually held up to force the water out of the middle to prevent a total collapse. We were going to serve frozen drinks, decided to serve coffee but could not plug the electric cord into the generator because there was standing water everywhere!! We even decided to sell rain ponchos, but there was no one attending to buy them!! Around 11:00am all the vendors started packing up. There was no one there to participate. The few of us who attended the Clayton festival bonded together but we made no money. The only thing we each came away with that day was a bad cold and a lot of laughs.

Posted by eventsleader at November 10, 2005 9:36 PM

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Posted by: Caty Tota at June 15, 2006 4:14 AM