From Living In a Van To Balling In Brooklyn, Meet Parker Olson

Why He Left The Retail Food Company He Founded and How He's Reinventing Himself

Author

Wes Schaeffer
October 20, 2023

Professional Sales Tips you'll learn today on The Sales Podcast ...

  • Young entrepreneur who met a guy in college who was leveraging Twitter to grow, and Parker offered him “all of my savings” ($3,216) to learn.

  • Hated work after college.

  • He went vegan for 30 days and rotated through different diets for 18 months and documented his findings.

  • Started a food company and fell in love with sales.

  • “How do you sell granola mushrooms?”

  • Most people cook mushrooms incorrectly. You’re supposed to pan-fry them on low heat until they shed the water, then you add butter or oil.

Related episodes and posts

  • He built a podcast tool when he was at Forij.

  • Grocery stores have thousands of brands, and they all must fight for space, and many stores only make changes annually.

  • iOS hurt their DTC (direct-to-consumer) model.

  • He was focused on the distributor model.

  • These grocery buyers have different titles for the buyers across the nation.

  • It’s hard to get in front of decision-makers in a saturated space.

  • He bought a 1995 vintage pop-up van and branded it, and drove around the country in late 2021/early 2022.

  • Content is still king. Get top-of-mind.

  • He was posting on LinkedIn daily.

  • You must exist in someone’s world, which is mostly digital now.

  • He’s seeing ghostwriters popping up a lot.

  • Be a real human to your network.

  • Uses Click-Up to manage his network connections.

  • Be consistent in connecting.

  • Stay organized.

  • As he was traveling on his roadshow, he did things on the fly as he got inspired.

  • Most people respect the hustle.

  • He’d pitch his products on plane flights and swim out to kayakers and record it.

  • “Oh, I can’t do that.”

  • “Please Date My Daughters”

  • Margins are trash in retail, and he didn’t really know what he was getting into.

  • He got interested in podcasting. He lived in a tent for two years while his bedroom was used for storage.

  • It was hard connecting with podcast hosts.

  • So he built a podcast-booking tool.

  • It’s a web-scraper that goes into an AI model, crosses that with his backstory, and creates custom outreach copy.

  • His friends asked for his help, and he started charging.

  • Majored in finance and went into consulting, so he’s not a techie by trade.

  • He had experienced people sharing their time with him because he was genuine and authentic.

  • What are you really afraid of? What’s the worst that can happen?

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