Piggy Banking Lessons from Thin Mint$

IN THIS ISSUE

The lesson you need to learn from Girl Scouts
What is piggy banking and how you can piggyback on others to do it
The 3Ps to look for when piggy banking
Building your own digital pig
Buying as many Thin Mints as you can stand

My wife and I went out to eat this week and were greeted at the entrance by a couple of Girl Scouts who had set up shop to sell their cookies.

You see it every year, but we all overlook what’s going on there. It’s a lesson that, if transferred to a different context and maybe slightly tweaked, could make you some money in the digital world.

The Lesson

If we first look at the restaurant, what you see is a steady parade of people visiting to pay premium prices for a meal. I say “premium” only to suggest they’re paying more there than what they’d pay if they ate at home.

So what we know about them is that they are food buyers. That’s important!

Girl Scout cookies are food. And they are also complementary food when you’ve just had dinner.

When you encounter a parade of buyers, it’s interesting to consider what else you could sell them if you could engineer an opportunity.

That’s one thing that’s going on here.

The Flow

As I mentioned in my “Tapping Into Flow” newsletter, it’s important to look for energy that can be tapped into. The restaurant has flow; some times of the day are busier than others. But there is always flow when it is open.

What this means for the Girl Scouts is they can tap into this flow and access those customers.

They don’t have to build their own flow.

Building their own flow is akin to them finding a way to invite people to their own location. Or going door to door.

It seems hard and it is.

Also, whatever flow that they are able to create is not likely to be as “pure”—the people they solicit are unlikely to be recent food buyers.

They also tap into another flow.

The Parent Flow

While it’s not something we saw at the restaurant, I do recall all those years of working in an office and someone’s parents selling me Girl Scout cookies.

There again, those Girl Scouts are tapping into the flow of the business their parents work at. At least at one time, people were guaranteed to be in the office and offered a lot of possibilities for more sales.

It’s not part of the lesson per se, but there’s probably a Law of Reciprocity thing going on with parents and their co-workers that enhances the possibility for sales. This likely makes up for the food buyer factor that restaurants have.

Piggy Banking

So far, we’ve talked about the “parade” of people buying the “product” of Girl Scout cookies. And the “process” of connecting those two was simply posting up at the restaurant and displaying the boxes. The established brand and history guarantee the cookies nearly sell themselves.

The 3 Ps, you could say.

The Girl Scouts didn’t create the parade, the product, or the process.

And yet, you know the Girl Scouts are raising funds for something.

Do they seem a little bit like affiliate salespeople?

You see a big idea, right? In lieu of creating any or all of the parade, product, or process, you need only find these pieces and assemble them together.

You need only be a sort of alchemist.

Piggy-backing on others can fill your piggy bank!

Your Digital Pig

To make this lesson less abstract and more concrete, I’d like to lay out a repeatable example in the digital world.

One thing about the digital world is that by definition it’s fundamentally just data. And data is easily cloneable.

The Product

So it’s easy to, for instance, take YouTube content and repurpose it for other mediums. And most people would think of taking clips and turning them into shorts, reels, or stories on other social media.

But here’s a different idea.

What if you took that content and repurposed it into book form?

And you arranged to do that for someone else’s YouTube content?

After all, what do you know about making videos? Plus, ain’t nobody got time for that.

The Parade

Where can you find some flow to sell your book?

Amazon has an unstoppable parade, you decide that’s the place.

You turn that book into a Kindle and put it on their marketplace. People will be looking nonstop for books and they’ll find yours. Sales are inevitable.

It seems like there’s no process to talk about, but the process is where the fun part is.

The Process

What I didn’t point out is you made a deal with the YouTuber to build and operate a landing page site for the book to reference.

You can easily do this with Carrd or a simple WordPress site.

Your reason for doing this is to create a tap into the reader parade for the book. Your goal is to establish a relationship with them to get the right to make offers to them on the back end.

You could also have negotiated a revenue share for the book sales.

You could have paired the YouTuber’s content with a bonus chapter from someone with related content. You charge that other person a fee that covers your costs, but that person also gets a tap into the YouTuber’s reader parade.

Wrapping Up

I want your takeaways to be:

You can recognize parade, product, and process as parts of a deal
You can own any of them or none of them
You must somehow get or influence control to tie them together
You are a deal alchemist limited only by your imagination and energy.

Each deal you create is a digital asset.

It’s a tap that enables you to get paid over a potentially long period of time.

Each time you do one of these, you are building intellectual property that you can lease or sell.

As is the focus of this newsletter, it pays to be a digital asset builder.

It’s fun to piggyback and piggy-bank.

Now that you know money is no longer a problem, go out and buy some Thin Mints from a Girl Scout.

— Bill

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