Case Study How to Get Past a Closed Door

Chris Aldrich, Evolution Foods, tells how you sometimes have to get creative: “We had been trying for two years to get an appointment with the Food Service Manager at the University at Buffalo, the second largest university in New York State with 28,000 students. We could not even get a call through to the FSD on our own. I managed to make a contact with the student leader of the top business fraternity on campus this year, who is also a student representative on the university’s board of dining facilities. This individual was able to secure us an appointment with the FSD.”
“After several meeting with the FSD and the fraternity, we worked out a program in which Evolution Foods would supply SWIRL in all the dining halls on campus. The fraternity is acting as our liaison with each dining hall manager, and is doing samplings and making various marketing efforts to pro-mote the product. We are paying the fraternity a set commission on every case of SWIRL that is sold. The students are already forming a plan to sell the SWIRL program to other universities within their fraternity network.”
“In our case, the Food Service Manager places a high value on the relationship that we have developed with the fraternity as a learning tool. I have since done a two-hour lecture with the fraternity discussing entrepreneurship and our business model, and will continue to work with them as a business partner.”
What a great networking story,
and a win-win for all parties involved!