This Maryland girl is headed to a meat festival with great music and the Cheers lyrics on her mind

Photo credit Matthew Paulsen

My Montana trip has been peppered with opportunities to support the Old Salt Co-Op, primarily for the Festival, but also with other facets of the organization. I have spent a few dinner hours getting to know not only the Old Salt team, but also their customers as I circulated among them to promote the Festival.

It's funny how opportunities pop up. Last Saturday I met Matt Paulsen, a local marketing entrepreneur and photographer,  to have some professional photos taken for my marketing purposes and he invited me to the Helena Young Professionals (HYP) networking social that followed our session. On my way to the social I popped into The Union, grabbed a stack of Old Salt Festival postcards and arrived at the HYP social ready to share the event details. The Festival was a great talking point as most of the attendees had some knowledge of the event, or at least the two sister restaurants in town, and welcomed learning more.

The New York Times featured an article about Old Salt Co-Op, an organization of four Montana ranches setting out to encourage Montana residents to buy meat that was both raised on local Montana ranches, and also processed locally. In this article titled "Montana Has More Cows Than People. Why Are Locals Eating Beef From Brazil?", Helena, MT resident and NYT writer Susan Shain (June 13, 2024)  wrote "Even here, in a state with nearly twice as many cows as people, only around 1 percent of the beef purchased by Montana households is raised and processed locally, according to estimates from Highland Economics, a consulting firm."   

The press had the welcome effect of boosting online meat orders. Hopefully these new customers will turn into repeat customers and sales will continue to grow. It is exciting to see the efforts of this start-up business gain traction and, with it, a following of supporters of their regenerative agriculture practices.  The Old Salt Team really runs their operation with Cheers-style ("Where everybody knows your name and they're always glad you came...") warmth evidenced by the all-hands response to get the new orders out in a timely manner that included handwritten notes from the Old Salt president and co-founder, Cole Mannix, that are sure to strengthen the connection.

This blog post is part of a series documenting my trip to Montana where I am performing non-traditional executive and personal assistant services with creativity, humor and through strategic relationship-building.  Please contact me to discuss how I can help you expand your bandwidth with fractional lifestyle management.

Comments

  1. AnonymousJune 21, 2024 at 11:31 AM

    Networking is definitely one of your superpowers. Glad you had the opportunity to make a difference.

    ReplyDelete

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