“But, lucky for you, now that I’m here for a while, I’m going to make Boys of the Bayou bigger and better than ever.”
“You don’t have to sell us,” Sawyer said. “Anything you do will be more than we’re doing now.”
“Hey,” Maddie protested. “I’ve been doing stuff since I got back. We didn’t even have much of a website when I showed up. And we’ve got alligator cookies and much better t-shirts now.”
Maddie and her husband, Owen, another of Charlie’s cousins, owned Boys of the Bayou with Sawyer, Josh, and Bennett Baxter, Kennedy Landry-Baxter’s husband.
“Great. We can build on all of those ideas,” Charlie told Maddie. “But I have a few other things that we can try while I’m here. And if you hate them, or they don’t work by the time I leave, I’ll take my ideas with me. But if you love them and it’s going great, then I can easily help you guys keep the plan going even when I’m not here.”
Maddie nodded. “Sounds good. I don’t have a lot of time to devote to the stuff anymore because I’m helping with tours since we’re getting busier. Which is a good problem to have.”
Sawyer chuckled. “You love doing the tours,” he said. “We would’ve hired somebody else to do the tours a long time ago or talked Mitch into taking some of them over. You’re the one who wants to keep doing them.”
Maddie grinned. “I really do.”
Charlie nodded. “Then there’s no reason for you to not keep doing them. I love marketing, and I’m great at it, so I am very happy to take this on right now, and we’ll see where we’re at in a couple of months.”
“That’s how long you’re planning to stay?” Sawyer asked. “Just a couple of months?”
Charlie lifted a shoulder. She was officially in take-this-one-day-at-a-time mode. She’d been shopping on Avenue Montaigne just a few days ago and could still taste the socca. After her boss had fired her, she’d simply gotten on a plane, landed in New Orleans, and driven to Autre.
She’d known she could figure things out once she was back on the bayou.
Her short-term plan was to pay off the ten-thousand-dollar paint job.
And to make a better plan.
She was looking for jobs, but until something came along, she was going to work as a veterinary assistant and help build the Boys of the Bayou.
At least she wouldn’t have a gap on her marketing resume.
“So what do you think? New website design? Maybe we add some tote bags to those t-shirts?” Sawyer asked.
Charlie laughed. “Oh, Sawyer, you have no idea what I have in store.”
Sawyer looked at Maddie again, then back to Charlie. “What’s that mean?”
“It’s much easier to show you than just tell you.” Charlie moved behind the front desk and pulled out a large leather portfolio.
She unzipped it and laid it open on the top of the front counter. She had to move a small lamp, a potted plant, and a pencil holder out of the way. She pointed to the first page with a big smile.
Sawyer’s eyes were wide as he took in the bright green, yellow, white, and black graphics that read Boys of the Bayou Marketing Plan.
“When did you have time to do all of that?” he asked, looking at the portfolio like it might bite him. “We just decided to talk about this.” He glanced at Maddie. “Didn’t we?”
She simply shrugged.
“Ellie told me we should talk,” Charlie said. “And it’s a long trip from Paris to New Orleans.” And she’d been in first class with plenty of room and resources to work. She’d simply needed a printer when she’d landed, and those were easy enough to find.
Sawyer and Maddie both still looked a little stunned.
Well, they’d learn to go with it. Charlie was an idea factory. She didn’t need a lot of time to pull concepts together. In fact, they often came in avalanches, flooding her imagination faster than she could write them down.
“Let’s start on page one.” Charlie flipped the first page of the portfolio, showing Maddie and Sawyer the initial new design of their logo. Now that the swamp boat tour company was also taking on the animal park and the otter enclosure, they needed a second logo for the animal portion of the business.
Maddie looked to Tori as if for help.
Tori just grinned and shook her head. “I’m thinking of hiring her for our marketing too.”
Maddie took a deep breath and focused on the portfolio again. “We’re getting a new logo for the Gone Wild stuff?” she asked.
“Yes, to start.” Charlie watched their faces.
Along with being very good at judging how customers responded to marketing ideas, she was also great at reading body language. A lot of times, when she came into the picture, she was the first one to introduce clients to big, exciting marketing plans, and they could get overwhelmed easily. Her cousins were definitely going to fall into that category.
The Boys of the Bayou swamp boat tour company had been started years ago by her grandfather and his best friend, Maddie’s grandfather, Kenny. It had started off as a couple of guys who would take occasional visitors out on the bayou to look around and fish and hunt. They quickly realized that people would pay them for the experience, and it had evolved over the years into a tour company they had passed down to their grandsons.
Sawyer, Josh, Owen, and Maddie’s brother, Tommy, had kept doing what they’d been doing and just slowly built the company off of their reputation as charming, fun guys with a great knowledge and love for the bayou. After Tommy had been killed on the bayou and Maddie had come back to take over her portion of the tour company, things started to evolve.
They had been having some money trouble at that point, and Maddie had brought in another partner, Bennett Baxter, the first non-Landry to ever be involved with the swamp boat tour company. Of course, now he was a pseudo-Landry because he was married to Kennedy, Josh and Sawyer’s sister. So the tour company had definitely stayed in the family.
However, thanks to Bennett’s influx of cash, Maddie’s initial marketing ideas, and just the general enthusiasm the family brought to the company, the business had continued to grow slowly over the past year.
But there was so much potential here. While this wasn’t the big, exciting opportunity that Charlie was looking for in her long-term career, she was excited to help them out.
“While I think some tote bags would be a great addition to the gift shop,” Charlie said, “I think that we can do more. We need to find a way to combine the swamp boat tour company and the animal experiences more intimately.”
“What do you mean by that?” Sawyer asked.
“Well, the otters are probably a little more obvious,” Charlie said. “But we might need to figure out a way to help people understand what llamas have to do with the swamp.”
“Actually, they’re alpacas.”
Charlie turned as Griffin’s voice sounded behind her. For just a second, Charlie lost her train of thought. That never happened when she was talking about marketing plans and doing presentations.
“Right, alpacas.” She gave Griffin a big smile. He’d told her they were alpacas the night they’d been in the barn together.
He frowned.