N O V A

The past two weeks for us have been very exciting ones. We have officially launched our clothing line, the NOVA Clothing Company. Our first item that we have been selling are our DMV t-shirts, which incorporate the American, Maryland, and Virginia flags representing the DMV letters, and it looks great on the shirts. For our first shipment, we ordered about 18 shirts, and I believe we only have 1 left for sale. Since it is exam week, we have not been focused much on our company, but as soon as exams are over we will get right back to it. There is still a whole lot that Peter and I need to figure out if we are going to continue our business, like what other products we can sell right now, how and if we should copyright our designs, and whether or not we should continue our business outside of the class considering all of the things we would have to do to make it an official business outside of Flint Hill. Nonetheless, I am very proud that we have even been able to make it this far, considering that only a couple weeks ago we had absolutely no idea what to do, and now we have the potential to create something big. For us it has been a huge success, and I am glad it has turned out the way it has so far. I want to try to get at least one more order in before the end of the semester, and to do that we have to promote ourselves even farther so that people might become more interested. If anyone is interested in buying or even giving us a look, visit www.novaclothingcompany.com

-Duncan and Peter

Hungry Huskies feeds the mouths of hungry Flint Hill students

Hungry Huskies walk-up sales made it's debut near the senior lounge last Wednesday during break. We decided to open during an open-mic day, which I believe brought in many extra customers due to all the hustle and bustle in the commons. We made a bit over $60 dollars while just being open for a mere 40 minutes and at some points during break we were unable to keep track of all of our sales due to the number of people buying. We sold at least one of each item and were able to get a good feel of what was liked by our customers. Our biggest seller was either the fruit snacks or the chips while the water bottles and cliff bars only sold one each. This came to our surprise since we thought that the demand for healthy snacks was high, yet the two healthiest items on our menu barely sold. Unfortunately, our luck has still been somewhat bad in terms of the number of break days the school has implemented in the last month. However, we hope to come back after break ready to sell out all of our product and commence the pre-order sales the day we get back.

Marketing is hard

This week in Small Business Start Up my team focused on completing the tasks at hand, which include the crowd funding project and working on our website to improve the user interface. We are going to hopefully continue to grow our client base, which could include reaching beyond the walls of Flint Hill. Our venture off into the community has been stumped because of the limited clientele there.  We are coming close to closing down shop with only about 3 full weeks of school left before the end of the semester. Our goal is to have at least one sale before the end of the semester. Time is limited but I believe with our new marketing campaign we can successfully accomplish our plan. For an update we plan to continue to use our venture of into different areas of our business, specifically in the social media and our grassroots campaign.

Until next time…

Stress Money $

We have almost sold out of our second shipment of inventory, marking the completion of our second goal of breaking even. It seems that when we do sell, we sell very quickly.  We have 3 stress balls left.  The challenge for us was finding time to set up and sell. It is encouraging that whenever we sell, our sales are consistent. Meaning that people are not getting tired of our project. Many customers bought more than one stress ball at a time. We would like to see people collect different stress balls; driving up our sales per customer.  Our team is content with each other and we still haven’t run into any disputes.  We even sold 16 at one time for a special bulk deal with another business class.

We do it big over at FHStress.

Candy Express is Currently a Mess

Deliveries. We made them. Now what about payment...?

We were able to successfully launch our business, and even filled a couple orders, but now we're struggling with how to collect payment. We originally were going to collect it ourselves in the mornings, but have realized that people are very confused by that process. Moving forward, we're going to have people drop the money off at a designated advisor and see if that is more efficient.

In addition to our payment struggles, we have not executed our marketing plan. Whether this is simply our social anxiety or lack of resources, it has not contributed anything positive to our business. From now on, our focus has shifted from making the most profit to making our business marketable to other people. We want to finish this semester by handing over our business to the next management class and allowing them to continue what we've started. Stay tuned!

- J & H 

My own struggles and trying to open my business (individual reflection)

The past two weeks have been a bit frustrating. I have tried to launch hungry huskies' walk up sales however the shortage of break periods has been killing our timeline. After having some minor conflict concerning our location of inventory, we had to go along with the rules and store our things in the igloo. This location of inventory is not ideal simply because we won't have access to our product whenever we want. However, I have learned through this process that there are certain sacrifices you have to make to allow your business to function. And if we had ignored the rules and faculty who had told us to use the igloo, the outcome may not have been pleasant.

Another major setback we have faced is our struggle to launch.We originally planned to launch last Wednesday and have cancelled our launch due to break being cancelled nearly every day this week and last week. Aside from the previously stated setbacks, the Hungry Huskies team is ready to launch and Ainsley is preparing to start taking pre-order sales next week. I personally am very excited to see how our sales progress due to the diversity in our product compared to the food that is normally sold during bake sales or by other businesses. Next week we will launch for sure, and we hope to sell out our product after a couple days of sales.

-Rob

Problems for the Huskies

In an attempt to launch Hungry Huskies, we have come across quite a few problems. Since our last post, Robert and Conner were able to go to Costco and buy the inventory we needed to launch. The first problem we came across was on the issue of storage. Since we were denied access to the lockers, we decided to temporally store our inventory in Mrs. Starnes's cubicle. However, this plan failed because they saw us bringing in the snacks and told us food wasn't allowed to be stored anywhere but the Igloo. In a final attempt to store our snacks, Mrs. Starnes reached out to the Parent's Association to ask for access to the Igloo. Thankfully, they quickly approved our request and we were able to secure room in the Igloo to store our goods. We tried to make an announcement so we could launch sales but the student announcements at town meeting this week were both canceled for other speakers. Below is a picture of one of the flyers that we put around the school to make everyone aware that Hungry Huskies will be launching soon! Since we weren't able to launch sales this week, a goal our team has is to launch sales the week following our Thanksgiving break. I think although we have been faced with a lot of problems, we have worked hard to overcome them and should aim to continue to improve our efficiency and work ethic through lots of effort.

Progress

Since we have launched FHStress we surprising sold out of stock in 2 days. After restocking, we have sold a few more. Our marketing is still being worked out, however, word of mouth seems to have been very successful for us so far. Obviously this will not continue, and at that point, we are putting our marketing into full speed.  We are a tad worried that the hacky sacks will not sell as well, seeing as they don't have the fun emoji appeal of our stress balls. We are planning to return them when they arrive, and are now searching for other products with the same social media appeal

Wait... NOVA Clothing Company? What?

So, as you may have seen in the title, there is this little thing now called the NOVA Clothing Company. What is it you may ask? A new clothing company by the founders Duncan and Peter. But how do you think the shirt business will get you good profits? Well, we already have 10 orders, even prior to the time that we have actually decided which website we want to buy from. We have a design, which is the one seen below, and we are planning to make a website so that people can buy it online, and they can also preorder through our twitter, @thenovaclothing. We are undecided on which website we want to buy from because the cheapest options seem to have lackluster reviews, so we want a shirt that people would be more than willing to pay $25 for. We do not want to disappoint the customers that are willing to pay a semi-expensive shirt. We want to order today, preferably and have the shirts come in at least 2-3 weeks before Christmas. The orders that we have already have been from me talking to my connects outside of the Flint Hill community. I am positive that when we ask the Flint Hill community, we can get orders easily. Depending on the price of the shirt, we are planning to pay between $250 and $300, and each shirt we would like to pay around $15 for. There are websites that offer them for under $10, but these websites seem to have terrible reviews and seem very unreliable such as ooshirts and mugsdiscounts. We are to decide a company to print today. We are predicting profits of approximately $100-$200, with a business which will help us with sales. We are thinking about buying from 4 imprints, but we are still not 100% sure from where.

To Infinity and Beyond

Throughout the past two weeks, our team has made a slew of changes ranging from our marketing campaign, all the way to renaming our company. To begin, the changes in our marketing campaign were the direct result of our two newest customers. Through this recent acquisition, we realized that we had gotten in touch with both of these organizations through social media and grassroots campaigning. Which lead us to a big decision in not publishing our website and putting forth effort in different areas of our business, specifically in the social media and grassroots campaign. Despite our recent customer acquisitions, we need to focus on reaching out to more and more potential clients and the only way to do this is to focus our efforts on this part of our business. 

Lastly, through much debate and consideration, Danny, Nathaniel, and I have decided to change the companies name. This is for a number of reasons, but mostly because the word "Infinity" symbolizes an infinite number of possibilities for our company and for our clients. #ToInfinityandBeyond

Individual Reflection

Our business is going to launch this week. We had a little setback with our storage space but we got it solved when Ainsley and I stored our merchandise in the Igloo. Robert and I will be handling walk up sales and Ainsley will be handling all of our orders. I am very excited to begin work on this project and see what we can make out of it.

Personal Reflection

Unfortunately, for FHStress, our Go Live date had to  be postponed due to the fact that our town meeting this week did not include a student announcement section. We would like to let the school know that we are selling before we actually begin, but it seems that wont be possible. We plan to start selling today, even without everyone knowing about us. As of right now we have sold 12 stress balls without formally setting up shop. We plan to sell 12 more today. After getting a little bit of feedback from some of the community, we have moved our prices down to 2 dollars. The majority of those on campus either don't have change or don't want to pay the extra $.50 (like it makes a difference). Either way our soft launch has gone very well. (matter of fact once we sell our 12 more today we will be out of stock)

Running through the Flint Hill School with my woes

So the past few weeks have been very unsuccessful in the lives of Duncan and myself. So I was talking a few weeks ago about making hotline bling T-shirts. They were so fantastic and they looked amazing. Only one problem, Drake has copyright on the artwork. We were told that we weren't able to do it, and although there isn't any official documentation online that cans support the fact that it is copyrighted, we were told not to take chances like this while using the schools money. So we have come back to phase one. The progression that we are trying to push into phase two is quite frankly terrible. True, we are trying our hardest and trying to think of something good, but we have reached sort of a barrier that is going to take some hard thinking to get over. Although we are not in phase 2 yet, we have some ideas that may bring us to that stage. One idea we had was to have mugs, maybe Flint Hill mugs or mugs students would want to buy as a nice Christmas present for their parents. Another idea we had was T-shirts that are satire of different candidates in the upcoming election. We have made some very funny ones about Donald Trump, because quite frankly, he is very easy to make fun of, and we are trying break past this impediment.

FHStress First Step

Our inventory has arrived and we already have a potential order from Mrs. Turner. We initially thought that the social appeal of our emoji stress balls would be our driving marketing force. However, since she ordered 12 stress balls, it is possible that our product catches faster as a tool for helping students focus. This could open up a larger market of students in learning center that might need a tool to help them focus on their schoolwork. This will also expose our product to all of her students. We are selling them at $2 each in this large order, but I feel that the easy publicity will result in more business than the $6 less that we made on the order. At a price of 2.00each (a discount for this bulk order) that is a total of $24. While $24 ($7 profit) seems like a small amount of income, that is a 9% gross increase on our total equity.

As a team, we are we are working rather well together. We've split the jobs we have into 4 general categories: Inventory (Ian), Marketing (Chris) General Management (Rohit) and Sales (All of Us). We've been doing our jobs very well. Ian has already gotten our product, Chris has started creating our twitter and pamphlets, and Rohit has contacted faculty to make sure our selling space is open. Overall we are moving at a good pace, and are very excited to launch next week.

Duncan and Peter Inc. Update

This past week has been a rough one for our business. We eventually came to the realization that we could not create a clothing business without completely standing out from others on an extremely limited budget. We then went to the idea of creating shirts regarding drakes hit song, “Hotline Bling,” but because of copyright issues, we were not able to produce these shirts. We have had to go nearly back to scratch in order to create an idea for a business that is completely different from our original ideas. Peter and I are basically in a frantic state of mind in order to come back from these failures, and take what we have learned to make a good product or service that people will desire. Right now we are thinking about doing custom decals for computers since everyone at our school has a computer, or a possibly coffee and energy service that we would run in the morning in case people need to wake up. The coffee and energy drink service seems like it would be the best option right now, but after putting a lot of thought into it, I am not sure if we have the time in the morning, or the storage area for our inventory. We might also think about doing custom mugs for the upcoming holiday seasons. At this point, we just want to make a product as soon as possible that we can sell to people.

-Duncan and Peter

Hungry Huskies Group Blog 3

Hungry Huskies are busy preparing for our launch next week so that we can bring our classmates good snacks. We have figured out a system for how we will balance orders with walk up sales. Our one problem is still finding a space to store all our snacks. We contacted Mr. Herman and he said we can't keep food in lockers. We plan on launching next Wednesday so we will make an announcement at the next town meeting to let people know that we will be selling our snacks. Robert and I are going to get the  snacks on Sunday so that we can store them and be able to sell them by Wednesday. We finished our business plan and we have all of our roles so we are pretty much ready to launch. We just need to get all of our inventory from Costco. We are launching on Wednesday!!

School sucks less with Candy Express...

Well, to be completely honest, Hayley and I have not had it easy in school. At this point, our senior year, the time that is supposed to be where we create memories that will last for the rest of lives... we are completely lost. Buried in homework, tests and quizzes, and tasked with the seemingly impossible task of getting into a college, we find it hard to say something positive about our learning experience. Based off of this negative perspective, we developed a slogan for our business: "School sucks less with Candy Express." We thought this was a sheer stroke of genius. Our teacher, however, did not agree. We've decided to chalk this up to creative differences, but may end up changing our slogan to better fit our product.

We're at the point where we've realized that though our business idea was easy enough to generate, now we actually have to do it. Whoa.

- J & H 

On The Rise

On The Rise

DOA Design Services

Since creating our new company, we have had great success in the initial steps for creating the foundations of our company. However, finding customers has proved to be a quite difficult task, as we currently lack the network of clients we were shooting for in the first few weeks of business. Luckily, my previous business NasaCreative was quite popular in 2013 and 2014 on Instagram. Over the course of the two year period, I was able to build strong relationships a come into contact with sports agents and marketing agencies, as well as athletes themselves. I have sent out emails to some of my connections, and I am currently waiting on a response. Over the next couple of weeks we will try to connect with at least 5 business that are interested in our services. We have a nice selection of sample work that our designer of the company has worked on to try and lure in customers. We look forward to seeing what kind of responses we get from potential customers, both positive and negative, if any. As of now, we do not have any customers so there is not much information to release. However, in the future there will be.

Advice from an Entrepreneur: Ann Dolin Visits

Yesterday we had the privilege of a visit from Ann Dolin, the founder of Educational Connections. She also happens to be the mother of one of our students, Will Dolin. She shared her story of moving from teacher to stay at home mom to tutor to entrepreneur.  Ann talked about how she turned her passion for teaching and helping students into a thriving tutoring business. 

As her in-home tutoring business grew, her neighbors complained that their street was overcrowded by a steady stream of cars coming to her home. She had obviously identified a need in her community and it was time to scale the business.

Ann described the challenges she faced as she went from a tutor to business owner and advised the students to know their own weaknesses and hire the best people to help them. For their businesses to be successful, she said, they must treat them with legitimacy, not as a hobby. Metrics, for example, are an essential tool in terms of growing a business. Track and study customer acquisition methods so they can build on what is working and change what isn't. Ann also suggested that students form helpful relationships with other business to benefit from reciprocal referrals. Especially important for growth is also to set goals and evaluate progress toward those goals, track demographics, and market to key customer types.

Ann's overall message was for students to find their niche and figure out how to make their businesses different. Ann encouraged all of the students to pursue their dreams of entrepreneurship despite the difficult times that they will surely face. She reminded them to take control of their own destiny and put in the work to build a business they can be proud of.

Entrepreneurial Week and Getting back to Business

After taking a week off from focusing on my business, I returned to class with my entrepreneur project as my primary focus. We spent last week presenting our entrepreneur projects and discussing the people who we chose to do our project on. I did my project on Mark Cuban, billionaire investor, TV Personality, and businessman. I put together a powerpoint presentation on Mr. Cuban which was the majority of my workload last week.
















On a side note, the Hungry Huskies team is back in action and planning to open in FHS soon. We have created flyers and posted them all around school and are eager to start selling. My goal is to be fully operational within two weeks and to be fully stocked in 1-2 weeks with inventory.

Mrs. Starnes Reflection

My group's pitch went surprisingly well. We had answers for the majority of questions posed and there was an all around positive vibe coming from the group listening. So far, we have addressed one of the main issues: "what comes next after the novelty wares off?" our answer is to introduce a new product. This specific product are "stretch balls", designed to be bouncy and stretch when pulled. While this product isn't quite as "stress reliving" based, it still has selling potential just because of the fun factor. This does further open up the issue of being distracting t students, so we still have a few quirks to work out.

Ms. Starnes' Reflection

Skyfall looks like it is going in the right direction. We have a shirt that has an extremely large amount of people that are willing to buy, and I feel that this company is going to do very well. The biggest risk I took personally was being very descriptive in my presentation. I thought if I went into large detail it would be good for the presentation, but for those presentations you need to be more right to the point and it didn't turn out as well as I would have hoped. A failure we encountered was that the school board didn't like our shirts and didn't think that they would have any hope, so we took their thoughts into consideration and made a new design. Our plans for the business is to order right shortly after the money has been delivered to us so that we can get 1 or 2 orders in by the end of the year. This week we were just doing the entrepreneur presentations, I think went very well. I gave good information, knew nearly everything without notes, and even answered all questions to my complete knowledge. I hope Duncan and I will be as successful as Sergey Brin and Larry Page

Skyfall is Falling into a pit of awesomeness

Our team name is Skyfall, which is an update from our previous blog post, in which we were named Flassa. We have worked on some cool designs we think people will buy, and we pitched them to the school. I think our designs were ok for the pitch, but we will probably not release those shirts and instead go for some other shirts that are very trendy, We asked for a large amount of money, over $500, because the more shirts you buy the less you pay, and it makes hard to copy. You could start a business like us, but to have $25 long sleeve t shirts with some profit, you need to have a large sum of money that would be hard for a student to acquire. Our pitch went well, and although the investors from Flint Hill felt very skeptical about our idea, I think that was primarily due to the fact that they are giving us such a large sum of money. We are sure that our trendy designs will sell, and each order should get $200 profit, so if we get 2 orders in, we can have almost as much profit as the Grind.

Hoping for incredible profit,
Peter and Dunk

Preparing to Pitch

Since our last post, the Hungry Huskies team has been preparing to pitch to administration. We have experimented and discussed various business models and have reached a consensus in terms of our plan. The walk-up and buy method, along with the form submission will both be included in our pitch. As a team we believe that this is the best option due our uncertainty in the model as a result of lack of time/manpower to run our business and the feasibility in terms of the way we will sell our product. We are looking to receive helpful feedback from admin, so we can use their opinions to pursue our ideas and start our business.

Once we have our method of selling product figured out, we plan to immediately jump onward to purchasing inventory and establishing the nooks and crannies of our setup. Although the last week has been challenging, we are optimistic about the future and moving forward.

Our Pitch Presentation:

https://docs.google.com/a/flinthill.org/presentation/d/1ZiV3EiaaITFOtzjtWRg__7QXLIeV-Z5MOI3K0lBgsQs/edit?usp=sharing

Fall Down, Get Back Up

DOA Design Services

Greenway & Co. has crashed and burned, affecting our company’s ability to get things started and organized. After hours of brainstorming, the three of us came up with a new business plan. We have decided to give up the dream of being venture capitalists, and focus on the visual appeal of business. We will be working with businesses to design their branding, which includes website design, logo design, posters, and many other design services. Our new name is DOA Design Services, however the company name is subject to change. We are looking forward to seeing what we can accomplish, and trying to establish connections in the business world.

As of now, we do not have anything to reflect on for our new business plan. However, we have plenty of goals for the upcoming business season. Our team is currently interviewing the other small businesses in the class and finding out if any need our services. A company with visually appealing graphic design is usually very successful. Take Nike for example, they have top notch graphic designers that help make their company one the of the most successful in the world. We believe that our design work is the closest thing to the excellent work that top tier businesses boast on a daily basis.

(Website Concept)

The Irony

We came to a consensus that we would continue our business idea of selling stress balls.  We narrowed down the inventory to only sell stress balls and hack sacks.  The total initial cost would only be $70 so have a total of 2 dozens of each product.  We have been working on our presentation on a power point.  One issue that was brought up when discussing our business idea was what is special about our business.  So our selling point is the fact that we have emoticon stress balls.  Since social media is such as large part in our lives, everyone is familiar with emoticons.  We feel that people will like the emoticon stress balls because we have seen that emoticon hats and shirts have been selling at kiosks in malls.  We wanted to include hacky sacks for those who want to use these balls for more of an athletic purpose.  The emoji stress balls would be sold for 2.50 dollars and the hacky sacks for 2 dollars.  So far the teamwork has still been amazing, but we have been getting stressed working on our business that should relieve stress.  At the end of class on 10/8/15 we were given the idea that we have a claw machine as well.  So we now might be adjusting some numbers.

Candy Express

     Out of complete distress, Candy Yes has now turned into Candy Express. Creating a start-up business is a lot more work than we had anticipated. We didn't hit the ground running, we just hit the ground. What was once an elective taken simply for a senior year credit has now turned into a much more personal endeavor; something we have begun to invest our own time on and that now consumes most of our (academic) lives. 

     Our idea was not the problem; executing it, now that was something else. We struggled (a lot) with our presentation. The information was not hard to put down, agreeing on a logo and well, everything, was the problem. Thankfully, as always, our determination and stubborn drive got us through and we were able to work out the kinks. Looking forward, tomorrow is our pitch to the Flint Hill administration to get approval (and money) for our business. So there's that. Fingers crossed, wish us luck! 

- J & H