The Grind

This week was all about preparing for our presentation for Mr.Reed, Mr.Thomas, Mrs.Williams and many other teachers. We took the mini business plan we made the previous week and decided what were the most important points from it. We also discussed what would be the most valuable points from our lean canvas and what would be the best presentation format to use. We ended up choosing Prezi to display our presentation for the teachers and picked the most important parts from our business plans. All this planning was done on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. Friday, we went through a dry run of out presentation and prepared ourselves for difficult questions and problems that could occur or be brought up in our meeting. We were not completely prepared for our presentation, because we only have five or six slides, so we will need to make sure that is done by the time we return from Spring Break. Our initial launch date had been immediately following the return of Spring Break, but now we have realized it will need to be pushed back a few days in order to meet and make decisions with regards to location and supplies.

Husky BuyPass - Presentation & Launch Date

During class today we presented our business plan and felt like we were on the right track. We will make a few minor edits that were suggested from the class such as detailing how we pivoted our business in our Powerpoint.

We are planning on launching our business officially the first week when we get back from Spring Break. Our website is well underway and development should not be too time-intensive.

VideAmigo Company Update 7! (The end of the quarter update!)

In the past two weeks, we've completed the following tasks:

• We finished our Mini-Business plan two days before it was due!
• We've finalized our price system for our various services, which range from photography, to video production, to general design!
• We've finished our presentation draft (and are working on finishing our final draft!)
• We've found our first client!

With that said, we have a little ways to go. We are currently working on finishing the listed tasks:

• We're still working on the website, but it is currently up and online.
• Chances are it will be up and finished a week after break!
• We're also looking for more clients, but will speed up this process after our pitch and the completion of the website!

To put it simply, VideAmido is on the right track, and will continue in this direction throughout the next quarter!

Pucker Up Update

So far this week we have been trying to finish our mini business plan and convert it to a formal business plan.  We finished the mini business plan on Wednesday and are in the actions of transferring it to the paper business plan and the presentation.  Originally we were just presenting to our class, but now we have to present to a large group of important faculty and people at Flint Hill.  There is a lot of work to be done before we actually present to the board including making our product, but we have all of spring break to complete the presentation.  We plan to meet with each other on Monday, March 16th to make the product.  This is the only day that will work with all of our schedules, so we need to accomplish our plans on this day.

We have also been trying to complete and order our labels for the chapstick tubes.  It is hard to find a good label maker that is a good price.  There is also the issue of the coloring of the label.  We designed a good looking label that had a good color spectrum, but after further discussion we also thought that our pallet would not look good on our white tubes and the color of the caps.  I think that is we made three different labels for each flavor it would be the best looking, but it will also be the most expensive option.

All of the ingredients came in throughout the past week, which is very exciting.  The only thing remaining is the labels and we have $56.28 remaining in our startup budget of $200.  Below is a screenshot of our spending so far.  As we continue to sell and make the lip balm, we will add our spending and earning to this document.  After calculations we can break even after we sell 80 units of product.

Tundra Update #6: Pitch Planning

This week, we met with Mr. Reed to discuss some problems and prepared our pitch.  Mr. Reed, unfortunately, was not able to answer our questions.  Therefore, we are waiting to get our key questions answered by the faculty who attends our pitch.  We are trying to figure out the possible locations for our business, a place to store our supplies, and if we can sell the apparel from the online school store.  We added pictures and effects to our pitch.  In our pitch, we discuss our problem, the solution, the target market, our user acquisition strategy, our business model, our competitors, what we have accomplished, our next steps, and our financial information.  We will practice our pitch on March 12th.  Our real pitch will be on April 2nd.

Halfway Point: What Have We Learned?

We've spent seven weeks brainstorming, forming teams, establishing a business model, writing business and marketing plans, having meetings, making changes...and with one week to go in the quarter, we are so close to the go-live date for our 5 businesses.

When I began the blog, I called class an experiment in authentic learning. As I've stated so many times on my personal blog, If You Ask Me, we must make school different for kids--now.  We must provide them with real chances to take risks (and fail or succeed), real reasons to get work done, and real opportunities for reflection and growth. As the weeks have gone by, I have been thrilled to see how much authentic learning is happening.  The students in the class have learned about business terms, tools, and processes.  But more importantly they've learned that starting a business is hard, that adults don't always reply to emails, that websites are challenging to make, that colors evoke different emotions, that teamwork is harder than working alone...they've also learned a lot about things specific to their own businesses--the Pucker Up team never imagined they'd know all of the types of ingredients in lip balm before this class began!

I know there's a lot more for us to learn, especially as we go from plan to action and the businesses try to run, but I'm already sold on the results of this experiment.

Husky BuyPass - Website in Development

Husky BuyPass has created a very rough version of our website, still in early development. 

Here is the link: http://www.huskybuypass.com

We will continue working on the website in the future and we feel confident it will be ready in a timely fashion. We also got registered with Amazon's affiliate marketing program, and are ready to stock our store with their products. Next class we will be signing up for the Ebay affiliate marketing program as well.

Food? Food.

Today was a very important day for our group because we discussed everything that needs to be done by our launch date. We have planned to be ready to launch the day we leave for spring break and then actually launch when we return from Spring Break. Annie informed us about another way to fill the Keurig machines, tea bags that are designed to fit in the spot, and would cost 31 cents a cup instead of 61 cents a cup. We are talking about what we need to order, there needs to be machines, food, drinks, location and other supplies by our planned launch date. We are nervous to buy anything until we have heard back from people about what we are aloud to use and do on campus. Another major thing we discussed was an opening and closing check list. We need to create a set of rules that are for the person who is in charge of getting everything ready and putting everything away when we are opening and closing the shop. We also visited the igloo to see where possible places that we could store our supplies. We discovered several large cabinets that are empty that would be an ideal place to store out stuff, we also found some empty racks that would be suitable for us to place the igloo supplies while our store is open. We are also discussing the name for our company, Food?Food. is no longer ideal for us. We also found out there are warmers in the igloo that would be great for our bagels. Today was really good for our group because we started to really work and started to comprehend what needs to be done in the next week and a half.

Where we plan to store our supplies 

Heaters and Warmers we could use

Another possible storage place 

Where we could place Igloo's supplies 

Overall look of storage we could use 

Pucker Up

Over the last week and a half Pucker Up has been establishing what we need to do as a company in order to start the creation of our product. The most important part of this week was when we bought the ingredients needed to make our product, this of course is essential to our process. We also began to work on the pricing of the product, and have established that in order to make a profit we must sell the lip balm at around three dollars a piece. This of course would have to be tested, because if no one buys the product because it costs too much, then we wouldn't make a profit anyway. We still have a lot of questions that we need to answer; for example, when will we produce the product? We also need to know where we are going to sell the product and how to effectively market it around us. One of our major obstacles as a group was that we were almost over our budget. To fix this we researched more suppliers and eventually found websites where the materials cost less. This week we also finished and presented our lean canvas, which lays out the foundation of our business. We hope that in the following weeks we are able to create our product and then the sell the first round.