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 

Expanding Upon Initial Ideas

Although FhStress, my teams business of selling stress relieving products is moving along rather nicely, we are having minor issues making our product unique. Yes we are the only people in the school selling our product, however we are attempting to make our product "ours" in a sense. Why wouldn't someone drive 5 minutes to the dollar store and buy one of our products. We have convenience on or side but not value. Currently our team is working on solutions, but we need to fully know what this unique property about our product is before we have to go in front of the committee.

Reality Hits: The Struggles of Startups and my Mission

This week brought many realities into play. I personally was able to realize the challenges and speed bumps on the road to making a start-up function.

Distributing the workload is a big focus for my team to be ready to give our pitch on October 9th. I
went through a possible business base case as I was thinking of questions to ask in a survey to the school students. I have been looking at possible products for our business to offer, buying them from Costco and the location where to sell in school.

As I thought on the survey and the business, I made some assumptions about pricing, quantity of purchases by students per week, along with possible periods of the day to be "open".  sales based on consumptions. I also thought that if the business takes off, or we individually have less time on free periods, we could hire a few other sales people paying a 10% commission on the sale $ they sell or service.

So we need to now send out the survey through Survey Monkey, get feedback to establish our base case to put into the Business Presentation. We need to distribute tasks to the 3 team members to do for the case. We need to do a practice run the day before.

I am worried about really having enough time to do all of this and maybe we should request a date change.

Personal Reflection #2

1 month into the course, and just a few days ago i joined a t-shirt/logo business, originally named Tuff Logos with a fellow classmate named Duncan Addams. We are both sophmores, and we are really excited about the company, though we have changed some things from the original idea. Firstly, we have decided to focus our efforts on the t-shirt market, and most likely we have dropped the logo idea. Secondly, Tuff Logos was a name made by Nathaniel, so we realized that we wanted an original name for our business, which took quite some time to decide. From ideas such as Paragon Shirts to Flassa Clothing, we chose just today that our name will be Skyfall Clothing. The link to that business name is available as a .com, which is fantastic because we are only looking for a name that is available as a .com and sounds good. We have made some designs, very few, but those few that we have shown to fellow students they have said that they would buy them. We will buy shirts in the $10-15 dollar range because we are buying bulk, then selling for $20-25. We are contemplating over how we are going to chose the designs, whether it is going to be weekly suggestions by customers or just new designs we will put up once in a while. Duncan is better at design than me, him taking 2 courses in design and myself only one, but i believe I can contribute too to the design aspect of the business. I believe that our business will perform well, and I am excited for the future of the company.