EXPOSED: Flint Hill student Tim Rupli...

Joins a small business class at school. He is a multi-sport athlete who plays lacrosse and golf at his high school. As noted by my "about me" section, I dabble in the outdoors, and do have a recurring tendency to wear Hawaiian shirts upwards of three times a week. Tim's favorite brands are Patagonia and Yeti. #sent

The Grind

Recently, we have been very busy prepping for our opening. We just ordered the food, drinks and materials we will need to run successfully! On thursday April 2nd, we presented our business pitch to some members from the school including our headmaster, business reps and other adults. Our presentation went very well and we finally received an answer about the igloo. The leadership board has come up with an idea to work with the parents association by possibly offering a 10 day trial to figure out if everything would work with regard to sharing The Igloo with The Grind Coffee Shop. We have our coffee machines, hot water carriers here and our other inventory is being shipped to the school this week. We have decided that we want to open this coming week. We pivoted from our original idea to open immediately after spring break and decided it would be more efficient if we opened by next week. We are also working on reorganizing our business pitch to turn into a more efficient document to give the leadership board. When ordering our food, we realized that with some companies we can subscribe to their supplies and gain discounts in the future with reordering our supplies. The bottom picture below is our logo that we created for The Grind. We have decided to have our logo printed out and placed on each of our cups, but want to wait until we create some profit to make this investment. The picture on the top is a list of our profit and purchase prices, along with an overall average profit from our intended inventory.

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.

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.

It Begins

This semester, we are offering a Small Business Startup elective for the first time.  Students in this class (sophomores, juniors, and seniors) will form four business teams and attempt to create, run, pivot, and grow their businesses.  Flint Hill will provide a small pile of startup money to each team, and any profits the businesses earn will come back to the school.  The course will introduce students to essential business concepts and key life skills, and offer an authentic experience.

This class will operate with the pressures, uncertainties, and challenges of a real startup. Students as entrepreneurs are expected to challenge, question, and push back; they are in charge of their experiences and outcomes. This class is an incubator or lab, where books and lectures are tools but not absolutes or blueprints. Students will need to rely on creativity and enthusiasm to interpret the content and turn it into an actionable plan and micro business. The key content is listed below:

Stay tuned for updates on our journey.  As the students form teams and begin their businesses, they will document their process and progress on this blog.