The Grind

Last Friday, May 1st was the last day of our 10 day trial, however, we were only open for 8 days do to our key problem that inhibits us from opening in the morning on some days. This week we have been working on creating a presentation to present to Mrs. Sanderson who will approve the rest of our trial for the year. We had the meeting with her during our small business class this Wednesday. The conversation went really well and she was very impressed with our profit and total sales. We are currently waiting for her to get approval from a few other administrators so that The Grind can open back up. At the end of our 10 day trial we have made $560.40 and $332.07 of that was profit. While we are waiting for approval, we are taking this time to start our final projects, which is our crowd funding campaign. For this campaign we are trying to raise money to create a cafe area around The Grind with comfortable, inviting seating and music.

The Grind

We have officially opened and we are on a 10 day trial run. We are day 3 into our trial and have made around $90 in profit. However, we have broken even and have gotten new supplies, which cost around $70. We have been opening before school, during break, and on certain days during our free periods. The problems that we have run into are: not producing coffee fast enough, clean up takes a long time when we have to put the other business's supplies back where we found them (The Igloo's), and trying to keep up with the demand of certain bars. Our solutions have been to make a pot of coffee and not just have the Keurig, saving enough time to clean up during our last period open, and we have not exactly found a solution for our bar demand because our storage is minimal. We have added more to our menu based on feed back that we have been given, for example: Vitamin Waters, Whip Cream, and other bars. We are the most successful group so far out of our class mainly because of the demand for food at school is high. Overall, we hope to keep our spot longer than 10 days in that location and hope to expand our business's inventory. We are now working on a Crowd-funding Campaign for our final project (it will not actually go live because we are not 18) and and we are "raising money" to buy seating for in front of our bushiness. We are trying to make the space around The Grind a more inviting space with comfortable seating with a cafe-like feel. Overall we are in good shape and are making a good profit and have a steady cash flow.

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.

Food? Food.

Today we re-reevaluated our plans, we came up with questions to ask the school about what is the most efficient and easy way to charge people who are interested in coffee and other products we plan to sell. We also decided that a Keurig is the best plan for selling coffee. We founds pods for a good prices, and we evaluated our next steps for launching our business

Food? Food.

Today we worked on hashing out a lot of small details like who to get in touch with to talk to about being able to use the Igloo space. We also got our idea of the bake sale like day where we have people taste different types of coffees to give us feedback. We were also able to create a survey for students to tell us some details that will be helpful when deciding what we want to offer at the cafe and when we should be open during the day. Our main focus right now is figuring out if we are allowed to use the Igloo. Once we have that information, the next steps in the process will come a little faster.