Personal Reflection ---- Sean Zhou

    Currently we are halfway through the class, and I personally have achieved a lot form our attempt to start a business. After watching many successful examples of entrepreneurs, I learned so much more about business. I am currently trying to figure out what our purpose of creating Go Kart is, to make a prototype with basically no money, and to put effort into improving our website. Below I have attached the link to the website that I created for our app.
    I do realize that in order to make Go Kart work, we need a small amount of starting fund. I will continue to work on the app, and figure our why I chose this idea to work on and what our belief is about our idea.

http://szhou5.wixsite.com/gokart

What do you plan to do?

Currently, our class has only been in class for about 3-4 weeks. During those weeks we have worked on how to create ideas for products that people would need and not want. We created a padlet of multiple business ideas and eventually "shaved" it down to about 16 ideas that we believed could really take off in the business world. We will soon be choosing teams on who we would like to work with. Ideally the people who we work with will have similar ideas to ours and they would be people that we believe could bring different perspectives to make an idea grow.

Hungry Huskies comes to an end

In the beginning, Hungry Huskies was launched with $150 we received from our funders, the Flint Hill administration. We bought all inventory for $128 at Costco. Over the three times we sold, we earned about $150 dollars. We learned that when you are running a business within the restrictions of a bigger organization it is hard to operate as you please. As a business we had to make a lot of sacrifices to conform to the rules and restrictions of our school. We had to operate around the schedule of Flint Hill, which drastically limited our operations. It also made our business inconsistent because of surprise town and class meetings. From this, our team learned that in order to be truly successful in the business world you must be independent. If a business is independent they are not limited by another organization's rules and schedule. Another problem we ran into was when trying to launch a service where students could order snacks ahead of time to be delivered to them. We were faced with space restrictions and the logistics of money being left in boxes unattended. Because of this, that part of the business was never able to launch. The best advice we have for future entrepreneurs is to be flexible and not to limit themselves to running in one defined area. The best businesses are those that solve a problem. Our advice is to find a problem that is faced by many because a limited market could limits your business's success. We also would advise future entrepreneurs to be passionate about the message and purpose of their business. If you are passionate about your business you are more likely to work hard for its success. In conclusion, Hungry Huskies is happy with our ending and hopes that future entrepreneurs are able to learn from our failures and success to thrive in the field of business! 

Hungry Huskies hopes that all the future entrepreneurs CHANGE THE WORLD!!!!

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.

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.