Closing Time

This is the last week in Small Business Start Up and we have learned a lot about how to begin our own businesses. Even though we had no customers throughout our venture, we learned that passion and motivation are two important traits to have. We only received our initial $60 grant from the school, but spent no money on operations and as stated earlier, had no customers. Our advice for future entrepreneurs is to make sure to create a business that all of your group members are genuinely invested in and want to see succeed. One of the pitfalls we would recommend new start ups avoiding is having bad chemistry within their team and a lack of cooperation. This was a great experience that taught us a lot about how difficult it is to begin your own business and gave me a lot to consider in my future professional endeavors.

The End of Candy Express

As this semester comes to an end, so does our business. We asked for $100 to start up. With that we used less than half to cover the cost of production, meaning buying the candy and packaging. However, we only received four orders. Our policy is that no one receives delivery until either my partner or I have received payment and we ask that they find us from 7-8 Am the day they would like it delivered. No one paid us even after we did deliver within the same week. Since then, we've received no orders and no money.

The most important thing we've learned through attempting to start a business is in order to have customers you have to create excitement and interest for the product or service. While our idea was a good one, we lacked in customer interest. Also, we needed to find a better way for people to pay us and follow through before we deliver.
Well, we tried. Say goodbye to Candy Express.

Approaching the end

As we near the end of the semester, we realize that we have learned quite a few lessons on the process of pitching managing, and operating a business. As far as managing a business, the skills of time management and communication are universally important. For example, properly managing our time to be able to sell as a team was at first difficult, but as we progressed, we made sure that everyone’s schedule was planned accordingly. Pitching, however, was the most enjoyable and difficult part of our process. Coming up with a proper pitch, along with balancing our budget was a very fun and challenging process. Pitching itself (to faculty administration etc.) was a very nerve racking experience, however simulated (very well) a real life situation.We were able to sell all three shipments of stress balls. Because we sold some at bulk prices, our total profit totaled $7... We did it!   

Us (the yellow one) ----->  

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!!!!

N O V A

The past two weeks for us have been very exciting ones. We have officially launched our clothing line, the NOVA Clothing Company. Our first item that we have been selling are our DMV t-shirts, which incorporate the American, Maryland, and Virginia flags representing the DMV letters, and it looks great on the shirts. For our first shipment, we ordered about 18 shirts, and I believe we only have 1 left for sale. Since it is exam week, we have not been focused much on our company, but as soon as exams are over we will get right back to it. There is still a whole lot that Peter and I need to figure out if we are going to continue our business, like what other products we can sell right now, how and if we should copyright our designs, and whether or not we should continue our business outside of the class considering all of the things we would have to do to make it an official business outside of Flint Hill. Nonetheless, I am very proud that we have even been able to make it this far, considering that only a couple weeks ago we had absolutely no idea what to do, and now we have the potential to create something big. For us it has been a huge success, and I am glad it has turned out the way it has so far. I want to try to get at least one more order in before the end of the semester, and to do that we have to promote ourselves even farther so that people might become more interested. If anyone is interested in buying or even giving us a look, visit www.novaclothingcompany.com

-Duncan and Peter

Hungry Huskies feeds the mouths of hungry Flint Hill students

Hungry Huskies walk-up sales made it's debut near the senior lounge last Wednesday during break. We decided to open during an open-mic day, which I believe brought in many extra customers due to all the hustle and bustle in the commons. We made a bit over $60 dollars while just being open for a mere 40 minutes and at some points during break we were unable to keep track of all of our sales due to the number of people buying. We sold at least one of each item and were able to get a good feel of what was liked by our customers. Our biggest seller was either the fruit snacks or the chips while the water bottles and cliff bars only sold one each. This came to our surprise since we thought that the demand for healthy snacks was high, yet the two healthiest items on our menu barely sold. Unfortunately, our luck has still been somewhat bad in terms of the number of break days the school has implemented in the last month. However, we hope to come back after break ready to sell out all of our product and commence the pre-order sales the day we get back.

Marketing is hard

This week in Small Business Start Up my team focused on completing the tasks at hand, which include the crowd funding project and working on our website to improve the user interface. We are going to hopefully continue to grow our client base, which could include reaching beyond the walls of Flint Hill. Our venture off into the community has been stumped because of the limited clientele there.  We are coming close to closing down shop with only about 3 full weeks of school left before the end of the semester. Our goal is to have at least one sale before the end of the semester. Time is limited but I believe with our new marketing campaign we can successfully accomplish our plan. For an update we plan to continue to use our venture of into different areas of our business, specifically in the social media and our grassroots campaign.

Until next time…

Stress Money $

We have almost sold out of our second shipment of inventory, marking the completion of our second goal of breaking even. It seems that when we do sell, we sell very quickly.  We have 3 stress balls left.  The challenge for us was finding time to set up and sell. It is encouraging that whenever we sell, our sales are consistent. Meaning that people are not getting tired of our project. Many customers bought more than one stress ball at a time. We would like to see people collect different stress balls; driving up our sales per customer.  Our team is content with each other and we still haven’t run into any disputes.  We even sold 16 at one time for a special bulk deal with another business class.

We do it big over at FHStress.

Candy Express is Currently a Mess

Deliveries. We made them. Now what about payment...?

We were able to successfully launch our business, and even filled a couple orders, but now we're struggling with how to collect payment. We originally were going to collect it ourselves in the mornings, but have realized that people are very confused by that process. Moving forward, we're going to have people drop the money off at a designated advisor and see if that is more efficient.

In addition to our payment struggles, we have not executed our marketing plan. Whether this is simply our social anxiety or lack of resources, it has not contributed anything positive to our business. From now on, our focus has shifted from making the most profit to making our business marketable to other people. We want to finish this semester by handing over our business to the next management class and allowing them to continue what we've started. Stay tuned!

- J & H 

My own struggles and trying to open my business (individual reflection)

The past two weeks have been a bit frustrating. I have tried to launch hungry huskies' walk up sales however the shortage of break periods has been killing our timeline. After having some minor conflict concerning our location of inventory, we had to go along with the rules and store our things in the igloo. This location of inventory is not ideal simply because we won't have access to our product whenever we want. However, I have learned through this process that there are certain sacrifices you have to make to allow your business to function. And if we had ignored the rules and faculty who had told us to use the igloo, the outcome may not have been pleasant.

Another major setback we have faced is our struggle to launch.We originally planned to launch last Wednesday and have cancelled our launch due to break being cancelled nearly every day this week and last week. Aside from the previously stated setbacks, the Hungry Huskies team is ready to launch and Ainsley is preparing to start taking pre-order sales next week. I personally am very excited to see how our sales progress due to the diversity in our product compared to the food that is normally sold during bake sales or by other businesses. Next week we will launch for sure, and we hope to sell out our product after a couple days of sales.

-Rob