Reading Reflection Week 5

As I wrapped up the final section of The $100 Start Up, I realized that I've kind of been reading a book I din't have to read.  Of course, I'm happy I read it, and it was a fascinating book.  However, I'm starting to recognize that outsiders can only give broad advice, while only you really know how to move the business forward.  Chris made a point of understanding this too.  He articulated that, as the owner of a business, it is your job to understand what you want to get out of this.  Chris, again, stated that some just want to sell their business, some want to keep it small, and some want to manufacture it to a global industry.  That decision has to be made by you, not some author who doesn't even know the name of your business.  Although Chris devalued himself, I think this actually made this work stronger and more true.  Chris basically changed the novel from a rule book to an advice column.  His message was to figure out your aspirations, and than to use this as a helping tool.  It's kind of like saying, here's all this advice, make of it what you want.  If I were to ever build a business, I would want to stay local.  I would want to be in touch with the community, and not solely concerned with the numbers and profitability of the business.  Thus, I'm happy that Chris acknowledged that there were other options than to build a franchise.

I found this book extremely interesting, and I would recommend it to all future students who take this class.  It's truly an easy read.  Chris takes the most complex ideas and condenses them into something understandable and even relatable.  It makes starting a business seem much more feasible and far less scary.  All in all, I'm very happy I chose this book, and it's broad audience makes it a good read for anybody.

In Class Reflection Week 5

This week in class, we worked on two major things.  Primarily, we were concerned with our practice presentation.  We've done a lot of work on the storefront project, and we want our presentation to show that.  I think the presentation went fairly well.  We had a few criticisms about numbers being hard to understand and a lack of valuable images, but overall, I think that we can fix these problems and move on with a great presentation.  I trust our group, so I'm not overly worried about fixing the presentation and presenting successfully in front of our judges.  However, it was rather the second thing we worked on this week that concerned me more.


Last week, we each put together our own 360 Eval sheet.  This meant evaluating and basically grading the members of your group.  This was a point of tension.  Although everybody in the group contributed, not everybody contributed equally.  I think all of us, or at least 4 out of 5 of us reached that conclusion.  The work that our group did was spread out mostly amongst four of us, the other shall remained unnamed for the sake of privacy on the internet (you'll know who the 5th is when you read the eval).  As the 5th member learned how we all felt, he obviously felt hurt and disappointed.  There was actually a whole class period where we basically argued over what was going to happen for the evals.  Each of us, including me, gave him a lower percentage than the rest of us.  I felt really bad about this, because he was a pleasure to have in the group, and he did do work.  I felt as if I had just thrown him under the bus.  I hope that everything turns out ok for him, and during our meeting I think it's important that we all show that we did value his contributions.

Reading Reflection Week 4

This section of The 100 Dollar Start Up was by far the most interesting and valuable to me.  Although the section, as usual, was about specific start ups and unique things that made them successful, the overarching theme of it was about how to sell.   Guillebeau really brought some interesting philosophical points and changed the way I think about business.  I've always kind of thought of salesman as fast-talking wizards, who hit you with a thousand words a minute.  However, after this reading, I'm starting to see that's not exactly true.  In selling, less is usually more.  Guillebeau made an interesting point, as he noted that when you force your customers to think, you leave them with doubt.  Thus, you want to make your value proposition as clear and concise as possible.

Because of this, our group really has to change the way we sell our calendars.  Typically, we've been pressing kids hard in the library to buy our calendars.  We really oversell it.  Guillebeau said that customers want to buy; they don't want to be sold to.  I actually tend to agree with this.  When I buy something, I like to make my decision.  When a salesman approaches it me, it makes me feel like I'm being tricked in some way, even if I'm not.  I think I should just show the kids the calendars and see what they think. It's kind of like laissez-faire.  I want to empower the customer not intimidate them.  Our group has already made profit, so this is no urgent matter.  Nevertheless, I want to see how this tactic works.  Hopefully, it will bring more profit to the school and allow us to present even greater profit in our presentation.

In Class Reflection Week 4

This week, things are finally starting to come to a close.  We've paid back all of our investors for the calendar project and are continuing to make profit.  In our storefront project, we've mapped out our costs and expected revenue, and have finally managed our costs so that we can reasonably expect good earnings from our coffee shop.  We are starting to put our presentations together, and it feels good to be able to show the amount of work we've put in.

In the past, presentations were rather stressful.  I attribute that somewhat to the inexperience I had in presenting, but mostly to the insufficiency of the work that my group had put in prior.  However, this time I'm excited to display what we've done. As opposed to having to oversell ourselves in the presentation, I feel that we can just confidently show the facts.  I'm proud of what I've done, and I'm ready to candidly answer all of the judges questions.  Our group really owned these two projects.  We embraced the challenges, and put something together that's wholesome and impressive.

Previously, I wrote about some of the anxiousness I had about what might cause us trouble in the upcoming weeks, but I feel like through each challenge we found a solution as a group.  I look forward to presenting with my teammates, and I hope that this is a group I will get to continue to work with in future projects.

Reading Reflection Week 3

In my third section of 100 Dollar Start Up, I read about a new side Guillebeau.  He wrote a lot about his experience as a traveler, instead of his work as a businessman.  He made sure to connect the stories of his travel back to the world of business, but I found this section was almost entirely unrelated to the rest of the book and the connection, although present, was definitely tenuous.  At the end of the section, he even said that travel was unimportant to many businesses, and that the idea of travel can often distract entrepreneurs from the true value of hard work.  Although almost entirely connected to what we're doing in class, I still found it very interesting.  His thesis was that wifi and other new communication devices allowed for small start-ups to be administered from outside the country.  He talked a lot about his experiences traveling in China and India and a guy who ran his piano lesson service company from South America, but both of them could have just as easily ran their company from back home.  It's awesome that it's less difficult to go on vacation, but for entrepreneurs who are supposed to be very tied to there start-ups, I think it's better to stay as geographically close as possible, especially if you need to have meetings with possible employees or other companies.  I love traveling, and the idea running a business from another country is fascinating. However, as we've learned through class, an entrepreneur should treat their business like a baby, and you don't leave your babies in another country.

In Class Reflection Week 3

This week in class was definitely a huge relief.  As I discussed earlier, last week we had a huge amount of inventory of calendars and some bad-looking predictions for our cafe.  This week was largely spent solving those problems.  We had some bumps in the rode, including the "advertising gone wrong" issue, but ultimately, last week was a huge success.  With a solid group effort, we are now 3 calendars away from breaking even and we were able to decrease some of our costs so that our coffee shop is expected to make slightly less than $90,000.00 a year.  This is a huge advancement from last weeks standing, but we can still do better.  We still have at least 50 more calendars we can sell and I still think we can cut costs on construction and employment.

Last week was good because we effectively divided up labor.  Ben and Clay worked on the calendar project, while Jacob, Yiorgos and I took on the problems we had with storefront.  I think it's very important that we continue this system, as it leads to a much greater understanding of individual role in a larger project.  Unfortunately, this means that it looks like we didn't do as much work in Trello (solely due to the way we organized our Trello page), but it is worth it so that we can produce a more in depth and complete final project.

Initially, I had worried about being in a group with 4 friends, as I had concerns that distractions would destroy productivity.  However, I've found that working with friends has actually made the workplace more pleasant, and has made communication much easier.  I'm extremely happy with that.

Reading Reflection Week 2

I actually found the second section of my reading of The $100 Startup to be strikingly similar to what we went over in the first quarter of class.  In this section Guillebeau talked about what value was and how to create it.  Like we did in class, he discussed how you want to solve a problem or better the conditions of something for the market.  He sited examples of guys who start companies to make air travel more simple, or young entrepreneurs who teach classes about how to use excel properly.  Unlike we did in class, however, Guillebeau separated the concept of the product and its value.  For example, the value of a pen is not that it is a writing utensil, but that it will help you in your job or in school.  The value of a vacation home is not that it has a pool, but rather that it allows you to escape the stress of the real world.  This caused me to rethink how we should be marketing our calendars for the 200$ project.  We shouldn't be advertising that it has tons of cool pictures.  Instead, we should be advertising that it helps you stay in touch with the Athletics community and the purchase allows you to support the high school.  Guillebeau's work forced me to look at business in a new way, and from this, I realized that we have to make the value of our product more clear to our customers.  This will hopefully help us sell more calendars in the near future.