Creating Our Own Businesses

During the Fall Term, the goal was to create and develop a business idea that we wanted to start someday.  It took me awhile to come up with the business idea that I wanted, but eventually I found it.  This term has taught me that starting a business isn't just about the fun stuff, coming up with the name and logo of the company, but it takes a lot of research to effectively plan out the business.  I learned a lot about what the main goals of a business should be.  

The main goals of a business:

1. Everything should be based on satisfying the customers needs

2. Make sure I have profitable sales (profitable sales > maximum sales)

3. Have a competitive advantage against others in the same area of business (this is what you market off of, market my advantage)

4. Have a specific target market (specific people, wealth, location, etc)

5. Marketing mix (appeals to the different types of targets)

Lazer Rager

While planning our event, we were sure it would be a huge hit. The main part of our event, laser tag, was, everyone who played thoroughly enjoyed it and we had a lot of people sign up. However, the dance didn't go quite as planned. Looking back on it, I see why and if my group decides to do another dance we will be prepared this time around. As people left the dance, I asked them why they were leaving and what most of them said was the gym was too big or because other people were leaving. I realized that I would have to do something in order to get people to stay at the dance. I went into the dance and took the red velvet ropes we had around the margarita stand and started making a makeshift dance floor by roping people in. At first it was working well and no one else was leaving but then we ran into another problem. People were complaining that there was no rap music and so some more people started to leave. I was watching the dance slowly unravel so I repositioned the ropes to make the dance floor even smaller but it was too late, there weren't many people left and they left because they said it was awkward having such a small amount of people there. In a last ditch effort, Mick, Juan and I walked to the student center and tried to bring people back to the dance but the student center was surprisingly pretty empty. I asked someone where everyone was and they told me everyone was in their dorms so I was a little upset. The people in the student center we told to go back did not want to because they knew no one was there. At this point, we walked back to the dance and my group decided to end the dance early. The laser tag was still going on but everyone there had already played once so we decided to end that as well. Kaston continued DJing while we cleaned up which made it bearable. In the end, I believe our event was, in fact, a big hit because our main event was the laser tag, but it did bum me out that people left the dance. I was also a little angry because it was Kaston's first time DJing for a dance and people just walked out on him.

Fishbowl Labs----Field Trip on Oct. 21st

    The entire class went to Washington D.C. on October 21st and visited several businesses including Custom Ink., José Andrés Think Food Group, and AOL Fishbowl Labs. The trip was awesome and we met many enthusiastic entrepreneurs.
    AOL Fishbowl Labs is a vibrant community for startup businesses. Vincent Wong's business MHelp Desk, an App-based field service management, is one of the companies in Fishbowl Labs. It was fun to listen to his entrepreneurial experiences in the pass; he sold chameleons for several years and used the money to buy his first car, a Lamborghini.
    MHelp Desk is an app on people's phones and helps them with different kinds of managements, scheduling, and billing. Vincent and his event coordinator, Jacob Garlick, sell their product through phone. Everyday, they call hundreds of customers who may be interested in MHelp Desk, and say that they really enjoy what they do--dealing with people--and never consider this as working. From the conversations with Jacob, I found that he was really open-minded and had a lot of ideas. Later, Josh Okot, a student in our entrepreneurship class, even got a customer for them through phone.