The Idea
This journey began in my Small Business Entrepreneurship class during Winter of 2019. The class was designed to give students an opportunity to see what it is like to startup, run, and exit a business in ten weeks. On the second day of class each person was expected to come with an idea for a business to pitch to the class in our "marketplace of ideas". I contemplated many different ideas and evaluated the plausibility of them. This helped me narrow it down to one idea, creating a community movie/entertainment night every week. This caught some good drift in class as this ended up having the most people jump on board to this plan. At at that moment, Show for Charity was about to materialize.
The Planning Stage
Like many other businesses, this one required extensive planning to be able to pull it off. First of all, I met with my team and we all established strengths and weaknesses in order to determine what roles people would be playing. Once that was determined, we discussed what the business will actually be accomplishing. There was lots of disconnect in that area as the original idea began to morph into a new idea. Once we finally agreed on a business idea, I facilitated a discussion on what tasks will need to be done. A checklist was made to help organize what needs to get done and who will be responsible for doing it.
After everything was established, we presented our new idea to small business owners in Bellingham to get feedback. We received critical feedback as it changed the way my business would be running. The panel classified this business as an event planning business and provided us with examples of how hard this could be. We continued to make small changes up until the first run of the new business. The final decision, a video game competition that also features a hangout spot for students to relax.
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We faced many challenges ranging from room reservations to weather delays but we managed to secure four days where we could put on our event.
Execution
This was the most exciting part because we will be able to see how the plan will play out. We gathered our equipment and met at the room we reserved, set everything up and then waited. We went out and talked to people passing by to get them to come in or even just donate to our charity. For a two hour event, we had only three people come in to see what was going on. After this first run we had to evaluate what went wrong and how to fix it.
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We then hosted a second event with some new changes but still faced the same results as before. The consensus we came to was that maybe the market we thought was there actually isn't. We had to really think about what to do at this point because we needed to bring in some money for the business.
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In our final event, we made a major shift in what type of things we would be doing. I made the decision to take advantage of the new Game of Thrones season that was coming out and show the last two episodes of the previous season to get people ready for the new one. I had my marketing team create a new poster and flyers for this new event and post them up everywhere around campus. On the day of our final event, we had brought in more people and more money to donate than the previous three events which we considered a success.
Reflection
After this business venture, we met up as a team and looked at the overall performance of the business. This was certainly a tough thing to accomplish in ten weeks, by a team of students who have no experience in event planning. Even though we did not manage to "breakeven", we still came up with money to donate to our charity of choice, the Whatcom Humane Society.
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We ran into many issues, but the top two issues were inadequate planning and narrowing down the scope of the business. The main issue was determining the scope, because this caused us to all work in different directions at some points which began to hinder our progress. Our planning phase should have helped us determine the scope of the business as well but we all rushed through just to get the events started to see how they would go.
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I firmly believe that if we had two quarters to complete the project, we could have made it very successful because we were recognizing the problems and fixing them as we went. This business was not the worst performing in the class and certainly not the best. This one however, seemed to be the most ambitious of them all because we were trying to do something that no other team has attempted. Overall, this was a success and an excellent learning opportunity that I can apply to my future entrepreneurial endeavors.