Week 15 Reading Reflection

     In “Vikram Akula: Business Basics at the Base of the Pyramid”, I was surprised to learn more about microloans and how they work. In my economics class in high school we talked briefly about the challenges of offering these types of loans and the effect that they could have on the economy in developing nations. It was nice to see how microloans can help improve a nation. It was a little surprising that they only offer loans to women but when they mention that “women are more likely than men to reinvest profits in the household and to support others in their borrowing group” (Akula), it makes a lot of sense.

     In this article I didn’t find any section to be particularly confusing. It’s been a while since I’ve taken an economics class that covered microfinance, but overall the article was simple to understand.

     It would be interesting to know Akula’s view on loaning money to single fathers. Since in developing nation there are such a large number of women who die during childbirth it stands to reason that there would be at least a small population of single fathers. Based on Akula’s reaction to first having to deny the women a loan before he started his own business, it would interesting to know his reaction to single fathers. I would also be interested in knowing what the secret was to overcoming the challenges of having a successful microfinance business since I’ve always heard most attempts at starting one have failed.

     For this article I didn’t disagree with anything that Akula mentioned. I found most of the article to be somewhat like a narrative so it was refreshing to hear about a real life story instead of reading about concepts and how they supposedly apply to the real world.  

Final Reflection

     Looking back on the variety of assignments that we’ve completed this semester it’s crazy to think about how much this class has changed me. I found that any assignment that challenged me to go out and interview people really took me out of my comfort zone and as a result will probably be the assignments that I will always remember, mostly because of how proud I am for completing them. The reading assignments probably taught me the most about what entrepreneurship is but the other assignments taught me what being an entrepreneur means.

     I don’t know if I would fully call myself a full entrepreneur but I’m definitely closer to being one than when I started this class. Throughout the past fifteen weeks I’ve noticed that I’m more aware of problems around me and I’m slowly starting to think of ways to solve these problems. The most important aspect of being an entrepreneur that I’ve taken away from this class is that I’m more open to the idea of failing. I realize that while you need to try your best at everything you do, you need to be able to accept the fact that you will fail but that doesn’t mean you’re a failure, what I’ve taken away is that, it means your succeeding at being an entrepreneur.

     My biggest advise for anyone considering taking this class is to ask yourself why you want to take this class. What do you really want to get out of it, an easy A or validation of your business concept? If you take this class with the right intentions then you won’t view the assignments as mundane tasks. Actually do the assignments. This might seem obvious but the best way to experience what being an entrepreneur is, means doing the assignments. To have the best success in this class try and work a week ahead, I’ve found that there’s a lot less stress involved when you have a week buffer for some of the assignments.

Elevator Pitch No. 4

     I once again, overall, received positive feedback on my previous pitch. The only questions that people really had were about how the food would be served and what type of foods I would be serving. In pitch 3 I added a line about serving comfort foods and delicious desserts which led someone to question what I mean when a say comfort foods. For this pitch I didn’t change anything regarding the type of food that I’ll being serving mainly because I’m not a hundred percent sure what I will be serving so I want to keep the description broad in order to not turn any people off of the idea by being too specific about something I’m not set on.

     What I did address in this pitch was how the food would be served by mentioning that there would be a variety of different size mugs. I don’t want anyone to have the impression that all of the food served at Mugged will be in small portions because I actually prefer a large wide mug to a small standard size mug and would like to reflect this preference at the café.

Venture Concept No. 2

     Opportunity: Are you tired of walking into cafes and noticing that they’re just like the ones down the block? Do you ever wish there was a café that had a small town feel for you to escape to during your busy day?

     I’m targeting two opportunities in cafes: how food is eaten and the atmosphere that you eat your food in.

     I’m a long-winded storyteller who could easily spend an hour eating a sandwich that would take any other person fifteen minutes. I’ve found that when I go to lunch with other people, I end up with cold food or melted ice cream way more often than I do if I’m eating by myself and while eating out of a mug might not scientifically be proven to maintain my food’s internal temperature longer, it has led me to discover a unique approach to eating my meals. Although the nature of the opportunity is small, only affecting a small percentage of people, there is a long window of opportunity because I don’t think café owners are looking at their customers experience after receiving their food. Cafes today, in my opinion, are focused on providing the food and drinks people want at reasonable prices but they aren’t doing anything to distinguish their café from the competition, except for maybe a small difference in price. The cafes I’ve visited all present the same generic atmosphere and I want to do something different.

     I’ve found these problems to be more prominent in cafes located in college towns because I feel as though they were designed for the “on the go” students, as well as the general population. Gainesville, in my opinion, has an unfulfilled market for small cozy cafes where people can spend long stretches of time.

     Innovation: Through the series of assignments I’ve created an incrementally innovative solution to the problems identified above. The goal is to take a traditional café and provide an in store experience unlike any other while creating a unique twist. I want to create a café that serves everything in mugs in order to not only have food maintain its temperature better but to also use mugs as a basis in developing a cozy atmosphere. My solution is an incremental solution because I’m not making any major changes to how cafes operate, only how the food is served. What I’ve come to realize over my years of eating meals out of mugs is that the food that I have eaten out of mugs generally retains its temperature longer, which I think is because when food is in a mug, instead of on a plate, less of the food is exposed to the air and the decreased surface area means that it takes longer for the food to be affected by the temperature in the room.

     Revenue will come from the sale of food and drinks. In one round of costumer interviews I determined that people generally only visit cafes to buy drinks so it stands to reason that drink sales will comprise the majority of my revenue and also serve as one of the main elements that will draw people into the doors. I don’t currently know the price that I will be able to sell my food and drinks for because it will depend on who my suppliers are and what price I can buy my inputs for. Ideally I would like to set the prices at a rate that makes Mugged competitive with other cafes in the area.

     Venture Concept: By serving everything in mugs, food will retain its temperature longer and as a result allow people to eat their food slower and maintain a conversation with their friends without the worry of their food becoming unappealing too quickly. I personally find the use of mugs to be a cozy experience; just the act of wrapping your hands around a hot mug puts me in a better mood.

     I expect that the aspect of my café that will draw people in, will be the atmosphere that will be created because there isn’t currently any cafes that I’m aware of that provide a cozy small town atmosphere. My small employee base will help to reinforce my ideal atmosphere by creating the organizational culture I discussed in a previous post. If my café is established in a prime location than it will likely make customers more inclined to visit my café since a majority of people tend to visit the most convenient café. My competition is the large array of currently established cafes in the Gainesville area. If my main focus is college aged students than Starbucks would be my largest competition simply because they are located on campus and are therefore the most convenient café for most people. In order to make myself the most competitive I can, I need to have my prices in the same ballpark as other successful cafes and be in an easily accessible location to draw in potential costumers.

     As mentioned in a previous post, http://cxgoss.blogspot.com/2016/03/my-unfair-advantage.html, my greatest advantage is that I want to create an organizational culture that fosters a relationship between costumers and employees. By having this goal in mind when initially developing my idea, it allows me to tailor my café to support my ideal culture more easily than someone who already has a functioning café.

     As I discussed in the Amazon Whisperer assignment, http://cxgoss.blogspot.com/2016/03/amazon-whisperer.html, I’m not totally sure what direction I want the café to move towards once it’s established. I’ve entertained the idea of adding a to-go option as a way to increase the number of potential customers, by targeting people on the go, but worry that they wont get to experience what my café is really offering.

     Assuming I launched this café, in five years I hope to still run Mugged by surviving the difficult first couple years. Long term, I have no interest in making Mugged a chain coffee shop or franchising because I feel that if we did expand we would loose some of elements that I’m currently working to achieve. I just hope to continue to improve the menu and the experience.

     From the group of people that I interviewed and also received feedback from, I’ve determined that a to-go option might be beneficial to my café depending on where I open my café and what type of demographic the population is comprised of. From my feedback, I realized that I couldn’t claim that hot food served in my café will remain warmer longer just because it’s being served in mugs. To fix this I added a small disclaimer stating that while there is no scientific evidence to prove what I’m doing, I have personally experienced the effects of eating out of mugs.

Week 14 Reading Reflection

     In chapters 3 and 4 of Entrepreneurship: Theory, Process, and Practice I was interested to learn that because of “the growing number of female entrepreneurs, companies are now examining the ethics of caring” (Kuratko 100). I would have thought that there would have always been a level of caring in entrepreneurship so I was surprised to learn that the ethics were heavily focused on rules and regulations when the field was male dominated. In regards to chapter 3 on the entrepreneurial mindset, I thought it was nice to learn about Kuratko’s views on what the mindset actually encompasses and being able to take that and compare with our own experiences so far.

     I found the section about conceptualizing corporate entrepreneurship strategy to be a little confusing and I didn’t feel like the figure on page 60 cleared things up much which is disappointing because Kuratko’s tables and figures usually clarify his points well.

     I would be interested in knowing have innovation, particularly corporate entrepreneurship, is incentivized. It seems like money is the most common way to incentivize anything these days so I’m just wondering if there is anything else that Kuratko can think of. Something else I would be interested in knowing is when do you start to face the possibility that a venture could be a failure. I feel like there’s a delicate balance between giving up on a failure and trying to fix it so I just wonder when is the right time to make the call to stop.

     I didn’t strongly disagree with anything that Kuratko mentioned in these chapters. However, there were some points that I feel like could be wrong but I don’t have enough evidence to support my own thoughts. 

Google Gold

     To reach search engine optimization I tried to have blog posts of an optimum length and have they posted on a regular basis. Other than that I didn’t really have a strategy to be one of Google’s top results because I kind of assumed that after a couple of posts my blog would show up on the first page. However, I learned through this exercise that my name is very common, both my first and my last, so when I searched my name I came up with the same two people; Caitlin Goss, a lawyer in Queensland, and Wayne Goss, a makeup artist on YouTube.

     I can’t really say that I had any keywords that I used in the blog. I mainly used the labels required on each post. However, once I developed a name for my business I began using the name a lot in my post but even then “Mugged” is a common word that doesn’t really stick out as a keyword.

     Other than YouTube, I didn’t use any other social media platforms for my blog because I’m just not a big user of social media. On the videos uploaded to YouTube I imagine that I got a couple of views from people not in the class, perhaps people trying to create their own elevator pitch. However, I didn’t have a link in my videos that would direct the people to my blog so I can’t say that YouTube increased the popularity of my blog.

     My most viral post was Customer Interviews No. 1 with 42 views. For this particular post, I published it the Saturday before it was due which allowed people to look at it and give them an idea of what to do for their own post, especially because it was the first round of interviews.

     I tried a couple of different keywords that I thought would have my blog listed on the first page but unfortunately none of them worked until I was super specific. I started of general with “Caitlin Goss Blog” which didn’t list me on any of the twenty-four pages. “Caitlin Goss ENT Blog” narrowed the results but I still failed to show up on one of the eleven pages. I was finally able to show up on the first page, the only page of results, when I searched “Caitlin Goss Ent3003 Blog” but even then I was the third of seven results. However, I’ve found that the more I search “Caitlin Goss Ent3003 Blog” the further up the list I move.

Week 13 Reading Reflection

     In chapter 14 of Entrepreneurship: Theory, Process, and Practice, I was a little overwhelmed with all of the information that goes into the valuation of a venture. I thought it was interesting to learn about how to assess the value of a company because when I watch Shark Tank they always mention, and sometimes talk about, what the particular value of the company is but not how they reached the number. Overall, I think that it was helpful that Kuratko included the list of questions that an entrepreneur must answer.

     In this chapter I didn’t find any section to be particularly confusing, at times it was overwhelming but not confusing.

     It would be interesting to know if Kuratko knows the method for venture valuation that would be the most effective in showing future success because since there are three methods it would make sense that one has an advantage over the other two. Something else I would be interested in knowing is Kuratko’s opinion on hiring an outside source to evaluate a company. While I imagine that this could be pricey, I also think that it would give the best objective evaluation of a company and provide the owner with the best information moving forward.

     I disagree with the concept of emotional bias because there are some people that build businesses with the intent to sell them for a profit. I think that emotional bias plays a larger role in ventures started by people who are passionate about their product.