Final Reflection - Assignment 30

2) I think the most formative experience in this class was writing the elevator pitch for the first time. While I did not think that writing it was difficult, I came to realize the importance first impressions are when presenting an idea or concept to an audience, especially when you are asking that audience for a favor (money). I think this helps me realize that taking time to craft your own personal elevator pitch or introduction is critical to making a lasting impression in your professional network.

My favorite assignment was the last reading reflection. I would never have found the book I read on my own volition, so I am glad I was “forced” to by that assignment. I took away some valuable concepts that I will be able to apply both within and outside my professional network.

3) I do not think I developed an entrepreneurial mindset as I still see a clear and solidified career path for myself through the traditional employee route. While it is interesting being able to work on your own time and be the master of your product, I think I am better set up for the traditional career path and it will lead to more success over time.

4) I would recommend putting more effort than you think is required to coming up with your problem and the solution to that problem (business idea). Since it is the foundation for the whole course, a bad idea will make completing the other assignment difficult. To garner the entrepreneurial mindset, I would recommend choosing a problem solution that you have some passion for. Otherwise you will not find an interest in solving the problem and seeing how you can make others lives easier. 

Venture Concept No. 2 - Assignment 29

1) Venture Concept

Opportunity

Most college students suffer from stress and an overwhelming amount of work classes, extracurricular activities, grad school or employment search, and a demanding social life. While college students have come to accept busy schedules as the norm, they have also accepted being tired and lethargic as also being the norm. From the time we began working hard in high school or earlier, we already accepted the notion that feeling tired and rundown is simply the inevitable consequence of working hard to accomplish your goals. I believe the root cause of this presumption is imbedded in broader cultural themes and habits that contribute to feeling of tiredness, lethargy, and stress.

While a little stress goes a long way to motivating students accomplish their goals, students often find themselves overwhelmed by this stress and consequently are brought further away from the goals they have tried so desperately to achieve. Of course, being tired from working hard is inevitable, but I believe there are simple solutions to this problem that is overlooked by almost all young students as well as adults.

The largest environmental forces is the social norms that the post lunch pre dinner lull is inevitable and the solution to being tired is to pour caffeine, energy drinks, or other chemicals you can not pronounce into your body. This only exacerbates the issue at hand.

Currently, students attempt to satisfy this need by either ignoring their mental health, writing it off as normal, or trying to compensate incorrectly.

The opportunity that is found is preventing or remedying this issue is large and is pertinent to almost the entire working population that has not already found a solution to their issue that prevents them from further exacerbating this issue. The primary opportunity lies in young people as their bodies are most likely to accept being tired and push through it.

The window of opportunity for finding a solution to this issue extends well into adult life after college. I think there is a great opportunity to expand my service into the working generations and the elderly population. However, I recognize that these markets are vastly different than my original target audience, so I will need to make adjustments accordingly.

Innovation

My “innovation” is not so much an innovation but instead a solution to people’s issues, but by targeting a more niche demographic, allows it to have a higher penetration rate and be more successful than competing services like mine.

My service provides college students with ideas to solve their energy issue. My company, Your Body Loves You, utilizes our human capital of employees that have spent years crafting their lifestyles to optimize their daily energy and health levels to provide college students with solutions that allow them to not have to fight against their body. We believe that your body is your best friend and is designed to work alongside you and not against you. However, your body needs you to work with it and provide it with the resources and fuel it needs to do its job: helping you live a healthy lifestyle while also working hard to accomplish your goals.

The service first attracts potential customers by our free Instagram platform that provides daily tips and blog posts centered around nutrition, fitness, and overall energy levels. At this point, followers will be enticed to sign up for our premium service where they can receive personalized counseling and plans that will allow them to reach their goals. This service is a subscription-based service that utilizes 3 month contract lengths to ensure that the customer has adequate time on the program to see results. A 6-month subscription costs around $100, just over $1 a day and our cost structure is primarily labor costs of the associates that provide for their clients.

Venture Concept

My product solves college students energy levels because it targets aspects of their lives that they are largely neglecting or not thinking about enough. For example, we believe that your nutrition, sleep, and circadian rhythms contribute the most to your daily energy levels and overall well-being. However, college students do not take these aspects seriously. Sure, everybody knows 7-8 hours sleep is ideal, but college student prioritize other things above sleep. By correcting the most impactful aspects first, Your Body Loves You is able to easily correct the largest issue contributing to people’s well-being.

Customers will want to buy this product because they have the inherent human need to care for themselves. We believe one of the largest issues college students have is that they underestimate the results they can achieve if they make minor adjustments to their daily routines. When potential customers utilize our free service through Instagram, they should begin to see improvements in their lives. Once they realize this they will want to continue improving, and this is where they have the opportunity to purchase a 3-month subscription.

My underlying service is not unique and many competitors exists. However, I differentiate due to my focus on college students and their specific needs. Understanding the uniqueness of their lifestyles is a critical component to achieving client goals.

Customer experience plays the largest part since we are promoting an overall life experience improvement, so customers should feel good the more they interact with our brands. This is even more critical when you take into account the subscription based business model of my service. If customers do not find an appropriate value proposition for the price they are paying, they will quickly cut their service.

Most important resources – Culture of improving clients well-being (benchmark success on clients success not monetary success)

Next opportunity – Potentially branching out to emotional well-being instead of mental and physical well-being

What’s next for me – I want to be able to have Your Body Loves You provide service to populations besides college students. Adults long into their successful careers need even more help living a healthy lifestyle since their bodies become more vulnerable to diseases and sickness. As an entrepreneur I want to say I made a difference in people’s lives.

2) Feedback

My feedback focused on two main areas

1.       Ensuring my customers enjoy the service enough to want to be returning customers

2.       Expanding my target audience to older generations, especially the older generation without a knowledge base of healthy habits.

I agree on the first point and it was a major focus of my original venture concept. I think that customer satisfaction will be critical as customers can easily determine if the price they are paying is appropriate for the service they are receiving.

I slightly disagree with the second point as I don’t think older generations are as willing to make lifestyle changes. Older generations grew up with no scientific knowledge of nutrition and healthy habits, so educating them is like teaching an old dog new tricks. While I know this is somewhat a negative opinion, many professional in the space (especially doctors) have no knowledge in the space, and changing their preconceived notions is a lot harder than with a younger generation.

3) Changes
My changes to my venture concept are described in the red text in my above venture concept. I took my two main areas of feedback (described in part 2) and incorporated them into the venture concept and weighed the pros and cons of each. While I think that the feedback in critical to incorporate, I should use my judgement when expanding my business to an unfamiliar target audience.

4) Illustration

This represents the multi-generation approach I can take to my business. Hypothetically, all generations represented in the below image could be a target audience for my service

Reading Reflection No. 3 - Assignment 27

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big - Scott Adams 

1) The general theme of the book is found in the title – failing does not equate to losing. One can still fail at a lot of things (just like the author) and still be able to find success by adopting certain mentalities.

2) Adams specifically mentions how entrepreneurs will never find success based on goals, but rather on a system. Adams advocates for adopting a system mindset, which differs from a goal mindset in that victories are found largely in the process and it is a culmination of the system that results in achieving a goal. For example, instead of setting a goal to lose 20 pounds, a system would be to exercise daily. By actually exercising daily you are achieving successes without the automatic failure of your goal until you actually lose the 20 pounds.

3) It would go back to the system mindset described above. The exercise would be 1) for students to think of a broad goal (such as receiving an A in the class). Then they must decide on the system to achieve that goal (complete every assignment and get atleast a 50% on all cupcakes). Then they must decide what they will do to achieve success based on the system and not the goal. In essence, getting an A shouldn’t be a thought in their minds, they should be focused on each individual assignment.

4) Adams makes a point that withholding praise in immoral. In essence he says that compliments and positive feedback in the adult world is so hard to come by, so when you actually are impressed by something, you should be obligated to let that person know. It is something so easy but makes a large difference in the lives of the other person. While I recognized that giving compliments is something that one should do, I never really took it to the extreme of morality. I may disagree slightly with this point, but looking at it from that perspective somewhat makes sense and encourages me to compliment people more often, especially loved ones.

Your Exit Strategy - Assignment 28

1

    1) Since my business is largely a service structure, I think it will be difficult to create a large economy of scale and grow my business for the remainder of my working career. Thus, my ideal exit strategy is stepping down from my position as CEO once I believe I have tapped the entire possible markets successfully or if I simply do not have enough time to dedicate to the business.

2  2) I have chose this strategy primarily because I do not think I could grow my business large enough to support me financially for an extended period of time. I think continuing my career in finance will give me a better financial standing down the line with the same amount of effort that would take to grow my business. I would probably sell my stake in the company and cash out.

3  3)     I think the greatest impact by exit strategy has played into formulating my business idea was in the creation of my target audience. I decided early on that my primarily market would be UF and some other Florida colleges. By choosing this target market, I implicitly decided that achieving economies of scale will be difficult, thus my business in its current format could not sustain across the country.

Celebrating Failure - Assignment 26

1.    This semester I began taking classes for my specialized masters degree. While I have done well to keep up with the more demanding class loads, I often times found myself struggling to organize my study schedule since I am so used to using third party services like Study Edge and Smokin Notes. For my final exams for the last module (graduate degree courses are scheduled in two Mods a semester), I studied neither enough not the correct materials in order to do well. Consequently I did not do well on the exam and my final grade was not what I hoped for. I consider this a failure not because of the grade, but because of the lack of effort I put into studying for something I considered important.

2.    From this experience, I learned that while it is challenging to study for something you do not have adequate study materials for, I still need to be able to find ways to study for an exam in those type of classes. Since they are less structured, I need to be more proactive and sometimes do more than I think would be necessary.

3.    I believe that failure is preferable to regret. Often times the feeling of not doing something and regretting it eats away at us worse than the feeling of failure. In this scenario, I probably feel more regret than I do shame of failure. I regretted not spending the extra night or two in the library more than I feel sad about the grade I received. To handle failure, I try to view failure as positive rather than negative. Because I even tried and do not have to live with regret makes failing okay in my book.

This class has put faikute in a different perspective and has made it more common to see. Entrepreneurs are considered failures until they finally make it with their new idea. Being able to live with that takes fortitude.

I am more likely to take on a risk now than I was largely because I realize that most of the time, abnormal success comes from taking unusual risk. Beyond that, since I am young I can probably afford to mess up in some things. Trying things ultimately makes it worth it, regardless of the outcome.

What’s Next? - Assignment 25

Existing Market

Step 1: I think the next thing for my service is a portion designed to help clients with emotional health, rather than my current focus of just mental and physical well-being.

Step 2:

Interview 1: Since we are focused on the UF population, we can probably set up in person meetings rather than doing everything online

Interview 2: Provide actual training sessions at southwest rec or another gym. That way you can not only provide an additional layer of service, but by attending exercise sessions with clients, you ensure they are taking your advice.

Interview 3: Since we want to expand to adults as well as college students, we can begin my helping professors at UF. That way we can stay centralized on a college campus but also branch out our potential customer base.

Step 3:

I did not think much about providing in person consulting as part of my company. Since our primary model of advertising is on social media, that provides we catch the attention of the entire social media platform, not just those at UF. Since most of our clients will come from UF, it makes sense to include in person consulting to out packages. Marketing to professors at UF is a great idea as it expands my current market but also opens the door to adults and rapidly expanding my total addressable market.    

Additionally, in person coaching will allow us to establish more of a well-known presence at UF rather than operating solely behind closed doors. Since my service begins by focusing on a centralized region (smaller customer base), I should make sure I juice the most out of my potential locally. My service can be scaled appropriately to include solely online coaching for areas away from college campuses and include in person for certain cities. This also capitalizes on the opportunity to reach out to professors to include in my current market.

New Market

Step 1: A radically different market from my current market is a service directed towards businesses. This would probably take the form of organizing corporate culture and office buildings to maximize employee happiness and productivity.

Step 2: My venture concept would probably have to take a different form when providing a service for a corporation. However, it can take a multi-legged approach where we first advise on changing culture and then should the business want it we can then provide the same service provided to college students but tailored to the employees of the business.

Step 3:

Interview 1: I spoke to a local startup in Gainesville that designs products that can be used by companies or events to advertise. All partners and officers of the business are current UF students. They told me that they think it would be hard to incorporate my product into their startup since the number of employees of the firm are small and they currently operate out of the UF innovation hub, so altering their office space is not possible. However, they said that on a persona basis, the employees could benefit from my my original venture concept since they are all extremely busy and often time burnout.

Interview 2: My second interview was a local study business sin Gainesville that most students utilize for difficult classes. They host in person study reviews and have a considerable number of employees. They mentioned that they think designing the office building can be useful since they are often teaching study sessions in their building, so having students able to better concentrate and learn would actually make their service more effective, helping increase sales. They also mentioned that advertising my product to students could be beneficial for both parties since I will have an outlet to advertise and they will have more energetic students.

Step 4:

In my first interview, I was not surprised by the response, as a small startup would have difficulties implementing another program to their already hectic business. My second interview surprised me since I did not think about the potential opportunity to expose by business not only to the employees of the business, but also to their customers who happen to be the same students I would be targeting anyways. Essentially this would provide me with another outlet to advertise.

This market does sound to be attractive to an extent. The largest issue I would have with this new market is the cost to cater to this market. I would probably need to hire a new set of employees with a much different skill set than my original venture concept. Beyond labor costs, implementing strategies, essentially research and development, would take time and I would have to build the infrastructure for these businesses. The most realistic option is found in businesses like in my second interview as we provide each other with a mutual benefit beyond monetary compensation. I could essentially barter my services for advertising, which may lead to more revenue than simply asking for monetary compensation for my service to the business.  

Venture Concept No. 1 - Assignment 24

Business Name: Your Body Loves You

Opportunity

Most college students suffer from stress and an overwhelming amount of work classes, extracurricular activities, grad school or employment search, and a demanding social life. While college students have come to accept busy schedules as the norm, they have also accepted being tired and lethargic as also being the norm. From the time we began working hard in high school or earlier, we already accepted the notion that feeling tired and rundown is simply the inevitable consequence of working hard to accomplish your goals. I believe the root cause of this presumption is imbedded in broader cultural themes and habits that contribute to feeling of tiredness, lethargy, and stress.

While a little stress goes a long way to motivating students accomplish their goals, students often find themselves overwhelmed by this stress and consequently are brought further away from the goals they have tried so desperately to achieve. Of course, being tired from working hard is inevitable, but I believe there are simple solutions to this problem that is overlooked by almost all young students as well as adults.

The largest environmental forces is the social norms that the post lunch pre dinner lull is inevitable and the solution to being tired is to pour caffeine, energy drinks, or other chemicals you can not pronounce into your body. This only exacerbates the issue at hand.

Currently, students attempt to satisfy this need by either ignoring their mental health, writing it off as normal, or trying to compensate incorrectly.

The opportunity that is found is preventing or remedying this issue is large and is pertinent to almost the entire working population that has not already found a solution to their issue that prevents them from further exacerbating this issue. The primary opportunity lies in young people as their bodies are most likely to accept being tired and push through it.

The window of opportunity for finding a solution to this issue extends well into adult life after college. As long as someone is working hard constantly and has not put much thought into their energy levels, the window to introduce them to a solution is open.

Innovation

My “innovation” is not so much an innovation but instead a solution to people’s issues, but by targeting a more niche demographic, allows it to have a higher penetration rate and be more successful than competing services like mine.

My service provides college students with ideas to solve their energy issue. My company, Your Body Loves You, utilizes our human capital of employees that have spent years crafting their lifestyles to optimize their daily energy and health levels to provide college students with solutions that allow them to not have to fight against their body. We believe that your body is your best friend and is designed to work alongside you and not against you. However, your body needs you to work with it and provide it with the resources and fuel it needs to do its job: helping you live a healthy lifestyle while also working hard to accomplish your goals.

The service first attracts potential customers by our free Instagram platform that provides daily tips and blog posts centered around nutrition, fitness, and overall energy levels. At this point, followers will be enticed to sign up for our premium service where they can receive personalized counseling and plans that will allow them to reach their goals. This service is a subscription-based service that utilizes 3 month contract lengths to ensure that the customer has adequate time on the program to see results. A 6-month subscription costs around $100, just over $1 a day and our cost structure is primarily labor costs of the associates that provide for their clients.

Venture Concept

My product solves college students energy levels because it targets aspects of their lives that they are largely neglecting or not thinking about enough. For example, we believe that your nutrition, sleep, and circadian rhythms contribute the most to your daily energy levels and overall well-being. However, college students do not take these aspects seriously. Sure, everybody knows 7-8 hours sleep is ideal, but college student prioritize other things above sleep. By correcting the most impactful aspects first, Your Body Loves You is able to easily correct the largest issue contributing to people’s well-being.

Customers will want to buy this product because they have the inherent human need to care for themselves. We believe one of the largest issues college students have is that they underestimate the results they can achieve if they make minor adjustments to their daily routines. When potential customers utilize our free service through Instagram, they should begin to see improvements in their lives. Once they realize this they will want to continue improving, and this is where they have the opportunity to purchase a 3-month subscription.

My underlying service is not unique and many competitors exists. However, I differentiate due to my focus on college students and their specific needs. Understanding the uniqueness of their lifestyles is a critical component to achieving client goals.

Customer experience plays the largest part since we are promoting an overall life experience improvement, so customers should feel good the more they interact with our brands.

The primary infrastructure of a business supporting my product is primarily employees who are able to provide quality services to their clients as well as a tactically organized social media presence that will be the central form of advertising.

Most important resources – Culture of improving clients well-being (benchmark success on clients success not monetary success)

Next opportunity – Potentially branching out to emotional well-being instead of mental and physical well-being

What’s next for me – I want to be able to have Your Body Loves You provide service to populations besides college students. Adults long into their successful careers need even more help living a healthy lifestyle since their bodies become more vulnerable to diseases and sickness. As an entrepreneur I want to say I made a difference in people’s lives.