Final Reflection

Although this is the end of our journey together in ENT 3003, you now have a set of experiences that you can use to better navigate the future. My hope is that each of you have, to one extent or another, developed an entrepreneurial mindset. That you keep a sharp eye out for problems, and you're willing to offer a solution. 

For this final reflection, I'd like you to do a few things:

1) Read through your blog from this semester. Recall all of the experiences you've had a long the way -- the highs, the lows -- the fun moments, and the moments of drudgery, and even the moments of dread.

There were a lot of highs and lows throughout the semester.  I started really shaky in this class without much of a direction and then my interest and abilities, and my tenacious mindset in regards to the class grew.

2) What sticks out to you as the most formative experience? The experience that you'll remember years later? What was your most joyous experience? What experience are you most proud of yourself for accomplishing?

3) At the beginning of the semester, I mentioned that I wanted each of you to develop an entrepreneurial mindset. And we repeated the mantra -- I am an entrepreneur. Now, at the end, do you see yourself as an entrepreneur? Do you think you have moved closer to developing an entrepreneurial mindset?

4) What is the one recommendation you would make to the students who are going to journey down this path in the future? What would you recommend they do to perform best in this course? What would you recommend they do to foster that mindset?

Once you have written your post, please include a picture (for illustration!). Include the phrase "Final Reflection" in the title.

Don't forget to make the declaration. 

Reading Reflection No. 3

In this exercise, I'd like you to select a book from the second half of the Official ENT 3003 Reading List and report on it. This part of the list focuses on books that cover, generally, entrepreneurship, business, and learning. I'd like you to address the following in your post:

1)         I decided to read How to Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Adams Scott.  I would have to say that that in reading this book I realized there to be many themes throughout.  I will later delve into what I thought my biggest surprise/’aha’ moment later which, in my opinion will actually describe the overall theme of the book. Themes throughout the book include the interaction of system 1 and system 2 of the mind and how they interact.  System 1 work autonomously while system 2 requires effortful thinking.  This theme early on sets the base for the book and helps the reader understand the operable mindset, per say, of how we think as individuals.  This sets up the second theme with our thinking and the role that heuristics play in all of our thinking patterns.  Throughout the researchers have a focus towards why individuals have difficulty thinking and making judgments statistically.  The next part dives into examining how overconfident we are as individuals.  This in turn plays a role specifically into our ability to think statistically, especially when it comes to chance.  The mind has the general ability to accidentally underestimate the power of chance and over compensate correlation between two events and how this plays into our ability in thinking and making judgments.  This leads into the second to last theme surrounding choices with a focus on economics.  The theme here surrounds how, as previously mentioned, the workings of system 1 and 2 occur, and work together but influence all the choices we make.  It focuses as well on our framing bias and that when some risk is presented with a negative outcome versus a positive one we tend to take the risk more often when it is presented with a negative outcome as if we have something to prove.  Lastly, the book comes together examining the two selves we have – the experiencing self and the remembering self.  Overall, it examines the conflict between the two and our general difficulty in pursuing happiness as individuals while still satisfying our ‘two’ selves that form our identity.  What memories do we make, how do we make them, and how do we let our experiences as we move through life affect and exist alongside our remembering self. 

2)         This book I think really enhanced what I have learned so far in ENT 3003.  First off, it helps explain many of the decisions and the ways in which I have responded to assignments in the class.  Overall, it definitely will help me look openly towards assignments to counter the framework I generally analyze assignments with, to then be able to attack/think about the rest of the assignments from an additional, different point of view.  This book connects with each individual assignment in some way, shape, or form.  Every assignment involves some sort of analytical thinking.  Thinking Fast and Slow analyzes the mind and how we think throughout, therefore this new found knowledge can be used in every assignment. 

3)         If I were to design an assignment for this class specifically around this book I would make everyone answer five basic questions that coincide with the five parts of the book: Two Systems, Heuristics and Biases, Overconfidence, Choices, and the Two Selves.  I would have everyone write down their knowledge or what comes to mind based on all these titles for each part of the book.  I would then have them write about how they arrived at their answers or what memories or experiences shaped their answers surrounding the title of each part. Then I would have them analyze themselves in terms of the titles of each part.  After I would have them read each part, and after each part I would want them to reflect on the same question that was originally asked and reflect on their original answer.  After the book is finished and I would incorporate a cumulative response in a general reflection on the work as a whole and how it has affected, personally, that individual. This is the assignment I would create around this book. 

4)         Lastly the biggest ‘aha’ moment of this book was realizing that, this is one of the few books that can be summarized by the title, Thinking Fast and Slow.  This may seem like an impossible, loaded statement, but if I had to describe this book in four words this would be the only way possible to describe and summarize all five parts of this book.  The reason it is my biggest ‘aha’ moment was because it simplified and helped my understanding of the book.  For me when I first started reading this book, it required a lot of concentration and effort by me.  I had to make sure it was absolutely quiet with no distractions around me because the material was so thick.  But once I realized the title summarizes the book and brings all the parts together I saw how everything was connected.  I saw how each part built off the previous one and that cumulatively the book comes together and helped me with the way I analyze everything now.

Venture Concept No. 2

Venture Concept No. 2

Many if not all individuals should exercise regularly.  Some of those individuals just go to the gym with no plan, and others go to the gym with a plan and a goal in mind.  The same routine over and over can get tiresome, boring, and not be effective for the individual depending on the goal.  On one slope individuals eventually want to switch up their gym routine.  Others want to not have to bring paper and pencil to the gym in addition to everything else.  Our technological advances have not kept up with the age old art of working out, and exercising in general.  This area needs to be fully integrated.  We too often, do not, create effective mobile applications to simultaneously satisfy needs of working out and the importance of tracking the workouts and results readily on your phone.  We are in the digital age.  The need of such a mobile application exists.  Our phones and technology around us keeps advancing and connecting us with all activities in life from helping us find the best restaurant to eat out at in town to helping us wake up during the correct time of our sleep cycle.  Everything else in the world around us has caught up with us.  Working out and our mobile technology has not. These customers are only satisfying their need through a few different mobile applications related to working out currently.  Other than those individuals there are still potential customers that still use pencil and paper, or just don’t keep track of their workouts at all.  All of these potential customers should keep track of their workouts, and/or have an easier time tracking their current workouts than the method or way in which they are being kept track of currently.  The market though is somewhat above a certain level because of the mobile data usage needed to run the application.  This will just limit the number of people that will be able to use the mobile application.

The service/product itself will be called Gym-in. It will be a mobile application available on the apple app store and the google play marketplace.  The application will consist of a multitude of features centered around exercising and working out.  This application will allow workouts to be tracked in real-time, effectively search for information concerning workout plans and nutritional information, It will be able to match the music you should listen to, to your workout based on your current mood, and it will allow you to check-in where you are working out to compete with others in your area, to help promote exercise of all forms from all individuals.  There specifically will be a find a workout plan, with personalized questions including experience, age, current weight, goal weight, overall goal, current height, and etc. regarded to your physical appearance.  The mobile application will then be able to run an algorithm sorting through the database of workouts and using the answers to the questions answered by each individual to find and customize the 5 best workout plans, which can then be separated by the variable amount of time you have available per week.  This will be the center feature of the mobile application.  All of this will be connected with a website where you can do everything you can do on the mobile application.  In addition, there is a B2B sales website as well.  Through this intermediary we well be selling and leasing the newest gym equipment.  Alongside the new equipment, we will also have refurbished equipment that can be bought.  This will be one our revenue drivers here at Gym-in.  The gym equipment will have such a large range as some equipment can be sold for just $100 while others can sell for close to $10,000.  The refurbished equipment will look to retail for half of those amounts to be made more affordable.  In addition, we will have accessories like wrist wraps to actual products like protein being resold.  This is to add another revenue driver despite the smaller returns.  The website will include advertisements for other companies wanting to target the same.  The ads would be sold based on time and rotational frequency over 100 different banner ads, for example.  These prices will vary and depend on what the company wants and what I can produce in website traffic.  Lastly, we would include a premium service for five dollars a month with a one-month introductory period for one dollar.  This is my innovation and the revenue drivers I have in place to generate positive cash flow.          

My mobile application, Gym-in, will get America moving again.  It will help individuals have that personal trainer in their pocket they aren’t able to afford.  It will give the experts the extra personalized tip that will get you past that hump to keep getting stronger without having a watchdog.  It will help solve the issue of time.  Workouts will be sort-able by the time available.  It will help keep customers and add more.  It allows for all these features and especially combined with the personal workouts, to satisfy the needs for any individual, whether they already workout, or have never worked out a day in their life.  Current consumers have trouble with the features, don’t even know that the website has a coinciding mobile application, or are even intimidated by workouts on the current mobile applications.  Gym-in will be the most personalized service available, this will help us drive advertising revenues up.  By being more organized and offering more combined features than our biggest competitor, Bodyspace which is the workout tracker application for workout plans through Bodybuilding.com.  This will help draw customers away from their mobile application to ours. It will not be an easy task, but since they are our only main competitor in the market of workout tracking applications we will also be able to introduce a lot of new users who were not using a mobile workout tracking application because of our simplicity.  The main issue is startup costs and accuracy.  Are we actually delivering the best top five individualized workouts for the individual, and at the same time is our platform simplistic for every user, young and old.  Then lastly, will we be able to market our product enough so our name and associated logo gets out to the public, so even if our download rate is low, our awareness rate is high enough to offset that.  As I jump into the role of packing and supply chains, I would most likely start the mobile application and the website simultaneously in the beginning.  Then as a means of growth add the gym equipment side of the business since we would have at minimum more access to credit and/or cash flows for investment.  Early on, the company would consist of very few individuals.  I would say a minimum of five people, between a coder, design specialist, an expert, and a few utility people who would deal with the financials, secretary work, and other utility types of issues that we as a team would have to deal with. Overall, I would play a role in the accounting and financial side of the business while overseeing the overall product development.  I would institute an open forum for all ideas at all times from any employee.  Otherwise, it would be departmentalized based on function.  For example, there would be a design department and then an IT department which can convert that design through code into the mobile application.  These are just some of the departments.  There would also be a chief financial officer, a chief operation officer, and a chief executive officer once the company grew above 15 employees. This is because I believe that if the corporate culture would be to be installed too late then it might not create the structure necessary to continuously succeed.  This is how I would fuse working out for everyone from their pockets.

Three Minor Elements

My most important resource will be our simplistic integration of multiple functions all in one mobile application.  Usually for the features I am looking to offer, usually there are multiple applications that one must download in order to achieve all the similar functions that we will offer in one.

The next opportunity that I have decided would be adding in the gym equipment department in which they can be bought, leased, or sold at discount once refurbished.  This will target a businesses and help spread the mobile application through getting gyms to sponsor the app while leasing the newest equipment from Gym-in.

For me, I would eventually want to sell the company while its growing.  Personally, I want to retire young and not have to work when I’m older. Also the company could have future ups and downs but I can exploit the upside early on so I can capitalize on a return and then reinvest my money into another venture.

2) Provide a summary of the feedback you received from your previous venture concept description. You certainly want to include the student feedback, but you may also include the feedback you received from others during the "What's Next" exercise. You want to summarize all of the feedback, but be sure to place an emphasis on what people recommended you change about your idea. (In other words, don't just describe the positive feedback.)

I know it says not to just describe the feedback but that is all I can do.  Everyone did think it was a good idea.  Respectively, each had their different reasons why they approved of it.  These reasons, in my opinion, show me the things I should and did keep constant in my Venture Concept Number 2.  Specifically, one person who commented liked how I thought of leasing the gym equipment, to add another revenue driver that would increase revenues and smooth them out as well. Also two of the three people who commented also enjoyed reading about my concept over time and loved watching it develop which to me, necessarily is not feedback, but in a way it helps when I need to push forward coming up with the idea.  Lastly, one person mentioned an opportunity that I had never thought of before.  This was helping with consistency.  Instead of targeting new and old veterans at the gym, target the fact that people need consistency and help staying on track with their workout.   That was by far the best piece of feedback I received.

3) Describe how you changed your venture concept, based on what you learned from the feedback.

Once you've done all of this, please post the URL here, and make the declaration. Well done!

 

An Affirmation

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByK4s27pC31gQWdPalo2WHlpYkU/view?usp=sharing

My Exit Strategy

Personally, I would intend to sell my business within 5-10 years.  Unless there is an economic downturn again that would hurt the value of the business completely I would sell.

As an individual, who likes to try new things and continuously succeed, selling makes sense for me at this stage in my life.  It can provide me with at least a small nest egg and then allow me to invest into another new business. Making successful businesses would be something that I would definitely get addicted to, which is why I would sell them to start other ones.  Also it has always been a dream of mine to learn how to play and become really good at golf, so either after this venture or a subsequent venture I would definitely want to learn how to play golf and go pro.

My exit strategy has influenced my previous decision concerning my concept.  Knowing that I want to sell pushes me to perform better in the planning and early stages because if it doesn’t succeed and I am unable to sell my business for much then it is pointless and a waste of time, in my opinion.   Also I am always a person who has to plan, which is made easier with an end goal in mind and it helps me focus on what needs to get done. 

Celebrating Failure

Celebrating Failure

I fail at many things that I want to do.  Not in a bad way, but because I try to form too many habits at once or try to hold myself to unrealistic standards.  Early on, in this class, I would save all my assignments until the end of the week and fail at doing them.  My schedule puts the assignments behind others because of the due dates are Sunday night versus Friday night for my other class’ assignments.  Then because I usually work every day on the weekend, I end up being “too tired” or do not manage my time well enough to where I freak out, start to worry, and never get the assignment done on time.  For example, earlier this year I chose to go to dinner with family instead of finishing my assignment as a means of procrastination which ended up causing me to miss the deadline.  Instead as the especially these last few weeks, I have to look at the assignments at a minimum in the beginning of the week to make sure I let ideas swirl around in my head.  This has led me to complete mostly if not all of my assignments the past few weeks.

 Through all of this I learned of another strategy to combat my failure in completely these assignments.  Recently, one of my roommates moved out and took the bar stools and table and chairs with him.  This has left me with a leather couch and recliner to sit on to do any work.  Whenever I sit in the recliner to do work I realized it takes a while to finish assignments of mine.  Then I thought why don’t I try standing up like the students at the law library do, which I thought was so strange.  I wrote my whole venture concept standing up this week.  It helped my productivity and focus.  I learned through my failures that I now do work better standing up.   

Failure is hard.  It is difficult.  It something we have to learn how to deal with and we all deal with in different ways.  I personally, especially when I was growing up I internalized a lot of failure.  I kept it to myself and was always hard on myself for failing.  As I have grown up I realize that doing so, is pointless.  It is counterproductive.  If I fail I have to see the positives.  Once you fail, it is in the past and it might repeat itself in the future but you can make adjustments or challenge yourself and be more prepared to handle failure next time.  In relation to this class it has helped me deal with failure.  There are some assignments I wish I had taken the time to do, but that is in the past I try to just focus on the assignments now.  Also I realize that everyone fails and it is not a singular type of event.  This class overall, has helped me overcome failure and see that there is only room for improvement.    

Venture Concept No. 1

Venture Concept No. 1

Many if not all individuals should exercise regularly.  Some of those individuals just go to the gym with no plan, and others go to the gym with a plan and a goal in mind.  The same routine over and over can get tiresome, boring, and not be effective for the individual depending on the goal.  On one slope individuals eventually want to switch up their gym routine.  Others want to not have to bring paper and pencil to the gym in addition to everything else.  Our technological advances have not kept up with the age old art of working out, and exercising in general.  This area needs to be fully integrated.  We too often, do not, create effective mobile applications to simultaneously satisfy needs of working out and the importance of tracking the workouts and results readily on your phone.  We are in the digital age.  The need of such a mobile application exists.  Our phones and technology around us keeps advancing and connecting us with all activities in life from helping us find the best restaurant to eat out at in town to helping us wake up during the correct time of our sleep cycle.  Everything else in the world around us has caught up with us.  Working out and our mobile technology has not. These customers are only satisfying their need through a few different mobile applications related to working out currently.  Other than those individuals there are still potential customers that still use pencil and paper, or just don’t keep track of their workouts at all.  All of these potential customers should keep track of their workouts, and/or have an easier time tracking their current workouts than the method or way in which they are being kept track of currently.  The market though is somewhat above a certain level because of the mobile data usage needed to run the application.  This will just limit the number of people that will be able to use the mobile application.

The service/product itself will be called Gym-in. It will be a mobile application available on the apple app store and the google play marketplace.  The application will consist of a multitude of features centered around exercising and working out.  This application will allow workouts to be tracked in real-time, effectively search for information concerning workout plans and nutritional information, It will be able to match the music you should listen to, to your workout based on your current mood, and it will allow you to check-in where you are working out to compete with others in your area, to help promote exercise of all forms from all individuals.  There specifically will be a find a workout plan, with personalized questions including experience, age, current weight, goal weight, overall goal, current height, and etc. regarded to your physical appearance.  The mobile application will then be able to run an algorithm sorting through the database of workouts and using the answers to the questions answered by each individual to find and customize the 5 best workout plans, which can then be separated by the variable amount of time you have available per week.  This will be the center feature of the mobile application.  All of this will be connected with a website where you can do everything you can do on the mobile application.  In addition, there is a B2B sales website as well.  Through this intermediary we well be selling and leasing the newest gym equipment.  Alongside the new equipment, we will also have refurbished equipment that can be bought.  This will be one our revenue drivers here at Gym-in.  The gym equipment will have such a large range as some equipment can be sold for just $100 while others can sell for close to $10,000.  The refurbished equipment will look to retail for half of those amounts to be made more affordable.  In addition, we will have accessories like wrist wraps to actual products like protein being resold.  This is to add another revenue driver despite the smaller returns.  The website will include advertisements for other companies wanting to target the same.  The ads would be sold based on time and rotational frequency over 100 different banner ads, for example.  These prices will vary and depend on what the company wants and what I can produce in website traffic.  Lastly, we would include a premium service for five dollars a month with a one-month introductory period for one dollar.  This is my innovation and the revenue drivers I have in place to generate positive cash flow.          

My mobile application, Gym-in, will get America moving again.  It will help individuals have that personal trainer in their pocket they aren’t able to afford.  It will give the experts the extra personalized tip that will get you past that hump to keep getting stronger without having a watchdog.  It will help solve the issue of time.  Workouts will be sort-able by the time available.  It will help keep customers and add more.  It allows for all these features and especially combined with the personal workouts, to satisfy the needs for any individual, whether they already workout, or have never worked out a day in their life.  Current consumers have trouble with the features, don’t even know that the website has a coinciding mobile application, or are even intimidated by workouts on the current mobile applications.  Gym-in will be the most personalized service available, this will help us drive advertising revenues up.  By being more organized and offering more combined features than our biggest competitor, Bodyspace which is the workout tracker application for workout plans through Bodybuilding.com.  This will help draw customers away from their mobile application to ours. It will not be an easy task, but since they are our only main competitor in the market of workout tracking applications we will also be able to introduce a lot of new users who were not using a mobile workout tracking application because of our simplicity.  The main issue is startup costs and accuracy.  Are we actually delivering the best top five individualized workouts for the individual, and at the same time is our platform simplistic for every user, young and old.  Then lastly, will we be able to market our product enough so our name and associated logo gets out to the public, so even if our download rate is low, our awareness rate is high enough to offset that.  As I jump into the role of packing and supply chains, I would most likely start the mobile application and the website simultaneously in the beginning.  Then as a means of growth add the gym equipment side of the business since we would have at minimum more access to credit and/or cash flows for investment.  Early on, the company would consist of very few individuals.  I would say a minimum of five people, between a coder, design specialist, an expert, and a few utility people who would deal with the financials, secretary work, and other utility types of issues that we as a team would have to deal with. Overall, I would play a role in the accounting and financial side of the business while overseeing the overall product development.  I would institute an open forum for all ideas at all times from any employee.  Otherwise, it would be departmentalized based on function.  For example, there would be a design department and then an IT department which can convert that design through code into the mobile application.  These are just some of the departments.  There would also be a chief financial officer, a chief operation officer, and a chief executive officer once the company grew above 15 employees. This is because I believe that if the corporate culture would be to be installed too late then it might not create the structure necessary to continuously succeed.  This is how I would fuse working out for everyone from their pockets.

Three Minor Elements

My most important resource will be our simplistic integration of multiple functions all in one mobile application.  Usually for the features I am looking to offer, usually there are multiple applications that one must download in order to achieve all the similar functions that we will offer in one.

The next opportunity that I have decided would be adding in the gym equipment department in which they can be bought, leased, or sold at discount once refurbished.  This will target a businesses and help spread the mobile application through getting gyms to sponsor the app while leasing the newest equipment from Gym-in.

For me, I would eventually want to sell the company while its growing.  Personally, I want to retire young and not have to work when I’m older. Also the company could have future ups and downs but I can exploit the upside early on so I can capitalize on a return and then reinvest my money into another venture.