Reading Reflection 3

I decided to read The Art of Social Media. 

1) The general theme of the Art of Social Media is how social media accounts are influential to the marketing campaign of a company. This book goes into details about what someone who is starting to market their company should do in terms of marketing on social media. It talks about some basic ideas, but also is very specific in other regards. 

2) I think this book really helped me see the positives of using social media marketing in order to have a successful marketing campaign. This book connects with this course because one of the biggest aspects of any new company needs to be their marketing efforts. A lot of entrepreneurs with small startup companies or ideas need to find an efficient way to market their product, and social media is the best way to do that since EVERYONE is on social media. 

3) If I designed an exercise based on this book for ENT3003, I would have the exercise be all about online and social media marketing. I would have the students create their own social media advertisement and have the students come up with various ideas for marketing online. 

4) I did not really have a big aha moment when reading this book. I think the only thing that really surprised me was all the different ways entrepreneurs can market their products on social media. There are countless ways to post advertisements online and on social media and there are even more strategies someone can use to market their product. 

Exit Strategy

1) Prior to this assignment, I did not think much about my exit strategy. I think my plan is to build the business up over the next 5-10 years and make it worth as much as possible, and then ultimately try to sell it and make a pretty penny. The idea of building the business and then selling and investing in another company is one that sounds really good to me.

2) I selected this strategy because ultimately the goal in life is to make money. Once you build a company, there are aspirations to build something else and that is what i eventually want to do. Being able to sell my company for a large return and then invest in another company or come up with a new idea is what I would do if I were in that situation.

3) My exit strategy has not influenced the other decisions I have made in regards to my company. Going into this assignment I previously had the idea that I would build up the company to the largest it could possibly be, and then sell it down the road. The end goal in life is to provide for your family and to live a comfortable and satisfying life.

Celebrating Failure

1) Over the course of any semester, students are bound to fail at something. I am going to tell you about a time this semester when I failed at something. I was enrolled in a class this past semester that I did not find very difficult. I was doing really well in the class until I had some personal medical issues rise up. I was no longer able to walk to class every day to go to class so I had to drop it. I felt like I failed myself because I had to medically withdraw from a class that was not very difficult.

2) I learned that not everything is going to go your way in life. I have always been a big believer that everything happens for a reason, so I feel like the major lesson that I will have learned from this failure experience will reveal itself later down the road.

3) I do not think anyone enjoys failing something, however it is something that everyone experiences and teaches them lessons. For me, I deal with failure internally. It eats at me for a while but eventually I come to terms with my failures and I try to come up with a way to avoid failing again. Everyone copes with their failure differently, but for me this is the best strategy. I do not think this class changed my perspective on failure because everything this class teaches about failure is something I already knew. Failure is a good thing, as long as you can learn from your mistakes.

Elevator Pitch #3

2. Most of the feedback I got from my second elevator speech was very positive. I was not told to change anything from the feedback that I got. I think the feedback that I received from my first elevator pitch was enough to get my going in the right direction for the second one. 

3. Based on all the positive feedback, I decided not to change much at all about my elevator pitch. This is roughly the same pitch with a few minor tweaks to the order in which I state things. 

Reading Reflection #2

1) What was the general theme or argument of the book?

- The book Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker has the general theme of society being driven by more and more innovation and entrepreneurship. Without constant innovation and entrepreneurial ideas.

2) How did the book, in your opinion, connect with and enhance what you are learning in ENT 3003?

- I feel as if this book reinforced my knowledge that I picked up from ENT 3003. To this point, I learned in ENT 3003 that innovation is the key to advancing society and this book just reinforced my previous knowledge of that. 

3) If you had to design an exercise for this class, based on the book you read, what would that exercise involve?

- If i had to design an exercise for this class based on the book, I would design an exercise that gets people thinking of new ideas all the time. The more ideas that one comes up with, the more likely they are to hit on one of the ideas and start a great opportunity.

4) What was your biggest surprise or 'aha' moment when reading the book? In other words, what did you learn that differed most from your expectations?

- I didn't really have a biggest "aha" moment when reading this book. I feel like because this book reinforced a lot of my previous knowledge, i was not really surprised when I was reading this book. If there was a real "aha" moment, it would be the moment I knew that all of the knowledge I learned from ENT 3003 is always applied to real world entrepreneurship. 

Growing Your Social Capital

For this part of the assignment, I was unable to find three people that fit the parameters of the assignment for the specific industry my opportunity is in. Although I could not find three, I was able to find one personal assistant that I could do this assignment on. This personal assistant's name is Mia. 

1) Who they are and what their background is.

- Mia used to be a personal assistant when she first graduated college. She went to the University of Delaware and majored in finance. She was unable to find a good job in finance so she became a personal assistant at a large financial company in New York City. 

2) Which 'slot' you are filling with each person (i.e., domain expert, market expert, supplier), and how the person fills the spot.

- Mia would fall under the supplier category because she used to supply her assistance to the people that needed her help. 

3) A description of how you found the person and contacted the person.

- I found Mia through a family friend. She is close friends with my first cousin that currently lives in New York City with her. 

4) The nature of the exchange you have with the person -- what favor did they do for you? What is the return expectation? 

- Since she lives in New York, I was unable to have a face to face conversation with her. However I was able to have a FaceTime conversation and get all of the information I needed. She was willing to listen to my idea and thought very highly of it. 

5) How will including this person in your network enhance your ability to exploit an opportunity?

- Including this person in my network will help my exploit my opportunity because she gave me a lot of good ideas as to what I need to do to succeed in the personal assistance business. She left me with a lot of good marketing ideas, along with the steps I need to go through in order to build a reputable business. 

Finally: Reflect. This experience requires you to do a little 'targeted networking.' How will this experience shape how you participate in any future networking events? Did this experience differ from your networking experiences in the past? How?

- This was a great learning experience for me. It is the first time that I actually started networking for myself. I think I am walking away from this exercise with a lot of new knowledge that I am going to need in the future. Everything gets better as you practice it more, and I believe this was the first step I needed to start networking for myself more and to build a reputable organization. 

Idea Napkin #2

1) You:
     I feel that I have a few strong talents. My best talent is my ability to socialize. I am a very friendly person and I can talk to anyone. Another talent I have is my ability to stay motivated on a task. I aspire to be someone with a large family that I am very close with and to have a steady job that pays enough to support my family. If I were to start this business, I would devote the majority of my day to this business if it projects to be very successful, however, family is extremely important to me and time must be devoted at night to them.

2) What are you offering to your customers? 
     The service that I am offering to customers is an assistant service for business owners or bosses can hire to help around the office or with personal work. This assistant service will utilize college students to give them the experience in the workplace that they are looking to be apart of one day.

3) Who are you offering it to?
     My assistant service will be offered to anyone, however a smaller subset of people will find the service more useful than others. My target consumers will be any business owner, manager, or boss that needs assistance around the office or with their personal work. The consumers could be male or female and could be any age. All of my customers will have one thing in common, they will all need the help of an assistant to get their work completed on time and in an efficient manner.

4) Why do they care? 
      Customers will pay for my service because it is a service that will only be used by the people who really need it. The assistants will be all college students so they will sign up to be an assistant for someone in the workforce, and the people that need the assistant will pay for it because that is the only way you can get an assistant.

5) What are your core competencies? 
      What sets my company apart from everyone else is the utilization of college students as the assistants. This will be a fast and easy way to hire an assistant that is specializing in the same field as you but just doesn't have the same work experience because they're in college. Finding a helpful assistant will never be easier than this.

Feedback Memo 

- I received a lot of good feedback from my first idea napkin. None of the feedback really told me to make any changes so I only changed a few small parts. One of the main takeaways I took from my feedback was incorporating why the use of college students is a better use of personal assistants than using older personal assistants that already graduated from college. The second takeaway I took from my feedback was to emphasize how this will help people not waste time anymore and get their work done on time.