Business Card and Business Plan Competitions

Amelia, Samantha and Regan got to work to design our logo and business card for the competition. What a great job they did on the logo - everyone was pleased. We all had input into what should be included on the business card but still, when we were sitting back and congratulating ourselves on a job well done, we discovered we had forgotten to say what our business was! Back to the drawing board . . .


The Business Plan was due in Week 9 (last day of term) we thought . . . Every other year it was apparently due in at this time but at the beginning of Week 8 we discovered that it was due to be with our Regional Coordinator by 3 pm on Friday of Week 8! Amazingly no-one panicked (except our teacher) we were well down the track with everything decided and the market research was coming in steadily so it was just a case of writing it all up!


The whole team pulled together although it wasn't as easy as we first thought to write all the reports. We had the benefit of reading our three previous Young Enterprise teams' Business Plans which was a great help. The three best English students proofread the whole thing and found quite a few errors, funny how you think you are saying one thing but on re-reading find it no longer says what you thought.

Our school's computer system tried its hardest to thwart our efforts when it decided to give up the ghost for two days and then refused to print out our effort in colour so it had to go in black and white which was a disappointment, but I guess it was what we had to say which was the most important. One thing was for sure - we were all very proud of our ideas and the way we just got on with the job. (including our teacher)

Watch this blog space to see how we got on!

E-Day (Enterprise Day)

The first official function of Young Enterprise was the Young Enterprise Training Day. On this day all the teams in our region, the Eastern Bay of Plenty, converge on Whakatane for a day of getting to know each other and getting to grips with "The Business Plan!" There were about eight or nine teams from four schools. Most of the other schools have Young Enterprise as a part of the timetable but for ourselves and Edgecumbe it is an extra curricular experience.


We have the most distance to travel so piled into one of our school vans for the journey to Whakatane. We looked very flash too dressed in our school's No1 uniform which we all like to wear when representing our school at events. (see the photo which shows us in ernest discussion with one of the 'dragons'.) Arriving late, after having got the venue wrong, we soon settled in for an informative day. Many thanks to the ladies at the Whakatane District Council who were so helpful and found the correct venue for us.

We had a fun and informative day on all kinds of topics. Two of the most interesting were about guerrilla marketing and core competency. Two of the most useful parts were our team brainstorming to decide on a product and the session with the 'Dragons'. The 'Dragons' were all business advisers who rotated around asking us questions about our proposed business, answering all our questions and making suggestions for funding etc which may be available. We had arrived at this day thinking that we had just about decided on our product but afterwards, when we returned to school, we actually ended up choosing a product, the idea for which came from this day. Thanks to everyone involved in this day it was most helpful.

Term One - Which product to choose?

During Term One we have been extremely busy! Below is the process we went through to come to our final decision to 'produce a DVD which will demystify and simplify Maori culture and Marae protocol for people who have little or no knowledge of things Maori'.

Our first task was to find a product which we could all be proud of and we investigated many and varied ideas. after brainstorming. Then extensive investigation managed to reduce these products to about six and we finally reduced these to three which were then really thoroughly investigated. The whole team would have been happy to do any one of the final three products which were a DVD travel guide of the Eastern Bay of Plenty with emphasis on, although not exclusively, places, events and experiences of Maori interest, gift baskets of soap etc hand made and including essence of kawakawa leaves, a Maori medicinal remedy and a DVD which will demystify and simplify Marae protocol and Maori culture for those people who have little or no knowledge of 'things Maori'. To help us decide we thought it would be helpful to produce a list of criteria which we wanted our product to achieve for us and this proved to be the factor which decided our final product.

1. Seven of the eight team members are Maori so it was an absolute for the product to promote an aspect of things Maori.
2.It must also be a product which we could produce once and then be able to focus on the marketing and selling of the product with minimum extra production work.
3.It must have little or no competition in our market.
4.There must be a need for it.
5.It must be able to generate a good rate of return on our investment.
6.Most important, it must be fun to do so that we could all give it 100%!

We completed market research sending out 100 questionnaires with 37 being returned. The feedback was really valuable and included ideas we could include on the DVD, one even took the trouble to write a letter to us because they thought the idea was so good and they wanted us to think carefully about the tone and mana which we should create with the video. Only two replies said that they did not want us to contact them with a view to purchase when the product was ready to go to market.