Blog post 8

  1. List five takeaways from Guy Kawasaki’s talk and explain exactly how you will integrate that concept/construct/strategy into your project. Make it compelling. Don’t write generic forgettable text.

One major point I took away from the presentation, is that in these early stages of the project a true mission statement and some of the pickier details really aren’t necessary. He spoke a lot about how generic and not to the point many mission statements are, and I totally again. My experience with that stage of projects has always felt unnecessary and premature. Focusing on the team’s concept, and proving the idea is much more important in the early stages. Remembering to focus on the goal at hand and not small details will really help our team advance the project.

Another big takeaway was his point about finding soulmates. I completely agree with this. In my life, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some really amazing people that pushed me to be better and do better. We played off of each other to make each other better and that environment was really crucial in making me who I am today. I find that the only way for an organization to be really truly successful is for the people in leadership positions to be friendly at the minimum with soulmates being the best case scenario. I plan to continue to build my relationship with my team members and create an environment of trust and open ideas. I’ve tried to make everyone in the group comfortable to allow a free flow of thoughts and ideas.

Another key takeaway, was his confidence while he was on stage. Guy demanded respect and the viewer’s attention when he was on stage, and that’s something I have trouble with sometimes. I forget what the name of the effect it, but essentially, when one doesn’t have much knowledge on a subject, they can feel like they’re experts, but the more you learn about a given subject, the less you feel like you know. I really feel this sometimes, as the path we need to take for a fully successful product is still unbeaten and windy. I plan on practicing presentations more and more to boost my own confidence, and that of the people around me.

A big takeaway from Guy’s presentation is the 10/20/30 rule. He stated that you should only have 10 slides, present for 20 minutes, and use size 30 font. This is something I learned about and taught when I ran the National Youth Leadership Training in Washington D.C. for a summer. Having the presenter ease off of reading the slides, and be comfortable with themselves to piece the bullet points together is difficult, but it takes a presentation from mediocre, to excellent in just one step. I plan on working in the future with my team to ease ourselves off of reading the slides and really being comfortable with our information and our slides.

Lastly, Guy said to flatten your learning curve. I think this is a really important concept especially since we will be developing our product in a foreign country. Eliminating extra steps, and making the process as simple as possible is an ongoing goal for the team. We hope to cut out baking steps to eliminate overhead costs and extra steps.

  1. In partnership with one or at most two team members, present a business model canvas for your venture.

Our business plan is currently very basic and requires a lot more validation with prices and operation costs that we can gather in Sierra Leone. At the moment we believe we can source all of our ingredients at a low enough cost, to produce each cake at 5.8 cents per cake. Or target wholesale cost is 10 cents, so this leave room for 4.2 cents per cake of overhead room. The team’s goal is to seel the cake to street vendors for 15 cents per cake, leaving the team a 5 cent profit off of every cake. Our current data tells us that we can seel the cake for 20 cents to the consumer, which gives the street vendor a 5 cent profit per cake as well.

Our current goal is to scale up the process to 500 cakes/day, which would give us a profit of $25 for all 500 cakes and would generate $25 dollars of income for the vendors per 500 cakes. As a team, and in accordance with professor Khanjan, we feel this is a reasonable goal to reach and would be beneficial for all parties involved. The children get the help and treatment they need and deserve, the vendors make a strong income, much larger than the average in Sierra Leone, and our group makes some money back to help us expand, and reach more people in need.

 

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