Assignment 29A Venture Concept No. 2

• Opportunity:
• Shortage of parking spots available to college students in college towns is a growing need that increases every year with the incoming of many more students attending college than previous years. This is not only an inconvenience issue but a safety issue as well. 
• The protocol customer that has the unmet need in which my opportunity aims at satisfying is the college student, ages 18-22 both males and females. These people are my target customer because they have the unmet need out of all the people at Universities (out of professors, employees of the University, etc.) 
• The lack of parking spots available for college students at off campus apartments possess a huge safety threat for the individuals. Universities typically schedule large lectures, labs, and other classes in the evenings which means that students will find a mode of transportation other than walking to attend these late night classes. When students do not have parking close by their apartment complexes or place of living this means that they often have to walk alone in the dark back to their homes, this puts students in an involuntary threat just because they do not have parking available to them outside of their apartments. 
• This market of parking garages is defined geographically by college towns where there is typically a lack of parking available for students living off campus. The market is defined demographically by college students, as i mentioned earlier ages 18-22 both males and females. 
• This "window of opportunity" will be open as long as people attend universities and live in off campus apartments or even dormitories as more and more colleges are beginning to make some on-campus housing technically be located off-campus. This "window of opportunity" will most likely be open indefinitely until towns in which universities are located begin to see the growing need for more parking availability in their towns and take care of the issues within their towns government. 
• Customers are currently satisfying this need by either making sacrifices, in which they would just have to not have a car with them while they are in college or if they are lucky enough to be living in an off campus apartment that has a very few parking spots available to residents than they would be paying an absurd amount monthly to rent the spot, according to my interviews that I conducted throughout past assignments, some renters pay $200 monthly to their landlords for a parking spot.

• Innovation:
• My company works to provide parking garages for all college students living in off campus apartments where they are not currently provided parking close to their apartments and houses in which they live. Once decided where the central location of the parking garages will be, I will bring in my team of producers and employees and the work will begin.
• My parking garages will be affordable, more than less than half of the price of going rates for individual parking spots from apartment complexes in the area. My parking garages will also be extremely safe, as I know that safety is a high priority for my customers, the parking garages will have only one entrance and one exit that will be guarded by a live security officer 24/7 as well as surveillance cameras on every corner of every floor of the garage to help fight any crime that could occur, especially such as theft. 
• My rate that I am looking to first implement for a reserved parking spot for a 12 month contract would be $60 monthly, costing the customer $720 for the whole year. I will also be offering a 6 month contract for a reserved parking spot and that will be $75 a month, costing the customer $450 for the entire year. I also will offer a per-semester package that will be a flat fee of $500 for the entire semester. 

• Venture Concept:
• Why my innovation will solve customers unmet needs: 
• My service of building parking garages for college students living an off campus housing will solve the college students unmet need because I will be providing them with parking spots that are located close to their off campus housing and I will also be satisfying their unmet need by offering an extremely hard to beat price when it comes to parking spots in college towns. 
• Customers will switch to my product:
• Because I will be one of the only companies offering parking garages with parking spots in the area for a price as good as mine.
• Who are my competitors?
• My competitors will be any other parking services, their weaknesses are going to be matching my price point.
• Roles my business plays in my business concept:
• The location of my business plays a huge role because of how mobile it is, I am able to travel all over the country to colleges in every state.
• Organizing my business:
• I would organize my business as one main office as my business started to spread throughout different regions and having employees and suppliers at individual locations. 

• Unfair advantage:
• My most important resource aka "secret sauce" is going to be that I have had my own personal experience with this unmet need being a college student myself so I am going to be able to cater and provide exactly the kind of service that college kids are in need for.
• What's next for the venture?
• My next opportunity in my business is to find other types of ways to cater to college students parking needs, this includes scooter, motorcycle, bicycle, etc parking being provided for students living off and possibly on campus in the future.
• What's next for me?
• I would love to have reached as many college students that I have been able to in the next 15-20 years. My goal is to provide parking garages for cities where space is limited but offices buildings are not.

Feedback:

• Need to have more details
• Make sentences shorter
• Condense paragraphs
• Make sure I include more plan details

How I'll Adapt:

• To make it have more details I just went back and read through where I had written paragraphs about certain aspects of my opportunity and where I felt that it was vague.
• I was better about condensing my paragraphs and went back to review.

Assignment 30A Final Reflection

• What sticks out to me as the most formative experience throughout this entire semester has got to be deciding whether I wanted to come up with my opportunity to be a service or a product. After I decided that I wanted my opportunity to be a service it was then even more difficult to decide on what that service was going to be. 
• My most joyous experience was being able to interview people for some of the assignments that we had to have interviews for, it was super cool to be able to get out and do interviews for something that I was passionate for. When other classes have made me go out and interview people for assignments it has usually been seen as a chore and something I had to do not wanted to, but for this class the interviews were enjoyable and I had a lot of fun as well as gained experience. 
• The experience that I am most proud of myself for accomplishing was definitely just coming up with a final draft for this service opportunity. In the beginning of the semester I thought that it would be really hard to come up with a service and to stick with it to make it better but in the end I realized that I did a pretty good job and I have created a service that can actually be useful in people's lives and not just as an assignment. 
• Now that we are at the end of the semester I do feel that I see myself as more of an entrepreneur than in the beginning of the semester. I do not know that this is necessarily a career path that I would like to pursue but this class has been one of my most enjoyable throughout my college life so far just because I found all of the material so interesting and fun and I truly looked forward to the lectures every week because I enjoyed learning about the entrepreneur mindset!
• One recommendation that I have for future ENT3003 students is to take this class seriously and really put in an effort to listen and pay attention to the material that is taught throughout this course, even if you think you have no interest in the entrepreneurship material just have an open mind!!!
• 

Assignment 27A Reading Reflection No. 3

The Art of Social Media by Guy Kawasaki

1.) The general theme of this book was how to treat your social media accounts as if it were anything else in your life, one of the examples that Kawasaki provided was that if your softball team keeps losing games because it is a hobby to the team, not a commitment, then that is okay but you can not complain when you do not win any games. This is true for social media as well, if you do not set your social media accounts to be professional and geared towards the people and other accounts that you wish to interact and connect with, then you can not be upset when this does not happen.

2.) In my opinion, this book, The Art of Social Media, relates to what we have learned this past semester in ENT3003 by how it had an emphasis on how your social media is set up and how you are presenting yourself to current and future potential customers. Throughout this course we have had lectures on how to make sure that the way we are presenting ourselves to the world and how we will have our name remembered as will have a huge effect on the customers and business that we have. Not only has Mr. Pryor mentioned this before but so have numerous of the guest speakers that we have had in this course emphasising how important it is to treat your social media accounts very professionally.

3.) If I had to design an exercise for the class relating towards this book it would be a very personal one. I would assign every student to take out their phones and pull up their social media. This book talked about how you should narrow down and limit your social media presence to just two accounts (Ex. Twitter and Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram, etc.) so I feel that a good exercise would be to make each student look at their own social media accounts and decide which two accounts they could narrow down to.

Once the students had picked their two accounts of social media, I would ask them to just take a look at the content that they have posted on those accounts and decide if this was material that future employers and other people would consider "professional" or if the content they were posting on social media would potentially hurt them or cost them a job opportunity in the future.


I would ask the students to have one major takeaway from the activity, if they saw the importance of having their social media platforms be set up in a professional manner, that from now on they would work to filter the content that they were posting.

4.) My biggest 'aha' and surprising moment of the book was that I initially thought from the title that this book would be about bashing social media and talking about how it is destroying society, so to say the least I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it was the exact opposite. Instead this book just highlighted on the fact that we need to represent ourselves professionally on social media to become the greatest version of ourselves and entrepreneurs that we can be.

Assignment 28A Your Exit Strategy

1. My Exit Strategy:
• I do plan to stay with my company service of parking garages as long as my finances and income are well enough for me to do so. My biggest hope would be to turn this business into a family owned business and be able to pass the ownership from myself to my kids, their kids, and so on. If this was not a possibility, I would try to sell my company and try to get enough money out of selling the company to be set for retirement, but this would not be my first choice. 
2. Why did I select this Exit Strategy:
• I selected this exit strategy partly because I have always wished that someone in my family had a family business that was and could have been passed down from generation to generation. This longing that I always wished for in my own family would be something that I would have the opportunity to start and have it for my children and grandchildren to carry on. 
3. How do I think my Exit Strategy has influenced other decisions I have made in my concept?
• I think that knowing that I want my business to become a family business and be able to be passed down for as many generations in my family to come defenitly paid some influence for my decision that I made in this company so far. 
• I would have to say that it made an influence on how I structured finding suppliers for my company, by using local companies that I already had a relationship with that just so happened to be family owned business as well ( Ex. Hooks Construction ) I was already on my way to set up my company to be surrounded by other family owned businesses. 

Assignment 26A Celebrating Failure

1. My failure this past semester:
• I would without a doubt have to say that my failure this past semester has been in my Management class. I studied extremely hard and had a good knowledge of the material going into the first exam (or so I thought I did) but then when I got my grade back.... which was a D, I was pretty confused and wondered what I did wrong so I decided that maybe I just didn't study hard enough. 
• When it came time for my second exam I decided I would study the same material and things that I did for the last exam (I'm still not sure why I thought this was a good idea since I got a D on the last exam butttttt.) I studied for a lot more hours and did more practice exams for this past exam and when I received my grade I had only improved by 1 point.... 1 freakin point after I had studied twice as hard. 
• Flash forward to right now, I am studying currently for my final exam in Management even though it is not until December 5th, I have to get an outstanding grade to just get a B in the course, and hoping to get a better grade, at this point I would honestly be happy with getting a C on this exam.
2. What I learned from it:
• The biggest thing that I learned from earning these two D's in this course this semester is two things.
• First, not to be so hard on myself. I have always put a ton of emphasis on my grades and I have never gotten a C in a class and so having a C currently in this course has given me major stress but I just decided to look at this and realize that this is just one course and that it doesn't determine me or who I am as a person.
• The second thing I learned from this was to study different material. It may have taken me 2 exams to realize that I need to study different material, how I study, and to begin studying further in advance. This time around for my final coming up I am hoping that these changes that I learned will give me a different grade and result in the end. 
3. Reflection about failure:
• There is no doubt that failure can be a really embarrassing thing, my dad was definitely upset to learn that I currently have a C in management and my mother was not too thrilled either. But, I think that failure is definitely something that everyone of us need in our lives, if we don't fail then we will never learn how to grow and how to learn better ways to achieve things throughout our lives. Failure also helps us find those people that we surround ourselves with that we can depend on for when things do fail and we learn to ask for the help and support from others. 
• This class has helped me change my perspective on failure because I have learned that entrepreneurs will and DO fail, a lot usually, until they get the product or service or business that they have created to be perfect in their eyes. This class has changed my perspective on taking risks because I feel that I know it is okay to fail sometimes and that it will happen throughout my life, it is what I do with those failures that matters the most. 

Assignment 24A Venture Concept No. 1

• Opportunity:
• Shortage of parking spots available to college students in college towns is a growing need that increases every year with the incoming of many more students attending college than previous years. This is not only an inconvenience issue but a safety issue as well. 
• The protocol customer that has the unmet need in which my opportunity aims at satisfying is the college student, ages 18-22 both males and females. These people are my target customer because they have the unmet need out of all the people at Universities (out of professors, employees of the University, etc.) 
• The lack of parking spots available for college students at off campus apartments possess a huge safety threat for the individuals. Universities typically schedule large lectures, labs, and other classes in the evenings which means that students will find a mode of transportation other than walking to attend these late night classes. When students do not have parking close by their apartment complexes or place of living this means that they often have to walk alone in the dark back to their homes, this puts students in an involuntary threat just because they do not have parking available to them outside of their apartments. 
• This market of parking garages is defined geographically by college towns where there is typically a lack of parking available for students living off campus. The market is defined demographically by college students, as i mentioned earlier ages 18-22 both males and females. 
• This "window of opportunity" will be open as long as people attend universities and live in off campus apartments or even dormitories as more and more colleges are beginning to make some on-campus housing technically be located off-campus. This "window of opportunity" will most likely be open indefinitely until towns in which universities are located begin to see the growing need for more parking availability in their towns and take care of the issues within their towns government. 
• Customers are currently satisfying this need by either making sacrifices, in which they would just have to not have a car with them while they are in college or if they are lucky enough to be living in an off campus apartment that has a very few parking spots available to residents than they would be paying an absurd amount monthly to rent the spot, according to my interviews that I conducted throughout past assignments, some renters pay $200 monthly to their landlords for a parking spot.

• Innovation:
• My company works to provide parking garages for all college students living in off campus apartments where they are not currently provided parking close to their apartments and houses in which they live. Once decided where the central location of the parking garages will be, I will bring in my team of producers and employees and the work will begin.
• My parking garages will be affordable, more than less than half of the price of going rates for individual parking spots from apartment complexes in the area. My parking garages will also be extremely safe, as I know that safety is a high priority for my customers, the parking garages will have only one entrance and one exit that will be guarded by a live security officer 24/7 as well as surveillance cameras on every corner of every floor of the garage to help fight any crime that could occur, especially such as theft. 
• My rate that I am looking to first implement for a reserved parking spot for a 12 month contract would be $60 monthly, costing the customer $720 for the whole year. I will also be offering a 6 month contract for a reserved parking spot and that will be $75 a month, costing the customer $450 for the entire year. I also will offer a per-semester package that will be a flat fee of $500 for the entire semester. 

• Venture Concept:
• Why my innovation will solve customers unmet needs: 
• My service of building parking garages for college students living an off campus housing will solve the college students unmet need because I will be providing them with parking spots that are located close to their off campus housing and I will also be satisfying their unmet need by offering an extremely hard to beat price when it comes to parking spots in college towns. 
• Customers will switch to my product:
• Because I will be one of the only companies offering parking garages with parking spots in the area for a price as good as mine.
• Who are my competitors?
• My competitors will be any other parking services, their weaknesses are going to be matching my price point.
• Roles my business plays in my business concept:
• The location of my business plays a huge role because of how mobile it is, I am able to travel all over the country to colleges in every state.
• Organizing my business:
• I would organize my business as one main office as my business started to spread throughout different regions and having employees and suppliers at individual locations. 

• Unfair advantage:
• My most important resource aka "secret sauce" is going to be that I have had my own personal experience with this unmet need being a college student myself so I am going to be able to cater and provide exactly the kind of service that college kids are in need for.
• What's next for the venture?
• My next opportunity in my business is to find other types of ways to cater to college students parking needs, this includes scooter, motorcycle, bicycle, etc parking being provided for students living off and possibly on campus in the future.
• What's next for me?
• I would love to have reached as many college students that I have been able to in the next 15-20 years. My goal is to provide parking garages for cities where space is limited but offices buildings are not.

Assignment 25A What's Next?

Existing Market

What I Think Is Next:

I think the next step for my service of providing parking garages to college towns that are in need of parking spots is to expand to not only car parking spots, but to offer scooter and motorcycle spots for college students. Currently, in many college towns especially those with large and spread out campuses more and more students are beginning to have motorcycle or scooters to help them get around campus more efficiently and quickly. As of now at my current college campus, there are no designated parking spots on the street parking available for motorcycles or scooters. This creates an unsafe and unaccessible environment for the people who use these as their form of transportation. Creating parking spots available for scooter and motorcycles would allow my service to expand and be able to offer more than just car parking spots. 

Existing Market Interview:

1. The first interviewee that I conducted mentioned to me that I should have bike spots as well on the street so that people do not have to worry about a place to park their bikes as well as their bikes being stolen. I thought this was a really good idea since a lot of people are starting to lean more towards automobiles and forgetting that a lot of people use biking as their form of transportation.
2. The second interviewee that I talked to told me that I should implement more scooter parking and to her surprise I told her that was the exact new idea that I was looking to implement in my business. This leads me to believe that this really is an unmet need as well.
3. The third interviewee that I interviewed told me that going along with my new scooter parking introduction, I should try to make it to where everyone can have their own assigned parking spot so that way it is not a "free for all" when it comes to finding a spot.

Reflection: 

     After listening to what each of the three people that I interviewed had to say about what is next for my service and what new services I should look at implementing into my company. All three of the people were surprisingly very similar with the new idea that I had come up with, which gives me a great sense of reassurance that I am implementing a new service to my company that will be able to benefit a bunch of customers. 

     My first interview provided me with a new insight and a new form of transportation to cater parking spots toward, bicycles. I had not thought about the issue of the lack of bike parking until this interviewee really made me think about it, and the more I thought I realized I do not see any or hardly any bicycle parking available on campus and especially off campus.

     My second interviewee surprised me when she told me that my new ideas for my company should be more scooter parking spots because that was exactly my idea that I was planning on implementing so this helped me confirm that I was coming up with good ideas and moving my company in the right direction.

     My final interviewee helped to provide an efficient idea that I should make each parking spot for the scooters have an assigned spot so that they would not have to worry about finding a parking spot or having their spot that they pay for be taken by someone. 

     In the conclusion after all of these interviews I really gained informative insight on my new product to introduce in my company. 

New Market:

A new market that I had previously not thought about was for college students that live on campus. I do not have control over how many parking spots or garages that the University's would provide for their students on campus but, my service and my company could be able to come in and talk to the right people at the University's and propose plans and ideas on how to make expansions for on-campus parking. I know first hand that this is a HUGE issue, the lack of parking is not the University's fault but rather just a space fault. The University has hardly any control over how many parking spots to put into their campus so if I was able to form a contract and a plan to help the University's expand their number of parking spots on campus so that way I would be able to help expand and meet the unmet needs of college students on campus that drive and park on campus. 

New Market Interviews: 

1. My first interviewee was with a student who is currently living on campus at his university and he has a car at school that he parks on campus. When I asked him if he could find any benefit from having more parking spots built on campus he was very quick to say YES and he informed me how hard and how time consuming it can become to find a parking spot on campus. 
2. My second interviewee was a student who also lives on campus, she told me that she as well parks her car on campus and says that there are often nights when she can not find any parking spots located near her dorm and she has to drive further away to find a parking spot or in a parking garage which also makes her feel unsafe when this happens at night.

Reflection:

     When I was first reflecting on the new market that I could appeal and market towards I could not think of any one group of people until I thought of college students living on campus. After I conducted these interviews I felt so much more confident in my decision to have on campus college student as the new market that I am going to appeal to. 

     My first interview gave me a little bit more of a perspective of just how busy the parking lot can become and how crowded they can become. As well as my second interview, it let me know that these students on campus also have safety issues when they have to find parking spots that are far from their dorms.

     In conclusion, these two interviews helped me gain insight on my new market and the potential customers that maybe one day I could work with my company to expand on.