This week’s company meeting was slightly different. We had the Area Manager for Young Enterprise, Gillian Hayward, join the students for an informative presentation on everything to do with the upcoming trade fair and the company’s business plan.
Luckily the lessons fell so that the students were able to stay for 2 hours. The first part of the meeting was with Gillian, were lots of inquisitive looks were seen around the room. As this was the first time that most of the team had met Gillian, they were trying to get as much information from her about the competition and what the judges are looking for to be successful moving forward.
After Gillian had left, the team had a lot of things to get on with.
The first thing the team did was sit down to deliberate the pricing of their product. The Finance team, Tom and Theo, led this discussion by firstly asking which way the product should be sold to re-confirm their pricing structure. The options were, individually priced items, a ‘pick n mix’ style product as initially discussed or a pre-packed set. The team decided to continue with their original plan of a ‘pick n mix’ style product so the Finance department spent the rest of the meeting working out final costings for this. By the end of the day, they concluded each ‘pick n mix’ product will be sold for £4.50.
As soon as the consensus for which way the product should be sold was decided, the rest of the team got back to their individual tasks. Lily and Hannah sat down to finalise their stories and work on the design of the product, Joe made the final purchases on the utensils, cookie cutters and bags, Tom worked hard to get the website ready to launch by adding a new element for the extended stories and blog, Dan and Nick started to construct their part of the business plan and Billy, Max and James starting to put all of the content required for the business plan together into one document.
As part of this business plan, Max as Company Secretary and Enis as Sales, took the initiative to take photos of each member to identify who is who. The team loved this idea and had a full-blown photoshoot! Enis even managed to get himself into each photo as Sales Director shaking hands over the ‘signed business contract’.
The team dynamic was stronger than ever, and their productivity reflected this. It was fantastic to see especially with the trade fair and business plan deadlines creeping closer each week.
With the success of this week, each student’s tasks are fully on track. To continue this momentum, Lily has been asked to finalise the trade fair rota ensuring everyone is aware of the slot they are doing and Enis has been asked to confirm and advertise the next cake sale. The last cake sale they did went down very well as they raised £60. This was just the cash injection they needed so with any luck the next sale will be as successful.