Reflective essay – Tom Gerrett

This module has been the most enjoyable experience I have had at university, not constrained by theories, exams and by being overly academic, it has allowed true creativity to flourish. Although this essay is reflective on myself I found it fantastic to see what my classmates were thinking and what their ideas were. This is something that doesn’t happen in other lectures, due to the lack of small tutorials we all sit there “absorbing” the textbook and not questioning or discussing it with  the lecturers or even ourselves.

Through this module I have built up the confidence to take the plunge next year and go set up a business of some kind, it is the perfect opportunity as I have nothing to loose and everything to gain.

The first blog entry was a tough one, although I had ideas what I wanted to do I had never written them down or fully decided. Although it was a short blog post it was one that I spent quiet some time over. It led me to the question: “why am I applying for jobs that I don’t want?!” As a result I tailored my graduate job hunt after that and became a lot more picky in identifying which jobs could help me, this has all now changed but I will discuss the trigger for that later in the essay.

The first task in the module was to create a business idea of our own and create a business plan. I am usually quite creative but pulling an idea out of thin air would have been a lot harder without the idea generation (http://businessmodelgeneration.com/) tools and resources given to us. The disruptive business model is one I like as it will hopefully unseat those who have been sitting at the top and not doing anything new.

This opportunity was fantastic and it really allowed me to get into and explore the ideas I had. Watching the video of Steven Johnson made me look at my ideas in different ways and ask the questions: what would happen if, if people thought like this then… and so on. It also reminded me to never take things at face value and to always question, this I feel is a key skill I have gained. When someone presents you with a problem, I will use an example from Google here (Google innovation video) : “We want to share the worlds information but in many parts of Africa there is no internet access” The answer here is not “oh well we can’t then” or “lets install internet in those parts of Africa” you should look through a different scope : how about supplying the information vocally over mobile telephones or so on.

I think this module has been most beneficial to me by offering the chance to improve my self confidence, whether that be in approaching people as I did in the OMGYUM! market research or if it is in presenting in front of judges and my peers.

When doing the market research I had to approach strangers, this was out of my comfort zone. However I realised even if you are relatively outgoing you can still get stuck in your comfort zone so it’s always best to push yourself every now and again and this was a perfect opportunity. This task made me more self aware. Throughout the day I worked on how I approached people, analysed how people reacted to certain behaviours and by the end of our session I was getting responses from almost all people I approached. What I learned here was the power of positive projection : smile, be happy and engaging and people will respond! (sounds simple really!).

Writing blogs has been really useful as it has made me think about my actions, the positives, the negatives and most importantly the areas for improvement. Not only this but it has made me look into the topics I blog about. For example I knew the final dragons den was looming so I researched presentation skills this lead me to improving the way I act while presenting, which helped not only in class but in job interviews I have subsequently attended. One important thing I learned here was that lots of people like to imitate, there are hundreds of YouTube videos showing “how to present like Steve Jobs” and I also noticed lots of people who were not Steve Jobs acting a bit like Steve Jobs and it was all a bit forced and awkward. This brings me to my next point, originality, I now know it is important to bring yourself to whatever you are doing, if you don’t do that it will be hard to be enthusiastic and if you’re not enthusiastic about what you’re doing, who will be!

Early on in the course we discussed baby steps, in fact I acted them out! This approach to new business is a good model to follow, however I do think that once you have scoped out the idea you need, for want of a better word the “balls” to go for it. Something echoed by one of the fantastic speakers at the last entrepreneurship experience “just get on and do it”. Now I am not saying go down the Gordon Gekko route and you certainly won’t be hearing me say “Greed is good” anytime soon but I feel it is important to have big aims. Or as some call it a BHAS : big hairy audacious statement.

Even with all the improvements I feel I have made this year I still need to get a lot more exposure to presenting, get more experience in dealing with finances and finally get some real life selling experience. Hopefully this will all come next year, but I now know I need to make it happen for myself.

In fact it was the at the last entrepreneurship experience that I realised I should spend the coming year trying out some ideas and it’s this module that’s helped give me the confidence to believe it can be done. I may try some ideas and they may fail but I will keep trying until I find one that works!

Quick blog

I could not find the blog i wrote on “approaching people” originally so i re-wrote it. Its posted under the date 15th April!

However while im blogging i found an interesting couple of videos:

First this guy was not allowed in to video a Drift day so he used his brain and did something really interesting and different. A great example of lateral thinking

And here is a video of a 6 day hotel build. Really interesting to see the operations working so well together. The teamwork must nearly be as good as the OMGYUM team 😀

Presenting…

This weeks blog is on presenting. One of the reasons I feel that people do not like to , or do not feel confident to present is because of the lack of opportunities to present. The more you do it the more comfortable it becomes. Also due to the fact most people only present when something big (i.e. coursework, business meeting, pitch, etc) is riding on it, there is even more stress piled on.

This weeks mission was to check out presenting styles, not just the best as it is also important to see the pitfalls of a poor performance.

First up is Steve Jobs. Although I dislike the crazy fans at all his presentations Steve Jobs always puts on a good show and is renound for his performances.

Next is my favourite presentor Douglas Merrill (Former CIO at Google) .. note that he says “All the worlds information..” 5 times in the first 30 seconds!

I will break down the details of what makes their presentations great later, but one key point to make now is they become accessible because of the casual way they dress, talk etc, this automatically makes it more interesting and engaging.

Now onto some not so good presentations (beware bad language!):

…Ok so that wasnt real but this one is.

Although the two men in this presentation are not too bad they just dont have the spark of Steve and Douglas.

Rules to make a presentation a good one, in no particular order.

1. Open body language (no crossed arms here!)

2. Good strong eye contact

3. Know your topic

4. Keep the slides clean with the min amount of words

5. rehearse the material

6. Move around the stage/ floor

7. Use hand gestures, but tailor them… unlike William Hague who uses the same one over and over!

8. Smile and project your positivity and belief in the product/ service.

Time management

Time management is important in any business. However it is now especially important in my life, with exams, revision, planing for life after university and setting up OMGYUM!

In this blog I want to explore what has worked for me over the last year or so.

So first one essential thing to remember is the 80:20 rule, the quote from Mindtools.com below illustrates what i mean by this:

“The ’80:20 Rule’. This argues that typically 80% of unfocussed effort generates only 20% of results. The remaining 80% of results are achieved with only 20% of the effort. While the ratio is not always 80:20, this broad pattern of a small proportion of activity generating non-scalar returns recurs so frequently as to be the norm in many areas.”

Or in other words most of your time is spent on the “smaller extra parts”. Or in my case for example: if I am learning about  a topic, the key information can be learnt etc in 20% of my time, whereas the other stuff (reading around the topics, discussions etc) takes up the remainding 80%.

So what does this mean? Should I work on just utilising the 20% of time and forget the rest as i will have gained the basic knowledge. Or does it mean that actually the real important stuff is when exploring in the 80%?
Well from my experience the saying “the devil is in the detail” is right and what people really value whether it is lecturers, potential investors or collegues, is the details and a real understanding of the situation.

However in terms of time management tools i like to use the prioritisation window: This window has four sections:

Anything that ends up in the not important and not urgent part is unlikely to get completed. I then take my tasks from the boxes and put them into a schedule, this will of course change as the box/ life changes.

This brings me onto my next point of scheduling and how important it is to try to keep to one. However again it is important to keep the schedule dynamic, in that it can change, but tasks need to have time allocated to them so they get done at some point.

Overall the most important thing in time management is knowing what you need to do, witho

Approaching people

I was sure i wrote a blog detailing our encounters while in London doing are market research…perhaps not as i can not find it, as the experiment was so interesting i will write another.

I felt it was a good idea to do something visual and not just the usual run of the mill questionairre. From my experience in telephone market research I knew that the most common thing for people to do is to hang up, say no thanks or something a little less curtious. So OMGYUM! needed to do something different. The criteria was as follows:

1) Something eye catching brash and bold

2) Something people could not just walk by and ignore

3) Something people felt comfortable enguaging with

From this i knew it had to be a personal thing, something one on one. Over the phone stuff is great if you want to get huge details and get knocked back 99 out a 100 times! We needed results now and doing something different is what ENVD and OMGYUM! is all about.  I decided the best thing would be to have very simple questions, that could be answered by a simple thumbs up or down. This eliminated the need for any words to be uttered…turns our people dont like talking.. I guessed this would be sufficient to get enough answers and responses.

Heres a little video one of the OMGYUM! team put together :

This is where the interesting stuff happened. We got very few reponses at all when we just stood there, we began to get more by asking them to thumbs up or down, then even more by directly approaching them. I did some tests:

We used two approaches were;

1) – smiling, open arms, up beat tone of voice.

2) – no smile, closed body language and monotone voice.

We found that almost nobody (only 1-2%) responded to us if approach two was used, and in fact they would deliberately avoid eye contact and change direction. On the contrary if approach one was used people would smile back, engage with us and answer the questions. This goes to show how much relationships depend on the type of interaction that takes place.

The great thing about this experiment was not only that we got some great results and footage but also it gave me an oppotunity to approach complete strangers and enguage with them. It really helped boost my confidence doing that sort of thing, a really useful skill as an young businessman.

Customer experience

This week in a team meeting the importance of the customer experience was discussed. It resulted in highlighting just how different people expectations on experience can be.

Experience shapes and reflects the culture of a company. So what kind of experience do our customers want at OMG YUM! ? To find out we looked at current “fast food” outlets.

McDonald’s

The average McDonald’s experience is :

-Walk in, wait in a que

-Place order

-Eat

-Leave

There is in essence no real pleasant experience, it is a quick operation with a low standard of service.

 

However at other companies such as Krispy Kremes there is more involvement and interaction. The interaction is likely to include a “How are you today sir”. It is still a quick simple service but with a more friendly feel.

We want to mirror this, in that we provide a friendly experience but also a quick and efficient one.

 

Other aspects of the experience relate to the colour schemes used, the clothes the staff wear, the way the customer is addressed and the premises. In my opinion the best experience for our kind of business is something i call, “the ice cream colours, have a nice day, super happy hybrid”.

By this i mean the colour scheme is pastel intertwined with white clean lines. Mirroring that of Krispy Kremes

The staff are casually dressed (still in uniform just T-Shirts, the google attitude etc). This is because someone dressed as such is approachable by anyone from businessmen to students. No one should feel out of place at an OMGYUM! These are of course my views based on my experience after visiting multiple food vendors. The other key aspect i have found is customer interaction, i think it is important for the customer to leave the vendor smiling and happier than when they walked in. Therefore no matter how much money is involved in the transaction smiling and positivity should always be delivered in truck loads!!

 

However although these are my views, other members of the group prefered the more formal and japaneseness of places such as Wasabi. Therefore even asking a small group of people illustrates that customers expect different things. We will find out more when we get the results back and do some more market research. It will be interesting to see if a Krispy Kreme service and environment/ McDonald’s food turnaround time hybrid could work. A bit like the picture below!!

What do people want?

I have just had time to write up some research I did on marketing and market research done a few weeks back.

To find this out we need to do some market research. Now there is the usual way of doing this… telephone surveys, questionnaires etc. But how many of our target audience (commuters) have time for that!  We need to do research that can be done without any real chatting or contact.

While looking for market research methods I came across a bunch of interesting marketing ideas, most of these came under the category of guerrilla marketing. Here are some of my favourite examples:

This kind of marketing not only has a big impact it affects the status of the company. guerrilla marketing is fresh and interesting, therefore implies that company doing it is.

I decided it would be great to combine a similar approach with market research. For example getting results without asking questions or verbally being told answers. My idea here is to have simple questions on placards/ t-shirts and get people to smile/ wink/ thumbs up at you if they agree. That way you make a postive impact, raise brand awareness and get results. All without annoying or taking up time from the public!

Finding our USP

We had the general principle of our business mapped out. However after doing some more thinking we felt it could be a better and more exciting business if we moved away from the norm.

With our current model we were looking at running with the healthy, organic feel. This is obviously a great foundation for a food establishment, the problem here is that there are loads of places offering health food and organic snacks. For example you can pick up a granola bar or yoghurt and fruit at Holland and Barrat or most food retailers.

Now here is the issue i had with our business, all we offer is pretty much what you can get elsewhere but either hot (we serve bacon etc) or healthier (cooked in the healthiest way possible). So whats are USP and does it really make us different and stand out from the crowd?

To really define our USP and shape our business we needed to do some more idea generation and “out of the box” thinking. A website “http://www.copyblogger.com/usp/” puts forward some really useful suggestions. There are several methods, the best I found was the cross roads USP:

“To create a crossroads USP, take two seemingly unrelated ideas and bring them together.

The hit movie Speed was famously pitched as “Die Hard on a bus.” Clueless is Jane Austen’s Emma set in 1995 Beverly Hills.”

This video is corny but it makes a good point, that sharing experiences and knowledge generates great ideas. That is what we have done, brought together our ideas on health and organic food with the experiences of a group member. Our new american inspired breakfast is something that is not at all available in the UK however similar places are hugely successful in the US!

A new business is formed.

Before Christmas a new group was formed. We went about deciding whether to use one of our existing ideas or to pursue something totally new. We decided on the latter as we wanted a bit more of a challenge.

We ran some brainstorming sessions, coming up with from all different industries of business; social, web, service. We decided to work with problems that we already had experience in, this lead us to the food and drink industry.

Over the Christmas break we brainstormed individually, so that when we met up again we would have a wealth of different ideas and angles at which to approach the business.

 

The presentation

This week was the week of the Dragons Den style pitch. It was good to get experience of pitching to people who could take a different look my business.I really enjoyed listening to everyone’s pitch.  One of my favourites was about teaching kids in school about politics early on, so it is not considered a boring topic and so people are more aware of the democracy they live in.

The main downside to the pitches was the way in which we received feedback. Although maybe realistic, I personally felt that the dragons focussed far too much on the downsides of people’s projects and maybe lacked the open-mindedness or forward thinking necessary for some ideas. This made the experience for some people quite unpleasant, it seemed to be more of a destructive excercise rather than a constructive excercise. I agree that a high pressure environment is useful to experience, however I think this was achieved in the pitching itself and the questioning and did not need further negativity.

I think it would be really useful to have more sessions in which we can get the feedback and ideas off of our peers and colleagues as I felt that this was the most valuable excercise we have done so far in this course (in terms of idea improvement/ generation).

Personally however I did enjoy presenting my idea and defending/ explaining why it was a good business. I felt I improved my ability to explain a lot in a very short amount of time!