You are on page 1of 4

Business Reflective Essay K1154125

Filed under: Uncategorized — Leave a comment


May 21, 2012

It is not easy to understand certain things until you really undergo it. Entrepreneurship is one
such thing. Understanding business is not an easy task. May be education and reading about it
develops your knowledge but you will never learn until you run one of your own. I gained such a
wonderful experience of running a business and gaining knowledge through this course.

Learning and applying:

Being a student from Business Management for me Entrepreneurship was a testing ground to try
every principles of Management I learnt in my other modules. My learning gave me a guided
approach towards business. The financial resource management and marketing were two major
subjects which I put into test in the entrepreneurship. The course being very practical and the
investment amount being minimal it gave me courage to try new things, as the risk is minimal.
Apart from this the class room group were more useful in gaining knowledge.

An effective class room structure:

Sharing the class room with the Creative economy students was an added advantage to this
course. Being a Management student it was very interesting to see students developing new
innovative products. The class room itself became a forum for variety of businesses. So this
provided the opportunity to learn mutually from other business. As everybody shared the same
class room it was an opportunity to see everybody’s ideas transforming into products and
becoming a reality. Apart from that this experience also gave an insight of demand based
products in the society. It was interesting to see products with less manufacturing cost gain
demand and profit from sales. Though each of the group was competitors, we gained more
knowledge through sharing the experiences and seeing each other’s business experiences. I
personally feel that the blend of the creative economy students with management students is a
right blend to develop new businesses.

Blogging:

Blogging is another new experience which I gained through this course. I never had the previous
experience of writing an open professional blog .This has helped me develop my writing skills.
Apart from that the blog writing has enhanced my thought processes. The ideas and thoughts
which are conceived in mind are developed when we write it out. Moreover I believe that this
blogging experience would stay as a document of my first business experience.

Personality Development

Above all the most I gained is my personality development. This course has helped me develop
my confidence and communication skills. The opportunity to meet different people develops
one’s character and behaviour. The market sales experience helped me reach out to different type
of customer’s .A true entrepreneur is one who is able to convince others about his idea. In that
way communication plays a major role(Sai,2011). I took use of the opportunity to speak to as
many customers I could reach.

Working on Ideas:

Businesses always are born on ideas. As a student interested in management naturally I was
always interested in knowing the business models and the functional advantage of businesses.
Despite this running my own business has always been an idea at a distant. But having this
experience of running your own business it has triggered me to work on any business idea and do
a feasibility study. Feasibility study for any business is crucial and this entrepreneurship
experience has given a wide lesson on that area.

A new innovative idea in any existing business can make a wide change. This can be seen in
history in development of new products(Ellie,2012) Most products now available in the market
are part of evolution than stating it as new development. They evolve from the existing product
or can be a merger or two or three existing ideas or placing one idea at new place or replacing the
existing idea with others. Development of Dyson Vacuum cleaners can be an example. But for
all these the essential thing that is required is to develop your ideas and to work on demands.

Demands are mostly hidden and until a product comes into existence certain demands can never
be realised. Until iphones were released we never realised that a cell phone would replace
laptops. This entrepreneurship experience helps me realise that.

Managing your money

For any business to run successfully managing the cash flow is very crucial. The cash flow
forecast is very necessary to determine the company’s performance .This also helps to develop
the business model. Pre determining of such factors is essential for any successful business. I
gained the experience of developing the business revenue model, finance model and do the cash
flow analysis. Determining the revenue model and counter checking the model at the end of the
business was very practical and helped to know about the factors which shouldn’t be pre
determined and factors which are independent of time.(Sai,2011)

Pricing Factors

Pricing your product is a critical factor for your products success. Any product which is over
charged might lose its customers. And its the same when it comes to the case of under charging
the product. The danger in under charging the product is that the product loses it prestige and
people start doubting the quality of the product. This might contradict with the sales offers which
come up at very reduced price and attract large number of people(sai,2011). The reason behind
that success is that these products have once proved that they are of high cost and having a
lessened price would attract more customers .The major pricing factors are determined using the
manufacturing cost,competeitor,supplier(Sharan,2001)
1. Manufacturing Cost:The first way to determine the basic pricing is to determine the cost
involved in manufacturing. By not taking this in to account, any product under sold this price
would end up in loss. This should be set as the minimum price for any product.

2. Competitor pricing:Competitor pricing is another crucial factor. At most cases many seller
will avoid selling under the manufacturing price. And analyzing the competitor pricing is also
one way to understand the markets.

3. Demand based pricing:Pricing factor most commonly depends on the demand. The demand
can be studied by market surveys and questioners. Apart from that we can determine the demand
by learning the sales volume of the competitor products.

Business Pitching:

Pitching one’s own idea plays an important role grabbing others attention on the business. The
workshop on Business pitching helped develop my ideas and post it in a way the key factors are
communicated .I also learnt that the key factors are not only important it is also crucial to post it
a very innovative and engaging way. The dragons den experience was a good experience.There
are three models in business pitching. They are Murder Investigation Strategy, Slowly, Slowly
Catchy Monkey and Middle-Distance Racing.(Philips,2011)

Developing a Business Report

Writing a business Report is as crucial as the business pitch. By writing up the business report
for a business we had run it gave me knowledge on factors that has to be mentioned in the
business report. Moreover it also gave me learn about the factors on which any investor would
focus on. Projecting the finance part was very important to catch any investor’s eye, as it
describes the business all in one word. The documenting part of the entire business has helped us
realise and identify the mistakes made in the business. For example in our business the mistakes
we realised was that the investment made on prototyping was more and quality of products used
for prototyping was high which involved huge costs.

Group Work:

A very important quality for a business person is to learn to work with different people in an
effective way(Kevin,2011). In this way I have had my experience through this course. A good
manager is a person who learns to work under constraints and make efficient use of the resources
available. Entrepreneurship at Kingston is a similar scenario. With the limitation on money to be
invested and with the group mates all set and the environment known it was the best to make out
of it. Leadership quality is acquired ,developed and used widely only while working in
groups(Charry,2009)

Future Prospect:

As a future plan the course has helped me realise the entrepreneur in me. Apart from that it has
helped me develop all the skills required for an entrepreneur. Experience is a good lesson for
everybody to learn from. And Entrepreneurship has given me the best experience of my course. I
intend to set up my own social enterprise in the future. Through my experiences on working on
ideas in the course I think this will help me analyse the need and come up with the best business
model which will benefit the society through its service .Group working has given me a good
experience in working with different people and I hope this would be helpful in my future
business. The business pitching workshop has helped to develop my pitching skills and I hope to
get significant funding for my business through this.

Thus in one word I would say that this is a life time Experience and I appreciate myself on
choosing this course .Thanks to my fellow class mates and our module leader for making my
experience wonderful.

You might also like