Twenty Percent

1. Find a business owner and talk to them about their customers. I choose a local car wash near my house. The car wash has been established since I was in middle school and seems to be doing very well. Unfortunately the owner declined to be recorded.

A. Who do you think your target customers are? People who are too busy to wash their own car and want the job done right. Most of my customers are adults that work a lot or the elderly. 

B. What are your customers unmet needs? The customers come here because they don't have the time to wash their cars or they don't have the right equipment. We have everything here to give customer's cars a full car wash by using a pressure wash, vacuum, and tire wash. 

C. Where do you find your customers? My car wash is in a good location so my customers drive by and come in. Other customers are from word of mouth. 

D. What are your customers demographics? My customers are of all ages. 

E. Who is your 20%? Returning customers 

2.

3. Reflection: The car wash is a simple business where the customers unmet needs are easily achieved. As long as the car wash does a good job on the car wash at the right price people will be happy with their service. The three customers I interviewed seemed pretty happy with their cars and there doesn't seem to be any differences between the owner and the customer. 

Week 8 Reading Reflection

1. While reading chapter 8, some of the early information was really surprising to me. The part on social lending from other peers that you may not know is such a great idea especially for people that might have bad credit or idea is still very new. It just really cool that the bank is not your only way of getting a loan.
2. Nothing confused me this chapter. Where entrepreneurs get their capital is straightforward.
3. What is the most common technique entrepreneurs use to start up their small business?
4. I disagree with one of the Myth saying VC's don't want any part of daily operations. Why would a company invest millions of dollars to have no say in operations. What is the company invested was doing something wrong or unethical will the VC just stand there and do nothing?

Half-Way Reflections

1. At the halfway point in this class is almost over I have changed my behavior a lot. I am more outgoing and invested into the class than in the beginning. At first I didn't see how the exercises helped develop my entrepreneur skill but now I use them outside of the class. Also, when commenting on other student's blog post I now try to take the time and give them good feedback because their ideas also help my own.
2. I find the exercises not to hard so there wasn't a time where I wanted to give up but there were definitely times were I was too lazy to do an exercise and I had to find the motivation to go interview customers on a Sunday morning. I try to work ahead in this class but I find it best to stay on track and do at least one exercise every day or two.

Three tips

1. Make sure that the exercises are done in a timely manner. It sucks to do these exercises last minute and cram your time because they are due at 9PM!
2. Take the exercises seriously and do what they ask you to do. But, try to have a good time doing them because they can be fun at the same time.
3. Apply what we learn in class to your everyday life or just simple thoughts. 

Week 7 Reading reflection

1. It surprised me how much research companies do on customer's preferences, style, etc. It just amazes me how an entrepreneur must create a product that people will use and it must be tuned to their preferences as well. 
2. When reading the article it was a little confusing how customers could be other businesses as well. I am use to the idea that companies sold to consumers. After analyzing it more it makes sense because some companies only sell to other companies such as whole sale.
3. What is the most important trait companies target in a customer?
4. The article states that customers are coming less predictive but that isn't the case in some situations. For instance, Apple knows every time they release the new iPhone they can predict that a certain number of people will always upgrade and they come from many different social classes.

Free Money

My game plan:

I first started by walking around campus asking students if they wanted a free dollar. I started the conversation by stating that I worked for a used car dealership and wanted to show them some cars we had for sale. I then asked them to pick the car they would buy if they had to and after I handed them their dollar. I wanted to give the dollar away so they would do the survey for my job and receive their input.

Here are the cars I listed:

2002 Lincoln Town car

1993 Chevy Camaro

1995 Lexus ES300

Videos of the conversation (sorry the quality phone was in my shirt pocket):

Elevator Pitch No.2

1.  
2. Last time I did the elevator pitch I received a lot of good feedback. One person said to use better language and sound more professional and it helped my pitch a lot. 
3. What I changed from the last time I did the pitch was my idea. My idea is now a company that is giving advice to Gator Dining and is more concrete. In addition, I wrote out what I was going to say before hand so I came into this assignment more prepared than last time. 

Week 6 reading reflection

1. What surprised me in this chapter is how easily the five forces can be seen in our world today. For instance, when Redbox came out as a substitute for rental movies, Blockbuster lost a lot of customers. 
2. A confusing part of the article was how the government has influence to competition. The article has some policies that help the unions or companies but doesn't go into too much depth.
3. Can an industry thrive without having all the competitive forces?
4. I found the article to be very straight forward and I agree with the all the forces.

Interviewing Customers No.3

1. My interview stategy was to ask students that live on campus about their opinions on the dining hall. Some questions I asked were "What is your least favorite part of the dining hall", "Would you get the meal plan again", and "Why didn't you choose to have the meal plan".
2. Videos are above
3. From interviewing the customers of the dining hall I found that a lot of students are not happy with the meal plan. The biggest complaint is the quality of the food they serve and many are not getting the meal plan again. If they were to increase the quality of food they could attract more students. Also, the main reason some students choose not to get the meal plan because of the pricing. I would like to show these videos to the University of Florida in an effort to increase the quality of food for next semester. 

Idea Napkin No.1

Phamily Food

1. I am the owner of a business advising company that deals mainly with food services. I have put together a team of skilled individuals that specialize in cooking, industrial engineering, and surveyors. My aspirations are to help businesses reach out to more customers and fulfill their unmet needs. 
2. My business will offer advise to restaurants that want to increase customers and profits. Some advise the company has to offer is better cooking techniques, menu options, better quality food, advertising, pricing changes, and customer surveys. I will also bring technology to family restaurants such as Point of sale devices that will help them order from the table without a waiter. This will help restaurants reach out to their customers unmet needs and increase their profit margins.
3. I am offering my service to mostly restaurants that are in need of customers or new restaurants that want to establish themselves. I also advise to universities to improve their dining halls and attract more students that live on campus to purchase meal plans. 
4. Restaurants will want my advise because I will help them increase their profits. Although, they are experienced in the business themselves my service is specialized in all aspects of the business by using data and skills they don't have.
5. What sets my business apart from other advising companies is my specialization in restaurants especially dining halls. My company will have survey data from students living on campus from all over the country. 

I believe my idea still needs to develop and I wonder if schools/restaurants will actually pay someone to make changes to their business. However, I think some places will want this advise because I see a lot of unhappy customers walking out of restaurants and people unhappy about their food. The food business has been the same for a long time but with improving technology and techniques my business can help bring older style restaurants up to speed and help them improve their profits and help bring the customer a better dining experience. 

Week 5 Reading reflection

1. What surprised me while reading this chapter was how much time it takes to file a patent. I believe this varies between ideas because some ideas take years to develop.
2. One subject I found confusing was the types of corporations structures there was. From the S and B corporations to L3C. They are all corporations but have very different rules.
3. When does a company want to renew a trademark? Under Chapter 11: Organization who does the bank choose to manage the business?
4. I agreed with most of the material in this chapter because these are laws.

Interviewing customers No. 2

1. After my first round of interviews I saw there was a problem. Now this round of interviews I have a solution in mind that I will ask the customers.
2. Who- I made sure to find people that have meal plans and used it more than once a day.
3. This time I asked more general questions to find out what people don't like. I also included a question specific on the solution as well.
4. Videos are above
5. When I first began this opportunity I had the idea in mind that people were unsatisfied with their meal plan. Now that I am 10 interviews into the opportunity I now know why they are unsatisfied and have a clearer view of solutions to solve this problem.
6. Interviewing customers was a great experience. Here are some fellow tips for next years students.

1) Pick an opportunity that you are interested in. By doing this you will be more engaged in your topic and easier to find customers and come up with questions.

2) Choose good questions. Good questions lead to good information.

3) Have fun and don't take it too seriously.  

Elevator Pitch No.1

Phamily Food

1. Students have an unmet opportunity at the Dining hall here at UF because the food quality and pricing aren't meeting their standards.
2. I believe that UF should increase their quality of food and add a new pricing option. A $1000 option where students have 3 swipes a day for any of UF's dining options.