Entrepreneurship
During Fall 2016, I was blessed by taking one of the greatest choices in my college career, which was taking ENGR 407 (Technology-Based entrepreneurship), class.
Many of us want to become entrepreneurs! Running our own businesses, having luxury cars, large houses, and traveling between California and Paris.
Oh do you want me to go on? I literally could go on with my dreams of the things that I want to have after having a successful business and I guess most of us have daydreamt about life after starting our own successful business.
However, the real question would be, how to be an Entrepreneur? As I came from a family where I have my Mom, sister, two brothers all of them are medical doctors and my father as a professor of organic chemistry. Most of the advices that we had focused on the practicalities:
1- Writing a business plan.
2- Avoid risk-taking in businesses and in general.
3- Raising money.
4- Marketing.
However is that the right way to have a successful startup? Well, to me I see that focusing only on the practicalities won't lead to a solution. Instead, we should focus on brainstorming for the actual ideas that would lead to a startup.
In this class, I went through several projects to me each one of them was a different adventure that took made my fall fruitful and full of creativity to be a successful entrepreneur.
JunkYards Wars
JunkYards Wars was one of the unique experiences I had in this class. As I have searched about it, later on, I figured that it was actually a TV show in the UK and the US. It shows the benefits of using resources efficiently and in addition, it develops the trading skills between us the students as the project actually had an effect on our grade.
A question might arise, why focusing on the junk? Instead of using more valuable resources that won’t limit our creativity.
The answer would be what’s more valuable than making more from less by selling and using junk? In fact using the junk
1- Saves money.
2- Makes customer demand.
3- Environment-friendly.
Crash N Burn
Crash N Burn was my favorite project in this class. It made think about all the opportunities around me that had potential and to work on getting the highest possible profit out of them. I thought about all of my strong points and skills and I worked accordingly. I didn’t consider any of my ideas as a failed idea or a failed startup. However, I kept trying different ideas and at the end, I worked on the idea that raised the highest profit and I tried to develop it.
I invested by throwing an event, had a lot fun while working on it and raised at the same time a lot of money.
Video 1. I used this video as an inspiration for the event’s decorations.
Crash N Burn was my favorite project in this class. It made think about all the opportunities around me that had potential and to work on getting the highest possible profit out of them. I thought about all of my strong points and skills and I worked accordingly. I didn’t consider any of my ideas as a failed idea or a failed startup. However, I kept trying different ideas and at the end, I worked on the idea that raised the highest profit and I tried to develop it.
I invested by throwing an event, had a lot fun while working on it and raised at the same time a lot of money.
The event’s Decorations were inspired by the most famous middle eastern broadcast channel MBC. This is one of the adds each year the channel brings in different adds with different songs. However, they all share the same theme, which reminds everyone of fasting and the atmosphere back home. Please check it on the left. I was inspired by the theme. Therefore, I added lights everywhere even inside balloons.
Album 1. Pictures from the event.
As I was organizing the games and activities in the event I didn’t know how to fill up the time with fun games as back home in Saudi my family used to do such parties for me only at young age that I didn’t help with anything that time. Therefor, I made heavy research on party games and on events organization. I even measured were the shade would be the night before and I added candles that prevents bugs from annoying the guests.
Time is money! As I lost a lot of time in the organization of the event I couldn’t afford any extra time as I actually ran out of it. Therefor, I remembered what Dr. Bob said in class when we had a debate between two teams in the class. Entrepreneurs create jobs for people! Therefore, I contacted a mother from Iraq that cooks food and I took the recipes from my Mom and I gave it to her and she did the cooking and we agreed on a very good price as I advertised for her in my event. I also ordered online special mixes and drinks that people drink back home after fasting.
For this project my team and I decided on working on mini projects to collect the highest possible revenue. I tried many projects like selling glow in the dark sticks at glow in the dark party, selling food, offering Hookah service, and finally the event.
I didn’t do all of this alone out selfishness at all. I just hate to add extra effort on my team and I usually wait for the team to ask me how can they participate instead of me asking them to work on my ideas. I was in an incredible team and they would’ve done everything if I asked them to do so. Honestly, I admit that I should’ve asked for help since I saw that the events raised a lot of money and they were fun at the same time. I believe that I learned that asking teammates for help isn’t wrong and as teammates they can approve helping me or not depending on what they can do. As a team we should stand by each other and to do so asking for help isn’t harmful.
Also next time I would avoid pricey stuff in that is not profitable as much as its price. For instance, chocolate fondue was pricey as the chocolate itself was expensive, the machine, and also it needed an extra rounded table to be rented, which just made me lose much of the profit.