This post is just an extra post I decide to do, it will be short and simple.
This whole IT entrepreneur course is just like one of our rite of passage only in a smaller scale, where everything is mini, and easier to be grasped and ontrol unlike our life, where you can't control everything, because this world is just to big to be control by us, it is made by God.
Indeed, this University is big, but this world is bigger, and precisely because of that we will meet again, even if some of them (Semester 6 Seniors) are leaving this place. I’m happy that you have journey all the way to this very post and do not forget that Our path will cross again, maybe we might not even noticed, when you cross shoulders with me, but this memory will be kept in my little memory corner for a long long time.
During the final presentation, I was actually more to blurting everything I know about our members and what they did during our business activities, thus it seemd more like a personal presentation rather than a corporate style which was much more suitable with the whole Business activities Final Presentation style . It was the bond between group members that had been developed over the whole semester that made me blurted out easily that I could think 1st during the final presentation, I don’t know whether because we had developed a strong bond over time due to the overwhelmingly amount of Meetings and discussion or something else. But when Mdm. Rafidah made their final lecture during the class for this entire semester, she said something very similar that kind of stuck with me for quite a while.
'I randomly selected your members for your group, and I realized that you class was mixing around with everyone.'
She was right. If we were still stuck in our own selected group, we would still be in a small little world, arrogant to those around us, caring only ourselves and how would end up getting some many happy memories and fun photos.
SO it actually summed up the entire presentation (to me): Don’t hesitate to mix.
In business environment you must be able to mix around to gain experience, information, friends, allies, understand your competators’ situation, even cooperate with them if situations demand you to do.
However you will need courage to do so, to venture into the unknown territory with unknown people. It will going to be, where you had start all over again to make friends, especially when you go out of this university, but I believe, that we can survive, or at the very least our class can, because we made such as enjoying class between ourselves with no sand left un turned (yes, sand, not stone, I did that on purpose) and also because we managed to survive our time in this University when we 1st came in, didn’t we?
Yum-yum, even chocolate mixed around for a better taste, don't you agree?
The Seminar Day was only a so-so success, I had to say. We should have rehearsed fully the day before the seminar rather than just a simple get over with it seminar. Oh well, what’s done, done. So what had I learned during this seminar day?
Seminar is boring, at least our seminar is boring, even I sort of fall asleep, especially during our Linux Speaker, Ahmad Kastro’s talk, he spoke too fast and his speech was thick with his native Indonesian accent. Yes, which reminded me, we should have spend at least 2 hours to rehearse with Ahmad so that we could correct any fault that might be present during the seminar. Sigh, in the end, in our race against time, we lose in that race. Surprisingly, when our members collect some personal feedback from our participants, they told me that, the seminar was not bad, all the while I thought that, it suck badly. But at least it wasn’t that bad.
Because of this, I learned something else, that you might think it isn’t very relevant with the whole seminar thing, but this had quite an impact on me: What you think is not what they think.
We think this, we thought that, thinking that it might suited our clients the best, but sometimes that wasn’t the case, only when we extract from our clients about the truths,(mind you, the truths, not some lies they sometimes speak in fear of ruining our friendship and stuff like that), then only we can be certain of how our policies and strategies were for our target market. Sometimes, we assumed too much on ourselves forgetting to ask our target market opinions, sometimes we feared that the feedback might be bad, and thus we chose to neglect the feedback question. Coward, yeap, that’s me. Haha.
With the feedback they gained it sort of soothed my mind of think what a bad seminar we organized which might had a big blow on my rather fragile ego, but thank God, it wasn’t entire true. We think what we think, they think what they think.
So we set a booth, after analyzing the factors that explained our lack of customers, and started a on booth promotion.
Oh, who knew that promoting something that people isn’t interested of or already known was such a hard job? Well, now we know. A very very hard task, indeed. But after conversing with our potential target, we or at least I managed to detect, that human usually can’t run away from their greed, and the sense that they will be treated fairly.
The 1st one is easy to explain, during promotion, we would explain all about the goodies we will be giving during the seminar, we would not exaggerate those goodies amount, just emphasized on the certificates that we will be providing, authenticated by whom, was it international? And free stuff such as free Google Chrome OS, breakfast, transport and stuff like that, even with this tactic, people usually are 50% hooked.
That was where the 2nd tactic comes out, we deal through their psychological mind by exlaininf where our cost gone and then fact that our seminar isn’t going to profit a lot of their money, which was all spent on the Certificates alone, which was true. When they knew that we only gained a little, that somehow, soothes their psyche in way that we weren’t swindling money from them. With these 2 tactic combined, the success rate is somewhere 75%, the leftover 25%, which I had to regrettably say, are based on our luck.
Well at least this is one of those Promoting Tactics I learned during this Week 10.
Huh? What should we do? Why aren’t they approving our letters and requests?
It was a rather running week, where our people had to run here and there to ask for the right format to write approval letters. What I learned this week was that we should had prepare much earlier and we had lot of TRIAL AND ERROR time, where we had to redo and redo and redo again and again and re-planned about our business activities, which in turn caused delay to our real initiation of our business activities, such as promotion and stuff like that.
Many things we had to redo, re-set, re-plan, re-think, one of them was the seminar pricing. This whole pricing thing was considered a little overrated in sense that it provides no certificate and the initial seminar draft was modified to suit our speaker, En. Amran Ahmad’s request. Tiring, huh?
Maybe we should have asked someone who had the experience of organizing a seminar, huh?
Eeek! Wrong! We asked, but it seemed that our former batch of IT Entrepreneur student friends, did those Format laptop seminar without any legal permission, they just rent a hall, spread the word and voila! Their business is huge and success…I think…
But circumstances for us, today, were way different. Ours wasn’t just some seminar for format laptops, ours tried to encourage people to know Linux, which proves to be the downside of this business, compare with the format laptop. The benefits weren’t apparent, and thus we had to shorten the fore sight benefits by providing Certificates of Attendance, and some materialistic goodies.
Oh well, what’s done, done, and here we were, still on our tedious way towards fulfilling our business activities: Promotion and seminar pre-requisite.
Well, then, next stop, week 10: Promotion is hard work.
It was rather shocking, to realized that on the last day of IT class, we still have homework to be done. Blogging 5 more posts. When Mdm. Rafidah mentioned about that blog post is not necessarily too long, I was thinking, what she referring to my overly and extremely long post? Heh. Probably. So from this post onwards t I will try to restrain myself from being too… mouthful. Haha.
Actually, I got kind of confused about which week I’m supposed to start off with…I asked my friends, some said week 9, other said week 8, those who choose week 9 because they rationalized that week 8 was just purely planning, and Mdm. Rafidah specifically asked for business activities, while to me, I thought that she was referring to the entire business activities project, meaning we can cover any 4 week amongst those 7 weeks, am I wrong?
Oh well, I decide to just do week 8, 9, 10, skipped 11, and continued with 12 and then finally the final presentation day.
So… I will start off from the week 8, about what I did learn: Think Moderate, Act Moderate.
Finally we were going to start our Business activities after weeks of conceiving the idea and planning it. I was rather anxious to make it happened. Initially we thought big, yet it was time for us to act, we could not act as we planned, we realized that it was rather hard, if we compare our a little too imaginary business plan with our reality business activities, Thus we had to re-planned our whole business plan on a much smaller scale, just enough to get over with our seminar, that is why we re-proposed another new business plan to the Entrepreneur Unit, to get our permission.
Even those running and approval posed lots of time.
Reflect on learning - What is the most valuable thing you learned in Project Business Plan?
Another reflecting post, oh how I love writing reflecting essays.They had some sort of mysterious power where you had to work out your brain juice and memory sap to recall your feelings, thoughts, pros and cons and etc. And then examine, comparing and analyzing them simultaneously.
Energizing really. Seriously.
Back to the topic. Hmm… so what is the most valuable thing I learned in Project Business Plan?
Sure, learning how to write a business plan is one of the things I learned. Valuable? Yes. Most Valuable? Nope.By the way, I’m not going to say teamwork again, this so too common in your everyday life around this university. You learned teamwork again and again, the only question about learning teamwork is, did you improve on your teamwork skills?
I did albeit insignificantly little.
So now, on my most valuable thing I learned in Project Business Plan candidate list is:
1.Power (Leadership) is good.
2.Good Finance is hard.
3.Planning is harder. ( This includes both the project planning and the team tasks and roles coordination)
4.Letting go.
The first candidate is pretty easy to understand, who doesn’t love power? Even in nowadays TV series and cartoon, games. But rest assure, despite being the leader for this time and this project plan, I’m not a power craze maniac who overuses my power, in fact, I did most of the job. The part that I like was they respect me and at least would try not to object whatever I have to say, that’s all. And it’s a great feeling. But that’s just it! Nothing much, so POWER IS GOOD’s out of the list.
Second: Good Finance is hard. I had lot of problem trying to adjust the rates, budgets, fees, and dealing with pro forma. Ugh, what a headache. They say money isn’t such a big deal, but it comes down to fulfilling your needs, it suddenly becomes a big fat deal. You have to plan the in and out of the money, so that when we are really going to execute our plan, we won’thave some last minute not enough money issues and cause the whole project to be delay. That is a stupid mistake. Then again, I always knew that Good Finance is hard even in managing money for your life, so THIS ISN’T MY MOST VALUABLE THING I LEARNED IN THE PROJECT BUSINESS PLAN.
Third: Planning is hard. As if dealing with finance isn’t enough, as a leader I had to deal with planning, and when I mean planning, I mean everything! From team members roles and task to finance planning, to project planning to whatever that has to be planned so that this project will proceed smoothly. This does take toll on my mental state, in a way. I got to think about synchronizing them in a right manner so that the result of the project turns out to be outstanding, and again, I failed. (I hope it isn’t too miserably.) Life is all about trials and errors, so get on with it! So again, you learned this sort of lesson in your daily life, thus Planning is Harder is once again failed to be the most valuable thing I learned in Project Business Plan.
And that leaves… the last one, LETTING GO.
Letting things go and allows them to all into the right place is hard. In fact is the hardest, among the listed four. To other this might seem to be a stupid answer, but for some reason to me this is the hardest, especially when you are the leader, you just can’t seem to stop worrying how your project is progressing, arethey doing their jobs? You just had had to control everything, as if like a control freak. It is like you had to constantly worry about the project where ever you are, and whenever you are. And just when it takes a heavy toll on your mind, you had no choice but to let the project go and flow to its own path. Just bear in mind that you had done your best and do not regret no matter what the outcome is. No one can control everything, no matter how perfect your plan might be, only God knows how will the plan turn out to be. That is why to me the previous listed three is just a minor, letting go is the most valuable and hardest thing to do, at least to me.
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