[寫作指導] 商業報告書：高中創業、社會企業 Student StartUp｜潤稿 Copyediting｜學生作品成果 Writing Clinic

 

Introduction

I am working in Lionize as the operations/marketing manager and successfully achieved the highest selling profit in the recent five years of this business proposal competition. 

The mission of Lionize is to lionize our school and make the students identify with it.  We sell drawstring bags, hoodies, t-shirts, and sweatshirts, all  quality products, to the students in school. 

Customers first. We stratitized the selling plan by sending google forms on which products the customers want. This strategy made us able to purchase the exact amount of products our customers ordered from the manufacturer, so we won’t have any excess left and minimize our budget.  

Cost reduction in both communication and money is important. To make sure the easy access to place an order and to optimize the internal communication, we made a google form to survey the students on which products they prefer. The decision is efficient in two ways. For the customers, it helps them to be able to place an order fast and efficiently by just clicking some boxes. For the business team, it also helps the team to be on the same page and have online meetings with the shared data on google drive. 

Profit grows. After the analysis of the targeted audience, we aimed to sell our products to some clubs to maximize our sales figure. We went to other schools for activities, like MUN or the sports teams because they are the two biggest clubs that we believe need this product. If one of the teammates purchased our product and is satisfied, the other teammates may also purchase it together. 

Team building matters too. Throughout this activity, our team had lots of fun and enjoyed our time together figuring out how to produce and sell the products. We did bump into plenty of obstacles and learned a lot from them. 

At last, our company was a success, and it not only benefited us but also the society because of our donation to the children’s cancer foundation.

What I’ve learned

This activity was to learn how to start and operate a company efficiently. To manage the business process, I have thrived in the two main aspects. 

           First, initiate some external communication. As an operation, it was my duty to do this. I’ve learned how to reach out, network, and build strong partnerships with the other manufacturers  nicely. It was hard to find an appropriate company because I also had to think about transportation and budget. At last, I found this company in Hsinchu and proposed a fair price for the products.

 Second, make public relations and selling. After finding a trustful manufacturer and talking with them about our design and price, the next important step was to market our products to our customers, the students, and teachers. As the marketing manager, it was my duty to initiate this. I’ve learned how to advertise our products to the customers and bring attention to our company. I’ve learned how hard it actually is to create a booth and try to make the students or teachers stop by and have an interest in our products. 

My teammates and I took two tables from the office and put them in the lobby. We chose a place where people tend to walk around the most. We placed a computer with our products’ design on the table and had a bag of size samples for customers to fit on. Letting customers try on the clothes and see how good our product’s quality is was an efficient way for customers to trust our promise on high quality materials. 

While the customers were looking at our designs we also briefly introduced them with our mission and concept to stand out. With this advertisement we successfully sold our products to about five customers. Patience is very important in this step because we can’t predict how many customers will buy our product. We need to patiently introduce our products one by one to every customer that stops by. 

Problems faced

As the operations, time and budget are the worst enemy but I have overcome it. A big obstacle I’ve encountered is finding a company that is able to produce our products within one month and has a fair price so we can earn enough profit. It took me three classes to find a company that seemed to be legal and could produce all of our products. I contacted them and told them our designs and expectations. Everything was going well until I knew they couldn’t finish producing in time. I needed to find another company within a very small amount of time. With my teammate’s help on searching and asking previous business students, I successfully founded a company that had a surprisingly cheap price but good material. 

As a team, the most major obstacle we faced was the downsized team, from 5 people to 3. The marketing manager, Florence, asked for a leave, and the accountant, Rikuto, went to study abroad. I took over the workload and became both the operation and marketing manager, so things got a bit tight, but I think we cooperated well for most of the time and sorted out the jobs efficiently. To ensure the workflow of accounting, we picked up the skills together to organize the charts and money to keep our company going smoothly.

 Some minor obstacles we faced were unproductivity and distractions. Due to these two factors, sometimes we had to rush a lot of work in a very small amount of time with a lot of pressure because we didn’t manage the time well.   If we had made a bar chart illustrating all the project scheduling to make the timeline doable and check in with the current working status regularly, these problems wouldn’t happen. 

 

Conclusion

This experience not only taught me how to start a company and the hardships of it but also the most important factor, teamwork. I am more than proud to take part in the marketing and operations of the company Lionize. Our group had the best teamwork and earned a profit of 15,560NT. Each of my teammates had an important role, and we wouldn’t have succeeded without any one of us. We’ve been through ups like when we found out how much profit we earned together and downs like when we kept being rejected by students when we tried to advertise our products to them. 

In the end, we decided to donate our profit to the childhood cancer foundation. I’ve never thought we would have been able to earn this much money and never thought I would have the opportunity to donate to a cancer foundation at the age of 14. 

Even though it seemed like we had a long time to create and start a company, time passed very fast, and we’ve all learned how managing our time and being productive was very important. When I first learned about this project, I was very excited and thought that this would be very fun and go very smoothly. However, when we actually started the project, I realized that things weren’t really the way I thought. The fun part was correct, but not the smooth part. Opening a business is always hard, but everything requires 120% of hard work and dedication. A hard beginning makes a good ending. Success will always make you feel that all the effort you put in was worth it.