Final Post

As we all know our product was not completely ready for sale until a couple of weeks before the due date of our project. The first week we managed to sell around 56 bottles out of the 420 total we needed to sell in order to reach our profit goal of 200. The second week, luckily, was thanksgiving break where we managed to sell the rest with an abundance of hard work and dedication on our side. We sold a bunch to family and the bulk of our product to everyday people on the streets and in the homes of D.C. residents. We also decided it might be best to buy the few remaining bottles ourselves in the interest of time saved and stocking stuffers. So we have now exceeded our profit goal of $200 by about 50 cents.

Our brief experience as entrepreneurs has been a relatively good one. Although we have also dealt with our share of stress as all entrepreneurs do, we have learned a lot. Because of the fact that most entrepreneurs end up failing and potentially going in debt, we were happy to survive and make a profit. Although we were never in danger of going into serious debt, there was a possibility of loosing the money we all invested, and for those of us without meal plans, end up going into debt simply because of our need to eat. For these reasons we spent a large chunk of our time trying to think of a business both innovative and cheap to start up. We feel we succeeded in both of these things at least in relation to our peers. It was a close call at the end and we ended up using the bulk of our free time during our thanksgiving break, but at least we got to experience at least a shadow of the sacrifice most entrepreneurs make when it comes to spending time with their families. Overall, we feel a sense of accomplishment by finally reaching our sales goal.

We learned a great deal of lessons and have much to take away from this experience. We now know what it is like to make sacrifices in the name of a business. Those of us who were able to participate in James Madison’s COB 300 program were able to utilize the teamwork skills we learned. Of course with any group project, we were able to work with new people and in the process learn to make decisions and negotiate with different personalities. For this project we had the fortune having a bi-national group. Two of our members are American and one of our members is Romanian. Because of this I think we learned an extra group of lessons that most other groups did not have the good fortune of learning. For example, we learned first hand the importance of double checking on meeting times and places when not all group members share a common first language. In conclusion, we each learned a great deal of lessons that we can now bring with us to help with our future endeavors.