Guest Speaker Graham Evans

We had guest speaker Graham Evans present to our class on Tuesday 1/28/14.  Graham brings many years of entrepreneurship experience with him and helped to give me more perspective on how to put together a business plan in an hour.

I took away a lot from this class!  I was a little lost when it came to how to determine the value of a business idea.  Once he asked for ideas and many of us shared ours (8 I think in total) and our class voted on the 1 idea we were going to expand on in class that day to build up as a business, things became much more clear.  I was very surprised at how many things you have to think about before moving even 1 dollar towards your project.  Such as having an understanding of breaking up the business model into 9 categories that account for the costs, partnerships, employees, tasks, services, etc.  This was what I needed to know what model I should put any idea through, in order to know if its worth my time. 

I also enjoyed him taking the time to show us that some businesses (even the one we worked on in class) can fall apart right before you even get it going, as many questions need to be answered first.  For example, knowing where the money would be made in our electronic recycling business idea.  It didnt manifest into what we all initially envisioned.  

When formulating my business plan for this course, I intend to draw a lot from Grahams discussion and will use his business acumen thoughts to not be short sighted in my endeavors. 

Thoughts on Guest Speaker Erik Hanberg

We had the pleasure of having Erik Hanberg come to speak to our class on Thursday morning.  His time spent with us explaining his progression away from the daily grind of working full time for someone else, and turning that into a money making machine for him and his wife was quite intriguing.  I found it interesting how he made steps with his book publishing to test the waters of entrepreneurship, the success and failures of small business ventures, and the lessons that he learned along the way.  Some of the things that I took away from his lecture was that you have to take risks, small ones.  Learn how to make 50 bucks, if you can do that, how do you make $100?  Try that first.  Simple as it may sound, it really isnt as easy as you might think.  I personally have tried my hand at numerous ventures in the past 20 years, but as Erik states, its all about making small calculated risks.  I liked how he said that you have to market yourself well, network and then do it again 10 fold.  I especially appreciated his take on how to evolve as a business person and know when the market is saturated with too many people trying to do the same thing you are.  He was insightful in the way that he clearly kept a log of his families earnings in a graph to illustrate how they took "dips" in their income at certain life events, and how they could depict the growths as well by changes they made in their strategies.  Knowing your strengths, and outsourcing the rest (even for barter) was also a great piece of advice.  Erik was a excellent guest speaker and I look forward to more great tips from the others further in the quarter. 

I like money...got some?

I expect to learn a lot about all things Entrepreneurship in this class. From things like business models, pitfalls, changing markets to infrastructures.  I am excited to see the guest speakers and learn about their experiences in their respective fields.  I enjoyed having Andrew Fry for my MTT class and knew that taking another class with him would benefit me especially when it comes to business.  I hope to learn more about how I can sharpen my skills to perhaps start a company and become self sufficient as opposed to being a slave to corporate America.  This is what I am meant to do as I have a lot of ideas that I feel can contribute to technology in many innovative ways.  There are very few classes that give a clear business view in IT, so when I seen this it really got me excited to learn.  I hope that there will be some information that will help me to also have a clear understanding of what to expect when I get into a corporation and how to navigate through the hierarchy to get into a management role one day.  All in all, I am really motivated to get as much as I can from this course.

3 Business Ideas

For our first assignment in my TINST 475 Entrepreneurship class we are to come up with 3 business ideas related to Information Technology.  I initially struggled coming up with some ideas but as I spent more time thinking about the needs of the consumer, it started to come together quicker than I had anticipated.  For me it comes down to what are services or products that are always in high demand.  For instance when we look at successful establishments that surpass billions of dollars in revenue its usually in areas such as food, oil/gas, automotive, retail, pharmaceuticals etc..  The thing that ties all these types of commodities together is that they are things that as humans we absolutely need.  When it comes to technology, how do we find that niche to bridge into this area of fortune 500 companies, and find what consumers feel they cant live without?  That's the long term goal, but for the short term its about getting a start-up idea together with realistic expectations, costs and making enough profit to make it a viable use of my time.   

Here are some ideas for some start-ups that bring together technology with some of my hobbies, and creating services that are not readily available today.

1.   Saltwater Aquarist Exchange:  The idea would be something similar to ebay (auction site) but for local sellers of all things in the Saltwater aquarium trade.  One thing that I have noticed since getting back into this hobby is that there is very little places to go to get quality items/livestock for people wanting to buy/sell items locally.  There is hardly any local fish stores that carry rare saltwater fish, and there are many times when people get fish that are not compatible with other inhabitants of their aquarium, so instead of giving these beautiful fish to places like petco that dont know how to take care of them, I would rather sell them to someone locally who wants them for their tank. Below is a picture of my saltwater tank, in which it took me nearly 6 months to locate some of the fish you see here. The Pink Tail Triggerfish was one of the hardest to locate along with the Naso Tang (grey colored fish with yellow belly).  Had I some way to stay connected to others in the hobby, I believe I could have saved an expensive fish from being flushed down the toilet or just given away to a chain pet store (which is the same as the death swirl).

2.  UFC gambling smart phone community:  This would entail creating not only an app for smart phones for users to join a community, but also creating a gambling community that doesn't use real money.  Instead of money users would use "punch tokens" and they would gamble on who they think would win fights, by rounds, finishes, scoring etc.  These tokens would then be used as a way for friends to play a sort of fantasy fighting championship where the winner at the end of the year could win real prizes.  This would obviously generate income from advertising as there is no real money exchanged.  Below you see a breakdown of the last UFC where the odds could have played a excellent advantage, had there not been this freak outcome that ended the fight prematurely. 

3.  Senior Citizen Support:  This is an idea that has manifested from my managing tech teams course and my non-profit internship that I just completed this past summer.  I worked for a retirement home where the clients are functional citizens, that use computers and tablets, but are not very tech savvy with them.  During my time with this client, I was told by the staff that almost every senior citizen home desperately needs IT support for their citizens and someone to come in and teach classes like I did each week.  They are willing to pay great money for a start up in such a venture and I could shop this idea around to multiple homes to set up a business model from.  I not only got over 30 clients computers working properly and secured, I taught them all how to do all the basics for computing and working in the new tech age.  I believe this could be a very profitable business if I am able to secure the right clients and they are wiling to pay a decent wage for the time these sessions take.