Day 10 of class we
finally put our Entrepreneurial Experience into action. Our business idea
was based on the fact that students have all of these textbooks they have
no use for after their class is over. They have the option to sell it
back to the bookstore, but they will only get a fraction of what they bought it
for. Our idea for a small business is to sell students’ textbooks to
Amazon.com for much more money than the bookstore will give them. The
name we decided on was Briar Cliff Book Sellers, or BCBS for
short. Because of the way that the Amazon buy back is set up, we are only
able to get amazon credit instead of cash. However, I don't think the
customers would really mind because they can use the credit to buy back new
textbooks from Amazon. The way that we will make money is that we will
sell the books back and then take a 10% commission of the total sales.
We started out by making
something like an executive summary about what each person is going to
do. Connor and Tommy’s job was to actually help write the executive
summary about what each person’s job is. Matt’s job was to write the
email that was going to be sent out to students. My job was to type up the
flyers that we were going to hang up around campus to get publicity for our
business. I also typed up a sales form to keep track of a customer’s
information and the textbooks and prices we were selling them for. We
also each advertised some from our personal Facebook and Twitter
accounts. The emails were sent out and I was pretty amazed at how quickly
we received responses! I would say the email was the most successful form
of advertisement, but the Facebook and Twitter also got some responses.
Thursday night, 1/16, we
went and collected books from different customers. I was amazed at the
collection of books that some people had. The customer who I received
books from had a whole box of probably 15 books and Amazon would only give
money for 7 of them. That night I priced out all the books and input the
textbooks and prices into our sales sheet. I then email the sheet to the
customer to make sure that he was alright with the textbooks and prices we were
selling them for.
We then met Friday
morning in the lounge in Baxter. This is when we actually took the
textbooks and sold them back to Amazon. For the 7 books that I was in
charge we sold them for $159, so roughly $15.90 for us, thus around $4 per
person. Total we have over $400 worth of books and not everyone who
wanted to have us sell books for them were able to get their books to us.
So, this is a little more than $10 per person that we made. After we
submitted all the books back to Amazon, we packaged up the books with materials
that we got for free from the mailroom. We then took them back to the
mailroom and UPS picked them up later that day. The books should get to
Amazon sometime later this week and, once they do, we will get the
credit.
I was pretty happy with
the way that our small business turned out. While we did get a decent
amount of textbooks to sell, it did not result in a huge amount of money for
us. I did learn a fair amount about starting a business, though. It
is a lot more work than I thought it would be, whether it is getting customers
or actually picking up the books from the customers. I also think it
would have been beneficial to advertise more. Most of the customers we
received where all people who knew one of the team members personally. I
think if we were able to build a reputation, then people who did not know us
would actually come give us their business. One important concept I learned
was about bootstrapping. While we did not make a bunch of money, one
benefit was that we did not have a single cost. The way we sold the books
back, Amazon paid for the shipping of the books back, and we got all the
packaging material for free from the mailroom.
Overall, it was a very
good experience and I have learned a lot from class, but also from our
entrepreneurial experience. I do not know yet where my life and career
are going to take me, but I most certainly think that I have a little bit of
entrepreneurial spirit in met and believe that whether I actually start my own
business or not, through hard-work and innovation, will make myself a bunch of
money.
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