Howdy,
Today we started with an introduction by Richard specifying when we should be doing specific things like production and sales.
After the talk, we had the morning to work in our groups towards anything we needed to do. We decided to delegate tasks between us and start working on them immediately. I decided to work on the point of sale stands for our sales events whilst Lorna and Angelo worked towards making our business plan as detailed and indepth as possible and Mike worked on promotional material and cards for sale alongside the chocolates.
I decided to look at work done by larger companies with regards to their point of sales designs and so I started to get a pretty decent idea of what I should start working on and which direction our sales and promotional material should take.
Richard came to talk to our group about how we were doing and what we would be doing next. He seemed to be quite positive about how we were doing and was helping us to understand what questions the panel were likely to ask for our final business pitch. Richard also took an interest in our finances, which are turning out to show that we are technically capable of making between £200 – £300 profit from the £100 seed fund.
At 1pm, we had a talk from Lee Sharma from the centre of student entrepreneurship. Lee’s talk about USPs was incredibly important in my opinion and it made it clear how we should be approaching our USPs and advertising them. His ideas on sales were also quite insightful and I feel his morals of making the product something that the consumer wants is essential.
Unfortunately, we had to leave Lee’s talk early as we were all set to start casting some more chocolates at 2pm. We met Ray Newbury again and got straight back to work, setting straight off again from where we finished off last week.
Our new moulds, although slightly more successful in making better detailed shapes, were in fact slightly worse at releasing the chocolates… The chocolate took a little longer to melt and temper today as we were using far vaster quantities, though it was still faster than we had originally anticipated.
We decided to create a small production line, where Mike and Myself were pouring and releasing the chocolates and Lorna and Angelo were packing and sorting the chocolates. This worked very effectively and we were able to produce a very large amount of chocolates ready to be packaged and sold.
Overall, the cooling times were brought down to a measly 10 minutes which is 6 times quicker than originally estimated and so we are able to turnover stock far faster than our original plans had anticipated.
Overall, today I am really happy with our progress as a group, we now have saleable stock ready to be packaged and sold next week. I have found myself returning to my indecisiveness, though this could be due to my slight concerns over what our point of sale designs should be like. I do feel like I am getting somewhere with them however and so I look forward to tommorow to see what actual stands I can build and test.