NFTN- Spotlight on Learning: City of Hawksville Opens New Business
Spotlight on Learning:
Subject: City of Hawksville Opens New Businesses
Presented by: D. Dyck
Subject: Entrepreneurship 10
Culminating Project
TEACHER DESCRIPTION: The final project of Entrepreneurship 10 is an opportunity for students to implement their learning over the duration of the semester. The Small Business Project requires students to plan and operate a small business. The target market, the city of Hawksville, aka Mouat Secondary. The goal of the project is for students to put into action what they believe they know.
Prior to operations, students develop a Business Plan. The Plan requires each entrepreneurial group (Partnerships and Sole Proprietors) to determine their product line, complete a cost analysis, develop a price list, and send out a market research survey. Honestly once these 4 areas are done, likely most businesses will revisit their original idea and make tweaks or completely revise. The last sections of the Business Plan require students to finesse the final product line along with finalizing prices. In addition, the Promotions and Marketing sections are written and created.
It is always a scramble on the first day! Emotions, dreams and desires of making lots of money is high. Day one was busy with excitement. Students quickly learned organization is important! Day 2 started with better organization, fresh stock and excitement from the previous days sales. Day 3 finished with mixed emotions over successful sales vs. left-over product and the new understanding of challenges small businesses face. Although, some business operators wished they could keep selling as they enjoyed making money.
STUDENT REFLECTIONS: For my first year in high school, I chose business and marketing as my elective. This elective taught me a lot about business and people's own perspectives. As a class we got to learn a lot about business. Our teacher Ms. Dyck taught us how to run a business and she used her own life experiences and examples to teach us. She made this class very fun and made it hands on, which was great since we learned more from experiences than notebooks.
We had a final project in this elective and it was to run your own business. As a class we learned a lot about how to run a business to prepare ourselves. We had to make a business plan before we could start. The business plan included a list of required information the city needed before they could hand us the permit. Ms. Dyck made this project very realistic, and it showed us all what is needed to run a real business. Some of the information we included in our business proposal was about finances, marketing, manufacturing, costs, ownership, menus and our competition. We learned about the legal fees of a business and how stocks work. When our business proposal was read through, we got our certificate showing we can run our business.