We're living in a world that's whirled and rushed; but some time or another, we have to give ourselves the chance to stop, sit and think. After completing our second product test on Monday this is exactly what we did. Tuesday afternoon was reflection time and Thursday brought around team discussions to form our short and long-term strategies.
The past couple of weeks had been the busiest; looking for suppliers, trying out new recipes and refining the old, ordering and cutting the fruit and setting up for our first whole-day sale. We were so focused on doing things for that Monday, that we weren't really sure what we were supposed to be doing after our second product test. I mean, we had tasks assigned in Asana, but were they top priority? Were they the smartest way to be spending our time at the moment? Were there other things we could be doing? What was our short-term strategy? What about our long-term strategy? These were all things we had to figure out before we could keep going, especially if we wanted to become more efficient and time-savvy. As a team, we sat down, strategized and prioritized our tasks. Although this constituted as sitting in a circle and discussing and not getting any physical products completed or checking off any tasks in Asana, we definitely got organized; we finished Thursday with a much clearer idea of where we want to go and what we should be doing now which, to me, is more important than getting things done at this point. Sometimes we are so caught up in what we're doing that we don't realize that we could be doing some things a lot more effectively and efficiently. After spending around 3 hours talking as a team and figuring out what we need to do, I personally feel that we are better prepared to attack and get things done now. We have important tasks that need to get completed and not so important tasks that can wait for a little bit and we also what strategies we want to apply in the short and long term. As I said before, we're living in a world that is very rushed and seldom do we just stop and think, but, little do we know that sometimes that stopping for a moment is the only thing that could make our lives easier.
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Every day we find ourselves being slowed down by speed bumps or stopped by roadblocks, but this is no reason to stop what we're doing and give up, especially if you have a great team backing you up. This week, I've found myself even more challenged than before and I realized the importance of having great people to help you out.
The reason why I say this week has been more challenging than others is because my phone was stolen. Yes, it might seem weird I'm saying this, you might find it superficial and you probably don't see how or why it's relevant. But it is. The thing is, my phone was just another part of me, like a third hand, and it feels like it was chopped off for no reason and without any warning. I had everything on it, from the basic pictures, chats and emails, to the most important: my homework planner app and Asana. With these 2 apps, I was able to plan everything I had to do for BlendZ and for homework in general; without them, I felt like a lost lamb without it's herder. But the importance of this anecdote is not that my phone was stolen but that I had great people behind me helping me, consoling me and figuring out ways to work around this "amputation". There simply are times that I cannot be more grateful for the friends and parents I have (shoutout to Karen and my parents!) and this is one of them. Karen was with me when my phone was stolen and she saw how I went from happy-go-lucky to crying, in hysterics and having a panic attack in a matter of seconds. She did everything in her power to try to calm me down: called my parents, talked to the sales associates in the store and fed me after we were basically pushed aside by the sales associates. It was an awful evening and I know I would have done something irrational if it weren't for her. I also have my parents to thank. The Sunday after the incident we went back to the store and we talked to the manager, to see if she could do anything (it turns out she couldn't if we didn't go talk to the police). My parents also helped me in any possible way when I couldn't open my iCloud Photo Stream on my laptop to access the pictures I took at Hiraoka when I went to look at blenders that Thursday. I was being challenged and I would not have been able to demolish this roadblock if it weren't for my team. The point of this is that although I had a hit a pothole in the road, I was able to work around it because of the great people behind me, backing me up. Now lets look at what has happened in BlendZ this week: We've been getting ready for our next sale! It has been fun, but definitely challenging. I had to come up with a new recipe in around 36 hours, figure out how much fruit we needed to order for Thursday and cut and freeze everything we had ordered by Sunday afternoon. It might not seem like much to accomplish in 3 days but it was challenging. In order to invent a new recipe, I had to rely on my parents to be able to buy fruit to experiment with. They were fine with this (at least for the most part I think) and I know I could not have done it without them considering they bought the fruit, yogurt and tried the recipe after I had spent a long time in the kitchen. This week I also had to test my math skills, something I am kind of lacking. I needed to order the fruit, but before I did that I had to calculate how much fruit I was going to need. I had the recipes figured out and all I needed to do was figure out how much fruit we would need for all 300 smoothies we were planning on making. But thank goodness I had Pedro to help me. I know that I would have royally messed up if I didn't ask him for help and I would have been a lot less confident about the amount of fruit that we were ordering. He was willing to help, check and re-check that we had done all calculations correctly, all for the greater good. The last big challenged I faced this week was cutting the fruit. We ended up ordering around 100 kg of fruit and without having a willing team like the one that IA'15 is, we would not have accomplished much by our deadline. Thursday morning up to lunch time was spent washing, disinfecting and cutting fruit. Thursday afternoon was spent cutting fruit and so was any other free time we had. We even ended up going to school for 3 hours today to finish cutting and setting up everything to kickstart the week with a BlendZ sale. It may seem obvious to some, but it really does make a difference to have a team that is willing to sacrifice a precious afternoon with family and friends in order to cut fruit with their second family. This is the importance of having great people behind us to back us up. I know I couldn't have accomplished half as much as I did this week without my friends, my parents and my team. All my examples and anecdotes seem really different when simply read, but they all have the same essence: the importance of having great people and teams to help you out in times of need. This might seem like a week where I might not have learned as much as others, but it definitely was one where I realized some very important things. I've always refrained about writing posts about anything other than school, but then my mom asked me "Why don't you write about other experiences, you've learned from them and that's what matters". And she is right on so many levels. My learnings don't come only from experiences in the IA, they also come from what has happened to me outside of the classroom in the past week and a half. Just because what I learned hasn't been completely confined to inside the classroom and Blendz and entrepreneurship, it doesn't mean that I can't take my experiences and apply them to the classroom. In the end, learning is learning, no matter how or where it happens. Yes, I know I already wrote a blog post about switching from the IB to IA but here's some insight into how it's been this past month-and-a-half, focusing on being CPO for BlendZ.
When people ask me why I switched out of the IB and into the IA, they are simply baffled. I simply tell them that I was never really interested in doing the IB Diploma and I regretted my decision as soon as 11th grade started. They all seem to answer something along the lines of "oh some people are not ready for the academic push" or simply "innovation es malaso, a las universidades no les va a importar"; but I'm learning not to fight it because what they don't understand is that just because I'm not sitting in a classroom listening to a teacher talk all day doesn't mean I'm not learning, it simply means I am learning effectively and liking what I learn. Lets just say I have learned a lot more doing and through experiential learning than sitting and listening. Lets talk about what it's been like being the CPO of a business. At 17. How many teenagers can say they have been founders, investors and workers of a company not even at the age of legal adulthood? Being Chief of the Production team can be quite fun, especially since we get to try new things all the time; but when it comes to being chief while starting a business, it can be quite stressful and overwhelming. Think of it: you are launching a product, it has to be exceptional and you are the leader of the people creating it. Basically, it means that all pressure is on us in order to make a desirable product. Honestly, when I signed up to be on the Product team, I was expecting it to be all about trying new smoothie recipes and talking with customers about what we should try next, but there is a whole lot more to the production team. First of all, for our first BlendZ sale, I ran all over Lima looking for the cheapest place to buy fruit. And I accomplished it. Our next step was to find a supplier who can provide all the fruit we need for the recipes we have now and fruit for other recipes. That sounded quite easy to me at the start, but once I spent around 2 hours trying to contact people, being nice to people who had no intention of being nice to me and talking with people who wouldn't talk to me if I had no "previa cita", aka appointment, I was really wondering what I had gotten myself into. This was Thursday, and for Monday I had to have completed a budget for fixed costs, a budget for recurring items, find a list of three suppliers and an idea of the three locations to put our stand. We're almost two months in to school and some people still ask me why I made the switch. The answer is simple: I like to learn and I want to learn. This was simply not happening with the IB. I learn through doing and living; by making mistakes and applying what I know in order to learn. I am able to do this in the IA and this is what matters. Just because I don't need to cram for 3 hours-some people's definition of "academic push"- for a test the next day, does not mean I am not "learning". I am actually learning and enjoying what I learn, the most important thing of all. What a successful day! On Thursday, we had the chance to prototype BlendZ during ICC. I spent the first part of the week driving around Lima looking for the cheapest place to buy fruit and Wednesday morning was spent cutting. Thursday was the big day though; around 2 or maybe even 3 hours were spent squeezing oranges and setting up the stand between the gym and the track, with a view of all ICC activities of the day. Today, although excited and determined to win all ICC activities of the day, we were more worried about selling, starting to establish our BlendZ as a brand and having everything go as smoothly as possible; and indeed it did! We sold around 85 smoothies in a span of 40 minutes, something we honestly were not expecting. But that's not the most important part of that day; what mattered most is that we figured some things out, we learned things that we could not have learned without the sale and found out that there were crucial things in order to sell and get prepared that we had not thought of before. Everything we found out are definitely things that will help us become more successful as we start out business and establish the brand at school. We came to the conclusion that our product is very desirable and most people are willing to pay the price even though it was higher than other things sold on campus. We also found out that people are willing to wait in line when the product offered is a great one and they are also willing to give feedback in order to improve our products. On the other hand, we found out some flaws such as the line was not too quick and a more effective cashier system such as 2 cashiers. We had also implemented a ticket system that turned out to be confusing and somewhat unnecessary. These were things we would definitely need to improve in order to give our clients the best experience possible.
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Author"Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light." Archives
June 2015
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