28A - Your Exit Strategy

I think I would probably stay with this business until I graduated from UF, and then hopefully try to sell it to someone else who I think would be able to manage it and grow it well. At most, I would keep the business for five years and then sell it. I’ve selected this particular exit strategy just because I want this to be a college business, and once I’m no longer in college, I want to be able to move on to bigger and better things. I will use this business as a learning experience and take what I learn from it and apply that to other business ideas that I come up. I really don’t think that I thought about my exit strategy in depth until this assignment, so I don’t necessarily think that it has an effect on any of the other decisions that I’ve made throughout the class. I want the business to be as successful as possible, no matter how long or how short I decide to keep it. 

27A - Reading Reflection No. 3

I read Shoe Dog by Phil Knight.

What surprised me the most was the before it was Nike, he called his company Blue Ribbon.

I think what I admired most was the fact that Knight was willing to go broke for his idea. He was so passionate about sports and his ideas, that he put everything on the line and had the “nothing to lose” attitude. 

What I admired the least was that I felt, at times, Knight relied a lot on faith in himself. While having faith is a great thing, it only gets you so far. 

Knight of course encountered failure and adversity. He had several lawsuits, didn’t have that much capital to begin with, and had to change suppliers, just to name a few. Knight always kept his cool and dealt with every situation well. He was never overcome by failure. 

Phil Knight exhibited many competencies. He was passionate about sports, and turned that passion into an extremely successful brand. He was not afraid of failure, but did what he could to avoid it and create an empire. He was willing to do anything to make Nike a success, even selling shoes out of his car.

I think the only part that confused me was the name change. If Blue Ribbon had a good name and reputation, why would Knight want to change the name to Nike? 

I would ask Knight where he got the courage to cold call Mr. Onitsuka. I would also ask him how, after the shortcomings and the lawsuits, he was able to persevere and find success. 

I would say that Knight believed hard work was everything. It is clear that he always put in the work to make sure Nike was a success.

26A - Celebrating Failure

I’m an industrial and systems engineering major. For my major, one of my critical tracking classes is a computer programming class. I was in this class last semester, and no matter how many programs I did, no matter how hard I studied, my brain just could not comprehend the coding language. I didn’t think I was going to be able to pass, so I dropped the class, and retook is this semester. I spoke to the professor beforehand and he said students usually pass with flying colors the next time they take the class. So, I went into it with an open mind and really thought I was going to be able to pass. Well, I haven’t been doing that great again and now I might have to switch my major because of one class. I’m not a bad student; I put my all into everything, I spend countless sleepless nights in Library West doing the sample programs, but for whatever reason I just cannot learn how to code. All of my different study techniques have failed. I’ve tried recoding all the past programs. I’ve tried just reading through the codes to understand the logic. Nothing seems to work for me. I don’t really handle failure very well. I’ll be honest, I’ve cried for hours and hours before and after exams because of my frustration. I have a chance at passing the class this time, but I don’t know if I really can. Honestly, what I’ve learned is that there are multiple paths to success. If this doesn’t work out, maybe there’s something better out there for me. This one class does not change the way I perceive myself—I have a perfect transcript otherwise and I know I’m not dumb, I just can’t code. And that’s OK. This class really had no effect on my perspective of failure. I am going to take a risk and take the final and see if I pass rather than withdraw from the class again, but that is because I need to take a chance, not necessarily due to this class. 

25A - What's Next?

Existing Market

I think what’s next would be to start actually finding tutors that I know have a really good background and understanding in whatever classes they are going to be teaching. I can’t really move on to any other steps because if there are no tutors for a tutoring service, essentially the product doesn’t exist. 

The first person I interviewed thought that I shouldn’t limit myself to just upper-level classes. He said that if I was going to create a tutoring service, I should try to provide as many classes as I possibly could, and if this meant doing some general education classes as well, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, I would just be providing for more people. This person agreed that I should start by finding tutors, then working forward from there. 

The second person I interviewed said that my next step should be finding an actual facility to conduct the tutoring sessions (the group review sessions). This person couldn’t think of anything that I should do that I wasn’t already planning on doing—his only “issue” was that competing with services like Study Edge was going to be an obstacle. He said customers might want you to start marketing and offering deals right now so they have incentives to join your tutoring service. 

The third person I interviewed said that I should try to make a deal with the UF Bookstore in the Reitz Union to sell my tutoring supplies. She was skeptical about this at first because she thought that they exclusively sold Smokin Notes, but still thought that that should be added to the list of things that I should do that I wasn’t already planning on doing. She thought that an on-campus distributor would make the product more convenient for UF students to access instead of having to go somewhere else to pick up notes and packets. 

In terms of “what’s next” for growing my tutoring service, I think the first person I interviewed made some really compelling points. While I was initially only going to offer tutoring for the major focused, upper-level classes, I think it would be smart to branch out and offer classes that most freshman are taking as well. That way, the students can come to us at the beginning of their university experience and stay with us as loyal customers until they graduate. Once they see that our tutors know what they’re talking about and they see actual results from their freshman year, they will feel confident in our tutoring service to help them get all the way through college.

New Market

As of right now my tutoring service is for young, undergraduate students at the University of Florida. A market that is radically different may be adults (ages 40-50) that may have graduated and want to go back to school and get another degree or just learn some more material during their free time. 

My tutoring service might create value for these adults because school is really different (and harder, in my opinion) than it was when people were going to college ~20+ years ago.  My tutoring service could teach them how to study now and help them get acclimated to a university environment again. 

I interviewed my mom and dad for this section. My mom agreed that college is vastly different now than it was when she was going to university. Her adaptation was that I should offer Skype tutoring sessions because there are people who work full-time jobs and may not have time to meet anywhere for tutoring. My dad was worried about marketing to adults. Being that I was planning to use social media for most of my advertising, he thought it would be hard to reach a lot of the older generation because he doesn’t really understand how Facebook and Twitter work, so, for him, the advertising would be ineffective. He suggested finding a different way to reach this target audience. 

I think after talking to my parents, I think that this is actually a pretty good marketing to try to break into. I was initially surprised because I was only trying to make a tutoring service for undergraduate students, but I realized there are many adults that still are going to school and still want to learn. I think the university environment can be a little intimidating for some adults, especially because there is so much technology incorporated into the classrooms and the homework assignments nowadays, so I think it would be a good idea to try to target the adult market and help them get acclimated to school life. The only issue that I see is what my father brought up with the marketing aspect. I wouldn’t really know how to reach a lot of adults because they might be working jobs during the day and attending class at night and have no time to check social media for our advertisements or just simply not know how to work social media. That would be the only issue that I see with this market, is just simply trying to reach out to them and let them know that our services are available.