Entrepreneurship for Journal of Multidisciplinary- myassignmenthelp

Question: Discuss about theEntrepreneurship for Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies. Answer: Introduction Entrepreneurship is the key to building an economy. This is how new businesses take shape and eventually build brands. Entrepreneurship feeds on innovation and it is important for a new business to try something new and offer to their customers. In this course of entrepreneurship we have learnt various important aspects of entrepreneurship and I am sure they will help me in the future. I have plans of opening my own restaurant which would offer a variety of cuisines and an excellent infrastructure. This course has helped me in understanding various theories that would help me with this venture. A few classes were very interesting like the concept of lean start up. This helped me get in line with the present day startup formation techniques. The business model canvas that we learnt today, I have applied on my venture and I will continue to update it regularly. I also read and understood about serial entrepreneurs and their attributes. And most importantly I learnt about social media marketing which is very prominent in the present day scenario and is expected to gain further ground. I will surely be using the strategies that I learnt through the curriculum in my venture and I am sure it would bear good fruits. I am maintaining this log so that I can go back to these logs when I actually start working. This log book is practically my handbook for the venture. I have recorded up to 10 logs of the topics that I felt were most crucial to my entrepreneurial venture. Entrepreneurship Entrepreneurship is the procedure of starting a new business with a purpose of making profit (Schaper, 2014). In this course I learnt various aspects about entrepreneurship that I did not know before. I have come to understand the concept of market segmentation and target markets which help businesses in connecting with the right audience and ensuring that their needs are fulfilled (Kiel, 2014). Market segmentation is the process of dividing the market into various customer segments who have similar needs. This segmentation can be done on the basis of gender, class, income group, lifestyle, geographic location, demography, age group and other such factors. I have learnt that this segmentation helps firms in understand the needs and targeting the right set of customers for their products. I have always wanted to open my own restaurant and this session helped me understand that it is important for me to find my target audience. I would now understand how I can strategically divide my m arket into various segments in order to make sure my restaurant offers food that suits these market segments. I will also need to ensure that my restaurant promotions are done in the right geographic locations in order to reach out to these customers. The lecturer also mentioned that how it is important for entrepreneurs to innovate their offerings in order to gain a competitive advantage. This is why I will perform a research about all the nearby restaurants and analyze their ambience, food quality, menu offered, service efficiency and pricing strategy. This would give me a better understanding about the existing competition in the area and hence help me evaluate how I can differentiate my restaurant in terms of its offerings (MacKenzie, 2014). Business model canvas Business model canvas was taught to us during this course. This is the tool to help entrepreneurs document current business model or build new business models. This model acts like a blackboard that helps in viewing the entire business idea in a single page (Vargas, 2015). The canvas throws light on four aspects of the business, Financial, infrastructure, customers and offering. The infrastructure aspect of the business informs the marketer about the key activities, key resources and partner network of the organization. The financial aspect of the model tells us about the sources of incomes and the cost incurred. The customer aspect of the model tells us about who our customers will be and how can they be reached effectively. Lastly the offering aspect of the model tells us about exactly what is it that we would be offering to our customers (Coes, 2014). For the restaurant that I intend to open, I have tried to apply the business model canvas to gain greater insight about my business proposition (Chesbrough, 2013). While I was working on it, I got a much greater understanding of the details of my business plan. I will continue to work upon and improvise this business model canvas till the inception of the business. Key Partners Key activities Value Proposition Customer relations Customer segments Two key partners including myself and my father. 1. Cooking food 2. Marketing and PR activities. 3. Cleaning and infrastructure development 4. Finances and accounting. 5. Customer service. 6. Home delivery service. 7. Parcel and take away. 1. Serving quality food to the customers. 2. Providing customers with a comfortable ambience where they can interact with friends as well as conduct official meetings. 3. Parcel, take away and home delivery facility available. 1. Effective customer service. 2. Quick delivery. 3. Prior booking on order. 1. Youth will be targeted for the caf. 2. Families would be targeted for fine dining. 3. Corporates would be targeted to conduct office parties, get together and deliveries. Key Resources Channels 1. Human resources including managers, waiters, chefs and accountant. 2. Financial resources required to set up the restaurant. 3. Land and building of the restaurant. 1. Television and newspaper advertisements. 2. Social media marketing. 3, word of mouth. 4. Bill boards and pamphlets. Cost Structure Revenue Structure 1. Rent 2. Electricity and water expense 3. Infrastructure expense 4. Raw material expense 5. Salaries of employees. 6. Marketing expense 1. Service fee received from customers. 2. In the future, franchise would be sold. Social media marketing Social media marketing is one of the most crucial forms of marketing applied and used by marketers today. This includes promoting a product or a service via internet based social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn and similar others (Tuten, 2017). We learnt that if social media is used effectively to promote a particular product, it is even possible to go viral and reach out to a much wider audience using a single platform. Everyone is on Facebook today and hence most companies have also built their own Facebook page. This page has now become a medium of communication between the customer and the business (Kaur, 2016). Social media has also been successful in keeping the business on its toes by ensuring that organizations respond to customer queries and address their grievances (Packer, 2011). If any business effectively addresses customers on these public platforms, it not only helps in customer relationship building but also helps the business establish and maintain a successful brand image in the world. For example, recently a customer in India tweeted by asking people to choose between Ola and Uber cab service for an inter-city ride. Even though Uber has a larger market share, Ola quickly took advantage of this opportunity and offered the customer a free ride. Within a few hours, this news went viral and was covered by leading news channels and social media pages. Although this cost the cab service provider additional money but the brand image that was built was completely worth the effort. For my restaurant I have decided to use Facebook as a medium to promote the events happening at the restaurant and spread more awareness about the business. On the other hand, I would be sharing the picture of the food and ambience on Instagram and Pinterest. Snapchat can also be used to upload stories about various events organized at the restaurant. Moreover, if there is a special event like live music or standup comedy show, the going live feature of Facebook and Instagram can be used to reach to a wider audience and share live updates about the event with our followers. Start up lessons learnt During this course I have learnt the many challenges that can be faced by an entrepreneur. This helped me prepare better. There are many types of stakeholders that I would have to deal with. These stakeholders would include my financers, investors, customers of the restaurant as well as the employees who work there. As the owner I need to take care of many things. Therefore what I learnt is that I need to maintain and build strong and long term relationships with people which would help my business grow. I learnt that I must maintain my finances well and be prepared in case of any unseen crisis. I learnt that I will consistently revise and analyze my business plan so as to make sure that I am prepared for any roadblocks if faced. The lean start up The lean start up is the new methodology that is slowly gaining ground. We learnt how lean start up is different from a regular start up that existed before. Such startups do not believe in making long business plans for 5 years. They rather efficiently use tools like the business model canvas explained above. It is strongly believed that it is impossible to judge or forecast the market situation for the next five years especially in such a fast changing scenario. Therefore lean startups have quickened the entire process of a startup and by creating a product and taking feedback (Ries, 2011). The product development cycle of such startups is very small (Blank, 2013). For my restaurant I could keep a feedback box in place, carefully examine Zomato reviews or even personally ask customers for any additions or variations that are required and do so quickly. This would help me be up to date and analyze consumer demand quickly. Guerrilla marketing and the drop box case study There are many concepts which were explained to us with the help of real market cases. One of the concepts that I found really interesting was guerrilla marketing. This is the process of marketing and promoting the product with little budget (Hutter, 2011). Dropbox is a downloadable application which allows its users to share, store and sync files, images, videos or documents. At present, drop box has a user base of 7 million. Drop box founder Drew Houston did not want to invest heavily in marketing and hence resorted to promoting word of mouth marketing and referrals. Drop boxs 4 million users produced 2.8 million direct invites (Eisenmann, 2012). Drop box also introduced a vote box which allowed users to give feedback about the drop box and recommend changes on the same. The team managed to garner immense insight on user preferences with the help of vote box. I am planning to open the restaurant by taking a loan from the bank. Which is why it is crucial that I set and implement the right budget in my business. The idea of offering discounts to customers who refer my restaurant to other potential customers can help me increase sales and spread word of mouth publicity. Over the time, I will launch an application to order food from the restaurant but ordering food from website will be possible from day 1. Anyone who makes an account on the website or application, gets their own referral code and 10% discount would be added to their account when anyone else orders using their code. Digital entrepreneurship Digital entrepreneurship can mean starting a new business which uses technology or simply updating an already existing venture with the help of IT. This involves the usage of mobile phones, internet, cloud computing, web analytics and cyber solutions. It was one of the most interesting courses I have ever studied. And the advent and growth of digitalization of the world today is truly phenomenal. The usage of social media has already been explained above but now many businesses are also using SEO (Search engine optimization) as well as SEM (Search engine marketing) in order to target the right customers and be more approachable to their audience (Nambisan, 2017). I have learnt that a digitalization of a particular company might mean there is digitalization of process, nature of goods and services, digital selling or digital marketing activities. A digital entrepreneur is the founder of a digital company. Such entrepreneurs must be innovative, well versed with customer needs and have a strong knowledge about information technology (Kelestyn, 2014). Big firms like Amazon, Air BnB, Netflix or Uber have garnered many million customers because of the digitalized nature of their product or the channels they use. In order to make sure that my restaurant will be up to date with the latest technology, I can look at building a digital menu. The idea of a digital menu is that it is easy to update and more precise as the customer enters the order for himself leading to no miscommunication. The menu would also have the feature of upselling items by recommending paired dishes automatically. At the same time, this menu can be seen in multiple languages which would assist foreign customers to order in their own language. To dare and to fail This was one of the guest lectures which was very motivating. This course taught us that almost 75% of the startups fail. The founders of amazon, Flipkart and various other startups experimented and failed many times before they finally hit success. Once we can dream of starting our own business, there is no looking back. This does not mean that we will not fail but what this means is that it is important that we learn from our failures and start again. In fact coping with this failure is the key for entrepreneurial success (Yamakawa, 2015). Many thought leaders say that it is important to face failure before one can taste success because the kind of lessons that failure gives pave the way for future success. How one copes with an entrepreneurial failure is also very crucial (Cope, 2011). If a business fails, it is crucial to in detail understand the reasons behind this failure so that the same mistakes are not repeated again. I will make sure that in my restaurant, every negative feedback is also taken constructively. If there is any issue with accounting, finances or human resources, I will try my best to identify the issue at a nascent stage and improve it. I would also invest time and reading about and researching upon similar ventures and their success and failure stories and attempt to learn from them as well. While I was researching more on the topic, I read that failed entrepreneurs can be divided into four categories. These categories are boiled frog, drowned frog, bull frog and Tadpole. A boiled frog is an entrepreneur who does not notice the changes around him like competition, demand, changing consumer lifestyles or recession etc. A drowned frog is an entrepreneur who tries to spread out into different aspects of the business and lacks the necessary skills for it (Ropega, 2011). A bull frog is an entrepreneur who let early success get to their heads and are smitten by vanity. They believe nothing is above them and fail to realize how this attitude can impact their business. And lastly, tadpoles are entrepreneurs who never fulfil their promise and hence remain tadpoles in the entire course of the business (Huffington post, 2012) Differentiation In this course I learnt an important thing called product or service differentiation and how is it so important to survive the competition existing today. This process includes attempting to make your product or service different from those existing in the market (Armstrong, 2015). In the current scenario where the competition is so cut throat, it is important that we offer something different to our customer. It is important to know that this product differentiation creates first time customers. Therefore it is important that once these customers have been introduced to the business, they are valued and served efficiently in order to retain them. The differentiation in product or service can be accomplished by either creating a different product, targeting a different market, pricing the product differently or even using different channels to reach out to customers (Kotler, 2012). Most leaders believe that the customer demands are ever changing that is why it is crucial to continuou sly keep ourselves aware of the market environment, have a thorough competitive analysis and innovate new or differentiated offerings that suit the need of our target customers. Samsung or Apple have survived in the market since many years solely because they continue to offer different products and are consistently updating their products to suit the customer demands as well as match up to the offerings of competing brands (Lee, 2011). However, it is important that the differentiation is well thought of, researched and then introduced in the market. It is not necessary that every different business idea will be a successful one. Pepsi once introduced blue Pepsi in order to create a different impact and change their offering from their competitor Coca-Cola. However, not only was the product discarded by the consumers but the company also faced severe losses. This is why upon introducing a new product, it can be first launched to a smaller target, taken a feedback and then introduced for everyone else. Serial entrepreneur In this course we learnt an interesting concept of serial entrepreneurship. A serial entrepreneur, as the name suggests, is someone who starts a business and once it is established, and delegates the responsibility of the business and goes on to start another business (Amaral, 2011). Serial entrepreneurs may or may not even sell their previous businesses. Richard Branson is one of the most suited example for a serial entrepreneur. The owner of virgin group has extended over 300 businesses till date. Some ventures like virgin Atlantic and virgin music are largely successful but the firm has faced severe losses in the form of virgin vodka, virgin brides, virgin clothing and even virgin cola. However, not once did these failures stop Branson from continuing to introduce something new. We learnt various traits of serial entrepreneurs that are innate within people who love to start new business and face new challenges. They love the idea of starting something afresh and problems that come with it. They work round the clock and have efficient time management skills. They have an innate quality of being able to drive the business to scale. They can bring any small business into a growth trajectory much faster than others. By now they have experienced so many setbacks that it is easy for them to identify the problems they might be facing and prepare for it beforehand. These serial entrepreneurs built strategic relationships that eventually helps them in the course of their business. They have an insatiable curiosity to know the when, how and why of everything. It is important that serial entrepreneurs are curious as it helps them work upon new ideas and create new businesses in order to satisfy that curiosity. Lastly, as a serial entrepreneur it is important to know wh en to move on. This is one of the most crucial things in serial entrepreneurship. Moving on too soon can mean that you have not fully borne the fruits of your labor and moving on too late will can exhaust resources. Therefore it is important when to cut your losses and move on. References: Amaral, A. M., Baptista, R., Lima, F. (2011). Serial entrepreneurship: impact of human capital on time to re-entry.Small Business Economics,37(1), 1-21. Armstrong, G., Kotler, P., Harker, M., Brennan, R. (2015).Marketing: an introduction. Pearson Education. Blank, S. (2013). Why the lean start-up changes everything.Harvard business review,91(5), 63-72. Chesbrough, H., Di Minin, A., Piccaluga, A. (2013). 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