The End is Nigh, Time to Buck Up

This week kicked off our group’s selling period. The large shipment of bottles had arrived the day before winter vacation, leaving us no time to begin selling until school got back under way. Now that we had the order, the next step was getting the word out to the masses that we had a product they wanted, a task that turned out to be more difficult than we had predicted. As means of advertising we enlisted the skills of one of our group members, who has some remedial talent in graphic design, to create a flyer, in tandem with this we planned to spread the news of the products availability by word of mouth, both through a school-wide announcement as well as each team member being a spokesperson in their day-to-day schedule.

Our group feel short of operating at the great capacity it once did as we were a bit too lenient with the style of this class. Half of our team would go upstairs to work on the flyer every day, when all we needed was the one student who had the graphic design skills. Several class days were spent working on the flyer instead of using other means to spread the word. While I stayed behind in the class to handle any writing assignments or administrative stuff, we had more people than we needed working on a single task. This mistake ultimately falls on my shoulders, being the project manager I should have directed them to a better use of their time, but they told me they were putting themselves to good use so I allowed it. This would have been fine had the flyer done its job and attracted enough traffic to make up for all the days spent not selling, but alas, generating business is more difficult than we imagined.

While the flyer looked nice, it had one gaping flaw, students were instructed to fill out the flyers with contact information as a signal of interest, but we left no contact information of our own. With no way to relay their interest to us, the several students that we may have reached would immediately lose interest. Our product is not exciting or groundbreaking enough to cause such a wanting in a student that they would go out of their way to find the seller and make the purchase. So we spent a week of our precious time to ultimately put out a message that will fall on possibly eager ears with no way to respond, leaving us deaf to any interest there may be in the halls of BHS.

The time to sell our product is coming to a close and I am feeling a pressure unlike that I have felt from a school project before. With real money at stake, it is no longer just a bad grade that threatens if we fail. I divulged in this blog several weeks ago that I was happy and proud to be the leader of such a in-sync group, but, as I am slowly learning, you can not leave a group of smart and able-bodied students to a task without direction for very little will get done. In the coming week I will be tightening my grip on how we spend our time. This project is a true test to see if we have what it takes to pursue the world of business and I am not about to be defeated by wasted time and a few set backs. We’re going to sell these bottles if its the last thing we do.