Your Exit Strategy

·      The exit strategy I plan to make is to grow the customer base of the business while simultaneously expanding advertising and marketing, as to attract more people and spread information. In regard to a timeline, I could foresee it being about seven to ten years before I could comfortably pass the business along to others to effectively manage it.

·      I have chosen the particular exit strategy because of the nature of the business idea. Due to the fact that not many people are familiar with my business proposal and the many great benefits it provides, I can safely assume it will take time to grow a solid customer base. I will have to inform people of the dangers of the commercial pet foods they have been led to believe is perfectly fine for all these years while trying to convince them that I have the solution.

·      To be entirely honest, I do not think my exit strategy has had any influence on other decisions I have made in my concept. I identified something that I am passionate about, that can ultimately help and improve the lives of dogs and their owners. As for how the exit strategy played into all of that, well I can’t say it had much to do with it. Regardless of the exit strategy, I would have still pursued my idea the same way I have so far, as it means so much to me.

Reading Reflection No. 3

·      What was the general theme or argument of the book?

o   The general theme or argument of this book is pretty straightforward, revolving around the idea of how people can maximize their marketing potential through social media. For example, for anyone who looking to share information, whether it be their own or someone else’s, Kawasaki provides the necessary and recommended steps to achieve exactly that.

·      How did the book, in your opinion, connect with and enhance what you are learning in ENT 3003?

o   This book in particular connected with and enhanced my learning in this course because it expanded on the social media aspect. Through this course, we utilize multiple forms of social media, from posting on our blog to using apps like Facebook and Instagram to find potential interviewees.

·      If you had to design an exercise for this class, based on the book you read, what would that exercise involve?

o   An exercise I would conduct, based on this book would be to have students create some form of advertising for a product before having read this book. Then, I would require students to first, read the book and then recreate/edit the social media advertising to reflect what they learned and read. Second, I would have them record the feedback they got before/after the changes and see how much it really benefited their social media influence.

·      What was your biggest surprise or 'aha' moment when reading the book? In other words, what did you learn that differed most from your expectations?

o   The biggest “aha” moment when reading this book came in the form of the info of how important visuals are in your social media posts. I had never really considered the appeal of them before reading this, but after, I could easily see how much more likely I was to click or read a post if there was a picture alongside it.

Celebrating Failure

·      I guess I would say the most relevant failure this past semester would be taking on one too many courses. I spoke briefly about this in a previous blog post, but long story short, I overestimated my time management skills and underestimated the workload required for each of my courses. Unfortunately, I assumed these courses would be more similar to my associate degree level courses, and that clearly was not the case. I ended up having to drop one courses for this semester, putting me at a total of 2 courses. Overall, time management played the most important role and was most crucial to my success, or so I realized.

·      As far as what I learned from my experience, moving forward I have to set more realistic expectations of myself. Considering that I have recently started working full time, I have to take into account the fact that I won’t be able to take a full schedule of courses. I strongly believed that I would be able to balance my time evenly amongst three courses, but as I learned from this semester, that just cannot be the case. Also, working ahead and setting a routine for myself will help me substantially, I believe.

·      My view on failure in general, is that it is definitely a bummer, but there is usually a silver lining if you look hard enough. In this case, failure is one of our best lessons, as we are able to identify where we struggle and how to improve ourselves moving forward. As for how this class has changed my perspective on failure, I would say that I am more likely to take a risk moving forward. It is definitely scary failing, but picturing myself years down the line, looking back at my younger self, provides me with the motivation to take the risk, possibly fail, and learn now, rather than never find out what I am capable of.