Supply and demand is what drives product sales in a capitalist system. If a product is in great demand, then the value of the product is increased in order to meet that demand, and if a product is over-supplied, then its value is lessened because of over-availability. Go ahead and complete the following practice on what supply and demand can mean based on our classroom conversation of the hot dog stand.

To Complete:

1. Participate in class discussion on demand and detriments.

2. Utilizing internet, complete the above ‘sheet’ on your own sheet of paper.

3. Give me what you did.

 

 

 

All right, this is what it’s all about- The Tank. We’ve watched many people enter the tank with their businesses, ideas, and inventions and have been thoroughly impressed. Well, now it’s your turn. You are going to enter the tank hoping to sell your business to a team of ‘investors’ who will determine your point total. If you just present the task, but the investors are unimpressed/uninterested/unwilling to consider an investment, then you will receive 150 points. If you can manage to convince the evaluators that you have a worthy-to-invest-in business, then you will receive 300 points. And if you are what the ‘investors’ consider the top business in the class, then you will receive 450 points, making the 2150 threshold much more attainable. But you’ll have to earn the opportunity to convince the investors. Here’s how: in the week prior to senior finals week (May 11th-15th), all discrete math students will present their businesses to me (with the rest of the class evaluating) in the same manner that those that appear on Shark Tank do (show the product, detail the sales, convince us your business is a success and deserves further consideration and investment). The presentation is entirely up to you as to how you want to go about it- there is no template. Do whatever you think is appropriate to sell yourself (Powerpoint, actual demonstration of the product, a financial analysis, etc…). Each student in the class will then evaluate the presenters on a 1-5 scale (5 being better). The 3 presenters with the highest average scores from the class will then present to the Sharks in the next week* in hopes of getting the 450 points (only one business will receive this). Simple enough, now let’s see who has the chops to make this happen!

*all students are expected to come to the ‘final’ to view the Shark Tank contest whether or not they are participants. We’ve come a long way, and everybody is invested in what we did this year in this class. Half of the 150 points you receive for this final presentation come quite simply from your presence on this day. (conflicting schedules for school-related issues will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis) Please, let’s not make this an issue and just schedule that 1 hour of our lives as a must-do. Thanks.

Please use the Toontastic app, currently on all the iPads, demonstrating a poor use of credit. Your comic strip animation must show not just an unwise purchase, but the rates and the results. Think beyond just the credit card (although this is certainly an option) to other types of credit. Full credit (ha!) comes from showing why this use of credit is unwise within the comic strip — articulate the results over time. Please consider this to be a required task for the points. Any student who does not complete the credit comic strip will lose the point value.

Simple project here, but if you actually had to do it (or if you do indeed run your own business someday, then you definitely will do it), it would be daunting. Imagine a small business possibility. Some ideas? Coffee shop. Simple restaurant. Book store. T-shirt printing shop. Catering service. Musical instrument shop. Or whatever you can think of. But when you start, it looks like empty. You have to develop it entirely. So the task here is this: figure out exactly what the inside of whatever business you envision would look like, right down to the finest detail. Shelves. Product. Displays. Wall coverings. Materials. Everything. You’ll need a diagram to really see what it is you’re doing, for sure.

Then, price it! All of it! What would it cost to open the doors in this business? Put it in a list with related cost, then total the costs to see what it would actually cost. Then show me.

 

1. You are given $500 to spend online to shop for their winter wardrobe.
2. You must buy a coat, pants, shirts, shoes, socks, underwear, gloves, boots and hats.
3. You can also buy any sports clothing they need.
4. You may use any store websites.
5. You will also add in a shipping charge of $10.00 and calculate a 20% discount for shopping online. The applicable tax will be 9.5% and must be added into their cost. They may not go over $500.
6. You must show all items purchased and costs.

Road Trip

 

Step-by-Step Instructions:

You will design a road trip itinerary that requires the following:

1. You must visit at least one of each of these items on their road trip; school/university, professional sports stadium, national park, local hot spot, and amusement park.
2. Decide on the type of vehicle used for trip and report it’s estimated gas mileage.
3. All travel must be completed within the time frame of 10 to 14 days.
4. You cannot travel more than 10 hours in one day.

In groups of 2-3, you will use the computer to research and decide upon the 5 required destinations. Next you will decide the order in which you will visit the destinations, based on the mileage between them. Calculate how much driving time is required to visit all the destinations and develop an itinerary based on the 10 hour driving limit per day. If your trip cannot be completed within 14 days, you must adjust your destinations to be able to meet the travel restrictions, or stay overnight in a location between the scheduled destinations.

After you have developed an itinerary, you will need to search for lodging for each night of your trip. You may stay wherever you like, but the cost for each night must be included in your total costs.

Each day you will need to eat. Calculate the cost for breakfast, lunch and dinner of each day and total food cost. Where and what you eat is up to you.

Once all the required information is collected, be sure to calculate the following items:

1. Total miles driven, miles driven each individual day and average miles per day
2. Total gas cost, avg gas cost per day
3. Cost for each attraction visited and total for all attractions
4. Total food costs, cost of each meal and avg per day
5. Total cost for accommodations, each day cost and avg per day
6. Grand total of all costs for entire trip, total avg cost per day

 

Pretty simple, but incredibly important. You need a sensible name and a decorative logo to help drive your business forward. No company has ever succeeded with “Joe Schmo” as the name- the name matters. Your task is to DIGITALLY design a logo that applies to your business (it doesn’t need to be the greatest artwork of all time- it can just be a font spelling out the business name like Bose Corporation.)

Make this one count. Put some serious mental effort into this, don’t just scribble something on a piece of paper. If you find yourself twiddling your thumbs at Ruzzle, develop this instead! This is a critical element to any successful business.

(Step 1: Business Concept)
A mission statement captures your new business`s purpose, customer orientation and philosophy.

Often will an entrepreneur’s mission statement be:

• “I have an idea and I want to create a business, support my family and earn a lot of money”.

If you have bigger plans for your business and want to communicate this to a wider public it might be a good idea to develop a mission statement.
When starting a business there is a tendency of basing it on specific knowledge or on a specific product.

Making a mission statement
If you like cooking you may want to open a stand and serve hot chicken soup at fair prices, and if you are educated within IT and software you may want to establish a company specialising in relational databases.

By basing your business on one specific product or service you make your new business vulnerable. If its foundation crumbles away, the market will lose interest in your business. You will have nothing else to offer the market.

Look behind the product
What you need to do is look behind the apparent features of the product. That is: how long and wide the product is, the colour of it, the durability, how many rotations per minute and so on. Try instead to determine which human, business or society related challenges the product meets.

More than a product
If you like cooking and sell “chicken soup” your mission statement could be

• “To serve tasty and healthy takeaway food for the public at fair prices”

By choosing this statement you will be able to continue your business even if the public should stop liking chicken soup. You will also open your mind to new ideas and new commercial ventures by widening your business statement.

Are you able to write down your mission statement? If not, wait and come back to this item later. When working with the business plan the right mission statement might just pop up.

Mission statement template/ Mini Business Plan – example

This business statement template will help you formulate the 7 key questions you should ask yourself in order to pursue your plans of being a business owner. You could also call the statement a small business plan.

Get inspired from the examples and write your own statement.

1. My line of business:
E.g.:

1. IT-company with JavaScript as the core business area
2. Design and sale of children`s clothes
3. Travel agency specialising in costumers of 60+

2. I want to sell these products:
E. g.:

1. Applications that connect a company`s web-sites with the company`s administrative system
2. Dresses for play, pleasure and party for girls from 2 to 6 years old
3. A travel agency that organise guided tours to historical sites in Asia for senior citizens

3. My costumers are:
E.g.:

1. Production companies within the state boundaries with more than 150 employees and a need for receiving costumer information from the web site
2. The three biggest retail chains in children`s clothes in the country and selected independent children clothes retailers
3. The well off senior citizen in the country that have the time and money to spend on a exclusive and cultural vacation

4. I will find and get in contact with my costumers this way:
E.g.:

1. We will from the national database of registered companies buy addresses of companies in our target group. Afterwards we send a mail/letter to the company and phone them two days later.
2. I have personal contact to two of the three national children`s clothes chains and I have already a list of the top 200 independent children`s clothes retailers
3. We contact the senior citizens through advertisement in senior citizens magazines and by creating a comprehensive web site describing the historical sites and the tours in a professional way.

5. I am different from my competitors in these ways: 
E.g.:

1. Our service is price effective because we have developed five standard components which fit 80 % of the costumers` needs
2. My good contacts among the retailers of children`s clothes give me an advantage
3. My strong historical and web site expertise and my wife`s 10 years in the travel business make us unique for this line of business

6. The three biggest resources I give my business:
E.g.:

1. ITC education, five years in a similar company and a strong professional network
2. Network among retailers, love to design clothes and access to dressmaker`s workroom
3. Visited many historical sites, inside business knowledge and web site professional

You remember that expenditure tracking thing that I asked you to maintain last semester? Where you kept track of everything you bought? Maybe? Well, we did do such a thing, and you can do it again this semester for points towards your overall score. Just what you spend, no mileage this time. Pretty simple, and you’ll maintain it through April. There will be 3 checks: at the end of February, right before spring break, and once more at the end of April.

 

To complete:

1. Gather a notebook or establish a spot in your smart phone for you to maintain a log of your expenditures, all of your expenditures, to the penny.

2. Verify with me that you indeed have a log ready to maintain by actually showing me.

3. At each check point, you’ll show me you have legitimately kept your expenditures tracked.

Dig your town you’re schooling in? Me too. It’s amazing to see the diversity of small business ownership here in Lafayette, and this task asks you to investigate that. It’s meant to be fun, and really, if you live far outside of Lafayette, this probably won’t be right for you, but no worries! Plenty of point opportunities out there. Here, you need to find the emblems (logos) of 8 Lafayette businesses, take a photo of it, then find a format to deliver the hunt (i.e., a Powerpoint, a series of emails/Snapchats, Twitter, whatever you can think of). Just remember, it needs to be 8, and it needs to be challenging, but not impossible. Upclose shots of the emblems, a little discoloration.

To complete:

1. Cruise the streets of Lafayette, finding businesses that are local (i.e., not Chipotle) and take an image of their logo/emblem, making it such that it would require some investigation to figure out what it is of.

2. Put together a ‘hunt’ that could be given to others in the class for them to try to complete (and the challenge for them needs to be that in order for them to get credit for completing it, they have to photo themselves at the place of the emblem itself)

3. Get points by: a) showing me the completed scavenger hunt proposal for 70 b) get 3 others to complete the hunt (don’t help them!) for 10 points each.

4. You also get points if you complete a hunt created by someone else (10 points) but you can only do that once.