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This is the last blog post of ET 9135. We have a business showcase on 4th Sept and I will not be present unfortunately. However, as the one responsible for sourcing and designing, I feel obligated to present that part in the showcase. As such, I have recorded a video for my part of the presentation. I truly wish to show our juniors and the professors what we have achieved over the past half year as much as we can over the showcase.
For this post, I would try to summarise what I have learnt over the past few months. There are way too many things, so I'll pick a few important ones.
1. Enjoy what you do.
A business can take up a lot of time if you are serious in making it succeed. I personally feel that in the long run, motivation is very important. Therefore, it is better to choose an idea that you are really interested in, and the other problems can be worked out in the later stages. We went into the terrarium idea without knowing anything about designing, but as all of us were interested in the aesthetics of terrariums, we went on to do it despite having to learn a lot more things ourselves. Had we tried doing other businesses, sure it might have been an easier journey, but it wouldn't have been as fruitful.
When you truly believe your project, naturally you will be keen to improve yourself and think more about how to make it better. This I feel is crucial for a business to grow and sustain.
(ps. To add on, this is more of a cycle: finding something interesting, trying to learn more, failing, keep trying and overcoming the failure, gaining the confidence and motivation from overcoming the failure to improve further, failing again etc etc. Funny how staring a business resembles maintaining our own life.)
2. One step at a time.
I have mentioned in the DIY post that timing is crucial. It is better to set realistic goals for each time period, as a business needs time to grow. If it feels like the business is not mature enough for a certain policy to be carried out, it is better to wait and continue developing slowly. Also, as mentioned, you need constant motivation to keep yourself going in this arduous journey, and that comes best from the little successes.
3. Keep grinding.
Depending on how unlucky you are, in the early stages almost everything might not work. This is because you are doing everything for the first time, and whenever you try out something new, there is no guarantee how it will turn out. For us, the designing and prototyping of our terrariums took ages and many sessions before we finally got a satisfactory product, and even then we kept working on improving it.
By grinding, it also means to keep pivoting. Our final presentation is vastly different from our initial report, because throughout the process we realised many things have to be done differently to achieve better results. As such, don't be afraid of change, and keep pivoting your business.
4. Do what you are good at.
I was very fortunate that throughout the 6 months, our team had almost no conflict. Besides us generally having good tempers, the main reason is that we each chose the area of business where we are the best at, and in turn we trust each other in doing our part to make the business work. Therefore, if you feel you are good at one aspect, be bold enough to take charge. Put in effort to further develop yourself in that area, so that others do not have to worry about your work. In turn, your teammates will do the same for the business.
To my juniors, if you happen to have read this far, thank you. I hope our experiences listed in these blogs have at least given you some insights on how a business works, and if you choose to embark on your own journey, I hope this blog can guide you somehow.
It has been an amazing journey thus far, and while it is the end of ET9135, Flormiere is certainly still going strong, as we have only just launched our new DIY products. So.... to be continued I guess?
-Jiacheng, 4/9/2019
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