practice professional networking

For this assignment I went to the Retail Revolution: A Sustainable Fashion Show located in the Mellon Board Room, April 11, 2018 from 6pm-10pm, which was hosted by Alyson Finnerty (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alyson-finnerty-214515159/) , Holly Taylor (https://www.linkedin.com/in/holly-taylor-b05895160/) , and Cierra Snyder (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cierra-snyder-4b516210b/) . Before the event started they had a reception in which multiple small businesses were featured. I did get there a little late because I had a class at eastside before the event but I still got to walk around really quick and see all of the little stands for each business.

Event Link:

  https://my.chatham.edu/happenings/get_event.cfm?m1=4&y1=2018&d1=11&EventID=21906  

Organizations that were featured at the Fashion Show:

-       -  Millie’s Homemade Ice Cream: Millie’s is an ice cream shop that has multiple locations in the Pittsburgh area, they have around 10 locations

-       -  Center for Creative Reuse: a non-profit organization that “inspires creativity, conservation, and community engagement through reuse”, they operate three “non-traditional” art supply stores where people can donate and buy art supplies

-        - Parkhurst: They provided food and made amazing mocktails

-       -  Wildflower Rising Jewelry: student at Chatham that makes their own jewelry

-      -   Bottlethread: Chatham alum who makes business casual shirts out of plastic water bottles

-        - Jody beauty: Chatham student in charge of doing the makeup for the models wearing the sustainable designs

This Fashion show was organized to talk about the harmful effects of the fashion industry and how we can avoid contributing to that pollution. In the Show they showcased different eco friendly outfits, modeled by students and the students that organized this event. I compared this even to an article that I found on The Wall Street Journal about team work called, “Teamwork Raises Everyone’s Game”. This article talks about the importance of teamwork and how it can help expand your knowledge and ideas. The fashion show was put together by a group of female students at Chatham and they brought several businesses into the event to make it work right. “ suggests that the way people work together is important for an endeavor's success”. Teamwork is really the backbone of any kind of business and it is essential to succeed in life.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB113133419766289797

Create a personal business plan

Personal Business Plan

The mission of Company Me is to create aesthetic, cozy homes that are attractive and affordable to everyone. Company Me will do this by providing design specialists to help customers design their dream home. This service will be open and affordable to any home owner.

Business Environment

Company Me will be competing in the Interior Design Industry. Our company will be able to utilize outsourcing to obtain unique, foreign products to use for our interiors that the designers design. Company Me would have a strategic alliance with an architecture firm so that if a customer didn’t know what kind of architecture firm to go to, they could just go to the one that Company Me is partnered with. With this strategic alliance in place, customers would have to go to both companies in order to make their house complete. When we talk about the global business environment we are relying on a combination of cultural, economic, and legal & regulatory aspects. Although Company Me will be doing a lot of international business to get materials for designing interiors, the company has to keep a watch on tariffs. Tariffs do effect the supply and demand in our industry as well as, embargos. From the IS Job Index by the Association for Information Systems, the job placement rate for bachelor’s degrees are 74% at graduation and 85% six months after graduation, as for master’s degrees it is 39% at graduation and 74% six months after graduation. As well as the job placement rate, they also have the average salary as well, bachelor’s: $62,820 and master’s: $72,517. This data is from the 2017 report. (https://ibit.temple.edu/isjobindex2017/files/dlm_uploads/2018/01/ISJobIndex2018.pdf)  While looking at the, Job Outlook: The Degrees and Majors Most in Demand by NACE, it says that “ Slightly more than 99 percent of employers indicated plans to hire bachelor’s degree graduates from the current class. Meanwhile, 53 percent anticipate hiring M.B.A.s, and 58 percent plan to hire graduates with other master’s degrees”. Also that more than 80% of new college hires have a bachelor’s degree.

http://www.naceweb.org/job-market/trends-and-predictions/job-outlook-the-degrees-and-majors-most-in-demand/

Entrepreneurship and Strategy

As the CEO of Company Me, some challenges that I envision “promoting” and “selling” Product Me are as follows. One of the main examples of a problem that Company Me will most likely encounter is the Five Forces that Determine Industry Structure, the competitive force in this (competition from vendors who manufacture substitutes, competition from new competitors, and competition from existing rivals) and the bargaining power forces ( bargaining power of suppliers and bargaining power of customers). Competition is one of the biggest problems that any company, no matter the size, etc. can face. There are also the nine critical questions that every business should ask themselves…

1.     How are you going to organize your business?

2.     What product/service?

3.     Who is the customer?

4.     Who are the suppliers?

5.     Who are the competitors?

6.     What are the substitutes?

7.     Switching cost? = convenience

8.     Bargaining power with suppliers? = volume

9.     Compete on price? Quality? Innovation?  

Some potential strategies we could do to at least solve most of this problem is to meet up as a whole company and answer all of the nine questions in detail so Company Me will know exactly what to do whenever we start to have a problem, this way it could be solved quickly with no problem. Or we could make deals with our competitors so that there would be no rough edges between us.

Management

As the General Manager of Company Me  I intend to have a strategic plan of how I will plan, organize, direct, and control Company Me. I’m a very organized person and like having everything in order so I would make sure it would stay that way. I would hold meetings with my employees and establish our strategic plan as a company with them together so I can successfully manage my employees, and so they know what my expectations are. Company Me would also use SWOT Analysis to continue being organized as well. To motivate myself I would organize my office, always keep everything clean, and have motivation items throughout the entire office. To attract myself to the right industries/professions I would have my marketing team make successful, organized advertisements to make our company look appealing to others. To set and achieve goals for Company Me, we can use strategic and tactical planning for longer and shorter term goals. To work well I teams I plan on having meetings with each section of my company to make sure that they are all getting along and all on the right track to get their tasks done on time. To communicate with coworkers and bosses effectively I plan on making sure everyone is on top of everything and meeting with my bosses to continue being up to date with what I am in charge of doing for the company.

Marketing

As the CMO of Company Me, I will promote Product me by consulting with the employees under me and hear their ideas about how we should advertise our company’s product and vote on which one we think will sell the most. To do this we will focus on following the marketing concept so we can stay on track and focus on what the customers really want. We will need to focus the most on our target market when looking at what our customers want to see from us. Our potential customers are adults/families that are looking to renovate their home and need professional help to make their dream home. Our marketing mix is as follows; product: interior designing, price: depends on project, place: we will be working from an office but will have off site projects in homes of our clients, and promotion: through ads and commercials. To attract potential customers we will show work that we have done previously in our ads and commercials to show customers what we can create as a company. To apply digital marketing skills to promote our product we will make sure we get good reviews from our loyal customers to make us more popular and continue making our ads the best they can be.

Accounting and Finance

Assets
Current Assets:
Cash				$1,500.00
Total current assets				$1,500.00
Fixed assets:
Apartment				$1,325.00
Furniture				$1,850.00
Car				$550.00
Technology				$1,305.00
Total fixed assets				$5,030.00
Total assets				$6,530.00

Liabilities
Current liabilities:
Accounts Payable							$4,000.00
Liabilities							$2,000.00
Total current liabilities							$6,000.00
Owners equity:
Owners equity								$530.00
Total								$530.00
Total liabilities								$6,530.00

 To manage my own investments I plan on managing and making sure I have enough money for the priorities that I need to pay for monthly/yearly. To manage this I will make sure I have balance sheets and make sure they are always accurate so I can manage it properly.  Along with the balance sheet  will also have income statements and statements of cash flow. I will create a financial plan for Company Me by seeing what all our company has to spend our money on and see if we can make any exceptions to cut down on everything that wee have to spend so we don’t end up wasting money on things that we wont be using.

Information Systems and Operations

As the CIO of Company Me, some information systems tools and analytics I will use to optimize my productivity and operational efficiency are cloud systems, TPS, and ERP software.

Resources

-        The IBIT Report in Partnership with the Association for Information Systems.  2017. Retrieved from:    https://ibit.temple.edu/isjobindex2017/files/dlm_uploads/2018/01/ISJobIndex2018.pdf

-        Job Outlook: The Degrees and Majors Most in Demand.   May 3, 2017. NACE.      Retrieved from: http://www.naceweb.org/job-market/trends-and-predictions/job-outlook-the-degrees-and-majors-most-in-demand/

Reflect on a Guest Lecture

The guest lecture that I am going to reflect on Is the guest that my group and I introduced, Stephanie Rosenthal. Stephanie Rosenthal is currently an assistant Professor of Applied Data Analytics here at Chatham University. She graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 2007 with a Bachelors in Science and Computer Science, and later received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon in Philosophy and Computer Science in 2012. She was a Human-Robot Interaction Scientist for Bossa Nova Robotics, and then was a Research Scientist at Carnegie Mellon before she started teaching at Chatham during the Fall 2017 semester. She had also worked at startups, government agencies, and universities before joining Chatham. Dr. Rosenthal teaches programming, data science, and research methods classes in the business department.

 https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanie-rosenthal-2a10054/

Dr. Rosenthal’s presentation was about data collecting on the internet (in specific). She discussed how cookies work and the various ways that companies/websites collect data and information about the people that visit their site. She mentioned that they can collet information about you from what you click on, if you sign up to get discounts, obviously because they are asking you for personal information, like email, phone number, name, etc. They can also collect information about you if and when you buy something from their website if that is available because you’re giving them your card number and address as well.

This aspect is a good thing, yet it can be very dangerous as well. The positive part of this is that companies can figure out what products are popular and which ones aren’t selling to help them determine what they should sell more and less of. The negative of this is that there can be fake companies asking for your information that can hack everything of yours that’s related to the internet, which is a lot. The other negative is that some companies, like YouTube for example, illegally collects kids’ data. An article from MIT’s Technology’s Review says that “ YouTube knowingly gathers data about children under 13 years of age, tracks them across the web, and delivers ads to them without the parental consent that is required by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.”

https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/610800/youtube-may-be-illegally-collecting-kids-data/

Find a Role Model

Dr. Chung recommended me to interview Sydney Penn for this assignment.

Sydney is a first year graduate student and she will graduate in Fall 2018. She is currently an MBA student concentrating in Project Management. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Interior Architecture from Chatham in the Spring of 2017. Since then she has been working as a graduate assistant in the Business and Entrepreneurship department for the 2017-2018 school year, and she also mentors incoming students that are a part of R.I.S.E mentoring group at Chatham. Sydney played basketball until she tor her meniscus at age 14, resulting in her having to get surgery at age 15. She also enjoys being outside on hot, summer days.

Some advice that Sydney told me about on good studying strategies are as follows. She found that she learns material better when she asks questions or if she applies the problem to real-life situations.  She also would find people that we particularly good at the material she was learning and would ask them to walk her through the materials. Having a dialogue about topics made things stick to her memory better and helped her have a greater understanding of what she was learning. She says “ school can become a big game of memorizing, but if you avoid that and actually learn the material, everything may make a little more sense in the long run.”

To find jobs on-campus or off-campus, the career development center is the place that Sydney suggests to go. At the office, they are able to connect you to people and they know about open positions as well. She also suggests going for jobs/internships that match up with what you plan on doing for your career. She says that many jobs can prepare you for your dream job because “all might require different skills, but making sure you can make sense of your job selections on paper is crucial”. She recommends going to mixers and other networking events hosted by Chatham and other nearby places, which are usually discounted for students or free. By doing this you have an opportunity to get hired or lead to an internship. She said that once she determined what she disliked about a company she based her future internships off of those factors, this way she never did the same internship or went to the same company twice. Doing this will help you gain more experience because not all companies function the same. She also recommends getting involved in as many competitions and projects on campus as possible, many of them will apply the education to real life situations. She says “people tend to get recognized for their accomplishments by taking part in projects and competitions”, Projects and competitions also look good on resumes especially when not all college students are able to have a job.

When I asked Sydney “what made you choose your major and why?”, she responded by saying, “In order to graduate, I had to fulfill an internship requirement. It was then that I decided that I wanted to go to graduate school for my MBA. Being that interior architecture is all project based, I believed concentrating in project management would better suit me. I found myself at one of my internships more engaged in the business aspects of the job. When dealing with projects, it is essential that you understand some of the business terminology and reasoning behind decision making. I hope to eventually marry the two degrees together. If I don’t, I won’t have any regrets about my decision of continuing on to graduate school.”

The last question/topic we focused on was a time where she failed and what she did to fix/overcome it. She talked about the time she failed at receiving her sought over grades her freshman year. She was very focused on receiving a 4.0 GPA in college and didn’t get close to getting a 4.0 until her junior year. She was able to overcome not receiving a 4.0 during undergraduate by looking at what she accomplished. She took 21 credits in one semester and managed to keep a 3.7 GPA and she was the first college graduate in her immediate family and graduated with a 3.5 GPA as well.

I compared my interview with Sydney to an article I found on Chatham’s Business Insight page called, “Internship Spotlight: Anh Nguyen, BA Marketing and Economics ‘19”. This article talks about an undergraduate student, Anh and how she had the chance to intern with a nonprofit organization that focuses on advancing equity and excellence in Pittsburgh Public Schools called A+ Schools. Her role was to “inform and engage the public to mobilize support”. Sydney mentioned internships and how they will expand your knowledge and horizons, for Anh “she leveraged multiple communication channels, such as social media outlets, email newsletters, blog posts, and flyers. The internship presented rich insights on career opportunities and member functions, particularly the role of marketing in a nonprofit organization.”. This internship helped her learn things that she never knew about before, she learned the similarities and differences between non-profit and for-profit organizations. Somethings similar between Anh and Sydney is the fact that they both reply very much on asking questions to learn everything to their fullest ability.