The End Of the Road

This entrepreneurial journey has had its many ups and down. It felt like to took us forever to come up with and idea for our product and then we were devastated when we found out we got scooped by the Breeze. We then had to move to a new concept and came up with Making Moves. It was extremely stressful trying to make the time to sell advertisements, put the book together,and sell it but in the end we not only reached the the $200 mark we passed it and made $312. Its be great seeing all of our hard work come to life in our product and produce value as we sold it. It was like having a baby and then seeing it graduate and leave the nest.

By far the hardest part of being an entrepreneur was finding the time to get everything done. Actually making the books, going out and selling ads, and then printing and selling the books themselves. Just finding the time to get everything done in the semester was challenging but in the end we got it done.

Our advise for future classes would be to come up with an idea that is feasible very early and start working on it right away. One of our mistakes was taking to long to come up with an in idea and then we had to scramble a little to pull everything together in enough time to start selling. I think that had we started earlier we could have had the book ready in time for Choices and would have made alot more money by selling to parents and visiting students. So our best advice for them is to get started right aways so they can take advantage of all the opportunities JMU has to offer and can create most value.

Over all this experience has be both challenging and very rewarding and we wish the best of luck to future entrepreneurs in this course :)

Getting there...

So we've been selling our books this past week, and we're going to continue this coming week. We're also working on our pitch video, but there hasn't been much action since Friday; hopefully we'll a bit more success with sales this week.

Making Sales!!

Team Making Moves is on the board!!

Although off to a slow start, we have sold over 10 copies of the book in our first two days of sales. We started out yesterday at Festival in the downstairs dining area, where we made one sale. It was kinda discouraging because we were in a crappy location by the trash cans and everyone seemed to avoid us. We were booked from 12 to 3:30 but around 2, Alexia and I decided to pack up. Then, Alexia heard "J-M-U-Duuuuukes!" coming from upstairs... after some investigation, she realized there was an Admissions Open House, so we quickly popped up our stand and tried to grab a few more sales. NO LUCK - the tour guides steered the students in an opposite direction. Our intuition was terrible...

Today, we sold in the Showker lobby. MUCH BETTER LOCATION! Not only did we see more students and friends that we knew, but it was just a busier intersection that wasn't hidden behind food dumpsters! We made about 10 sales in our time today, and now we have figured out how to strategize to get more sales. We are confident we will keep selling through friends and next week's sales locations! Help us out and buy a book for just $2.00!!

FREE ≠ BETTER all the time...

Good news: Book was finished Friday and looks great.
Bad news: The "unlimited printing press" system is not full-proof.

Thanks to a new system at Washington & Lee University where my mom works, the number of how many prints and copies are made is now recorded by computer, not department. So, the plan of sneaking into my mom's office building and printing 8,000 full-color pages has a few glitches. Today, my mom and I were able to go around to her colleagues' computers (I am being carted off to jail as I type this, I swear...) and print about 15 copies, or 600 pages of full-color glory...

...when the ink drum decided to go dry. I must carry bad luck because these drums last for several weeks in her department, and go figure it was on 2% when we got there! We squeezed out as many as we could that looked good, but our initial plan to print off 150 copies to sell at JMU and 50 copies to send to Albert's mom for distribution in Lynchburg, VA, is currently foiled.

NEW PLAN: Instead, my mom is going to slowly-but-surely print off these pages throughout the week and use the free shipping benefit of her department (random perks you don't think about until times like these) and ship me 15 to 20 copies worth each day for me to put together and bind into a nice-looking format.

So, everything will work out to keep overhead costs at nearly zero for printing, but this new snag in the operation will slow things down a bit. Nonetheless, we should be able to facilitate purchases all week as we work at our various locations. Here's where you can find us this week:

Monday, Nov. 9th: Grafton, times TBA

Wednesday, Nov. 11th: Festival 12pm - 3:30pm

Thursday, Nov. 12th: SHOWKER lobby 12pm - 3:30pm

Monday, Nov. 16th: SHOWKER lobby 12pm - 3:30pm
Thursday, Nov. 19th: Festival 12pm - 3:30pm

Goal Reached and About to Hit the Printing Press!!!!

Well, the biggest news over the last week for us is that through the sale of ad space in our book and the planned distribution of 50 copies in Lynchburg, VA, we were able to meet and exceed our profit goal of 200 dollars!!!! With that condition of the project under our belt, we can now concentrate on making the best product that we can. This means that we are going to have a big week ahead of us and a lot of planning to do...

But on a more progressive note, we have secured several half-page and full-page ads in our book and still working for more! We have full-page ads for the Virginia Safari Park, Albert's band Allay, and 2 for Albert's mom's business. Payments are en route and will be received sometime this week, but we are so excited to have things moving right along that we are going to do a little accrual accounting and count these sales in our spreadsheet! :D

We are closing the date to secure ads by midnight this Wednesday, so whatever we have at that point will be sent to press (aka to my mom at Washington and Lee University). Overhead costs (minus binding and some lamination) will remain at zero, which is a huge advantage for us. For now, it will stay a sustainable advantage since we have access to virtually unlimited printing!

We will begin selling at the beginning of next week. For the rest of the semester, we will sell in a few strategic locations such as TDU, Festival, Showker, and possibly some of the bigger dorms like Eagle. We didn't want to sell at places that people hide from or pretend to be on the phone when they pass by like the Commons. We'll be selling these 30-page, full-color books for $2.00 so come find us and find some new fun things to do!! :]

Getting Money!

So we have finally finished making all of the pages for our book and now it is time to get the advertisements and make some money. In this coming week we are arranging meetings with the companies that we are advertising in the book and presenting them with the opportunity to purchase ads and add coupons. We are charging $25 for a half page and $40 for a full page advertisement and have 45 businesses in our book that we will be trying to get to purchase them. We have also acquired a sponsor who will be purchasing 50 books and distributing them around Lychburg, VA. Here are some of the locations that our book gives information on...

Putting It All Together

After finding all of the locations that we are going to feature in our book now we are coming up with the book format. We are also going out and talking to businesses to get them to buy adds in the book and add coupons. Here are some of our possible formats below. In this next week our goals are to complete the book and get it ready for printing. It will only take us two days from sending the books off to have it ready to sell so we should start making sales by at least the 28th :)

Awesome progress, but still a long ways to go...

So we definitely made some big progress today! The thing that really got us going was the information that we had all gathered over the past week. Alexia brought tons of information she had collected through various information centers about things to do in the area relating to restaurants, late-night fun, art galleries, and tons of other stuff. Albert and I, on the other hand, picked up information from UREC and bookstores like Barnes & Noble about lots of outdoor recreation. This is going to be a really important part of our project as this time of the year is optimal for biking, hiking, camping, fishing, trail running and rock climbing, like this picture from my hiking trip last weekend!! Since many people are definitely interested in that and there are so many opportunities here in the mountains, this is going to be a really strong part of our attractions book. In tonight’s meeting, we were able to divide up the remaining information seeking that we need to do to make sure that our book is thorough, interesting, and lists tons of really cool places and ideas that other people might not know of or think about when looking for something fun to do in the area. We are pretty sure the hardest part of our project is going to be the next couple weeks! Just like the real estate business is about "location, location, location”, our book is centered on “INFORMATION, INFORMATION, INFORMATION!” It’s going to be tough getting everything together to make our book so complete and captivating, and to completely design a book from scratch. So, the next two weeks will be filled with many library meetings, lots of creative planning and designing, and… becoming authors? Watch out, Bill Wales…

And we're off!

After our initial idea for an off-campus housing guide for students was totally done by The Breeze (we shake our fists at you, The Breeze!), we again went to brainstorming something that would be able to take advantage of our free printing source. We've finally settled in on our idea: a guide for people who are want to know what kind of stuff there is to do in the Harrisonburg area. The way this came up was the revelation that there are a lot of students that don't want to be knocked around in a dark Ashby apartment at 1 AM by strangers "dancing" to blaring music. We took this idea for class critiquing and we actually got a lot of positive feedback and good suggestions. Some of those included selling space for coupons to local attractions and selling to prospective students and new teachers. We also want to set up a Facebook group that people can use as a rider board and a place to post their own suggestions for things to do. Right now we're conducting our research on area activities.