Evaluation

GROUP EVALUATION- Maise

Team Work

I think we worked well as a team, through dividing some tasks, but also collaborating on others. To do this, we made to-do lists and divided up the tasks evenly. Some tasks that were more important or time consuming, we decided to collaborate on, in order to come out with a better outcome. To make the product, we also collaborated as we either cooked together, or divided what each of us had to make. An issue that we had was not being able to work on the blog at the same time, as this didn't allow for completely equal teamwork. To solve this, we made a presentation on google drive where we put all our work before uploading it on the blog.

Products Sold

In the end, we ended up only selling nachos, lemonade and strawberry granizadas. These were the cheapest and easiest things to make, so we decided to limit ourselves to these three.

Profit

This is a spreadsheet that we made detailing what product we sold, when and for how much. We also calculated that we didn't make a profit as we spent 2 pounds more than we got back. If we had kept selling the left-over products, we could have made a profit but there were inconveniences that did not make that possible. Another issue is that we bit off more than we could chew as we wanted to sell a variety of products that were rather complicated to make, so we ended up only selling twice.

FEEDBACK-Maise

"I think the food was very good but maybe more advertisement could have been made so more people were informed of your sale." - Tatiana

"I think that the drinks were very good, I really liked it and it was original because no one did that. But I would have had more advertisement and also it was a bit sour so perhaps add a little bit of sugar". - Eugenie

"The drink I tried was really tasty and refreshing and something I had never tried before. However, some of the ice was in big pieces which made it hard to eat." - Pilar

From the feedback received from our peers, we can see that some of the things we should improve on are the advertisement and the facility to eat it. When it came to advertisement, even though we made sure to have plenty of posters around the school advertising what we would be selling, we did not have the cost nor the time we would be selling our products at. As we can see, this had somewhat of an impact on how many costumers were prepared with money to buy our products with. Another thing that was mentioned was the taste of the lemonade. Unfortunately, the amount of sweetness that should be in it depends on each person's personal taste. Something we could do to make this better for future sells is to have sugar or honey on the side in case they would like to add some to their drink. Finally, the ice for the granizadas was mentioned. As we were not able to buy shaved ice, we had to break it down by ourselves and on the spot as people ordered our products. For this reason, there is a possibility that the ice was too big and difficult to eat.

SELF EVALUATION-Paula

I think that even though this unit was a relatively new idea to me, that I was able to adapt to it pretty well. Of course, I still had things that I had to practice and improve my skills on but I think I was able to develop new ones. The small business that was created out of this unit is something that I was passionate about, which made me want to work even harder for. As I'm usually the costumer, it was really interesting to see the other side of things. The organisation, the planning and the carrying through. However, I am glad and satisfied with the outcome of the unit and how much I was able to develop new skills. In addition to this, working with a partner and feeling the pressure to try and not let them down was something that I think pushed me even further in how much work I put into the blog and selling.

SELF EVALUATION- Maise

I believe that I worked well throughout this unit. Although this was a complicated and time-consuming unit, I managed to complete it somewhat successfully. I was able to create a business that was somewhat profitable as we were able to get back our money and earn a profit of 2 pounds. I was also able to keep up with deadlines and work as a team leader in order to complete the tasks necessary. I was organised in managing a lot of things all at one, being selling, the blog, etc. This unit, I challenged myself to do something more demanding and challenging, which I might not have done before. This skill of taking risk is an important skill that I will take from this unit.

I could have improved more by coming up with a more feasible and profitable idea, as the idea that we had was very demanding. I could have also improved my quality of work by working more ahead of time and asking for more feedback. Further planning would have been necessary for more success in selling as I didn’t anticipate events such as Ramadan, as well as the lack of time at break times. Another improvement to my work that I could have done was to spend more time and add more detail to each task, in order to achieve the higher grades.

SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS- Paula

- From the feedback we received and from what we noticed from our sells and clients, was that we needed to improve our advertisement as well as small things such as the size of our ice in our granizadas. This is something that could definitely be improved. After the feedback was given to us, we were able to apply most of it. For example, after our peer Pilar suggested that we make the shaved ice a bit smaller in order to facilitate it for people to eat it by saying: "The drink I tried was really tasty and refreshing and something I had never tried before. However, some of the ice was in big pieces which made it hard to eat.", we applied it and made it much smaller the next time around. When this happened, it was evident that it made a big improvement as more costumers, even previous costumers, kept o complimenting the taste of our granizadas and we sold more than the first time. Similarly, we tried to make our selling time, days and prices more known if through emails.

However, I think the fact that people now knew about us, our products and prices, they began asking us in person as they bought from us, willingly informing themselves of our next sells. Improving our advertisement and making the important information known most definitely helped us increase our sells. Even though we made sure to have posters up around the whole school, with our logo, slogan and menu offered, we didn’t have any information as to how much our food would cost or when we would be selling. Therefore, if we had advertised the important facts, more people would have been able to buy from us- even though a way to address this problem was writing peoples names down and letting them pay us later. Additionally, we were told that some of our ice in our granizadas was sometimes difficult to eat as it would have to be chewed down- not as easily as shaved ice should be. Cleary, we made sure to address this issue as we wanted to make our food the best quality possible to make it enjoyable for people to eat it and enjoy the taste of latin summer.

Consequently, taking this into consideration as well as with our specification, I think we could have also worked on improving things such as the actual purpose of our stand- which was to represent or raise awareness of the Latin culture and possibly also on the menu and what we originally wanted to make compared to what we ended up making and selling. The representation of our culture could have been further made by having some posters on our stand with flags of where the food we were selling originated from or posters with key words as to why we eat that type of food in Lain America and so on. This would have helped as it would have informed our costumers about what they were buying and consuming, whilst linking the products to our culture- therefore raising awareness of it. Moving on to the menu, my partner and I did get really carried away when proposing what we would be selling. As we began testing the recipes and making it at home, we began to realise that it maybe would not have been as great of an idea as we though due to the overwhelming time it took us to prepare certain dishes- as well as the cost that it would be if prepared a minimum of 10. I think that a way in which we could have had a range of food to offer, we could have focused on small, quick snacks more similar to nachos than the other dishes we were planning on making. Therefore, by applying two simple things into our business, these suggested improvements would have gone a long way into helping us succeed more than we did.

FOLLOWING THE 4P's- Paula

For our small business, we had to create somewhat of a structure to follow in order to make sure we succeeded. In this, we include the 4P's: promoting, pricing, products and finally, place. Thinking about this and how we'll use each "P" helped us organise our thoughts and have a clear idea of what we were going to be doing and how we were going to be doing it.

For promotion, we had to make sure that the school and our peers knew about us, ICSummer, but also about our products so they knew what we would be offering to them. For this, we made sure to have posters all around the school. We placed them in two to three different levels, in hallways, canteen and any surface we thought people would be able to read from. In addition to this, before any of our sells, we also made sure to send out an email to the school, specifying what we would be selling, when we would be selling it and for how much. This was in order to inform our target costumers about what would be available for them and how much money they would need to come prepared for the next day during our sell.

Next, for price, we really wanted to make the price as fair as possible. As my partner and I began thinking about pricing and how much we should sell each thing for after checking how much we would be spending on it, we decided to go for the lowest price possible. This is as we reminded ourselves that if we were the costumers and we noticed something was overpriced, we would rather not buy it. Even though we did maintain our prices the same throughout all sells, we hadn't taken into consideration the reality of how much we would be selling. Our prices originally led us to an okay profit. However, this was assumed to be if we sold a minimum of ten things each sell- which we didn't. This led to us having a loss of profit by 2 pounds as we weren't able to sell as much as we had originally intended.

Then, for products, we originally wanted to go all out, creating our own menu with everything we eat in Latin America- having a menu ranging from empanadas, to tacos to simple things such as nachos. The menu helped us plenty when it came to organising our thoughts and what we really wanted to make versus what we didn't. Similarly, it helped us get a clear concept of what was realistic to hope to achieve to make, compared to what wasn't. For this reason, as it has been previously mentioned, we weren't able to accomplish goals by selling all of our desired dishes. We instead stuck to selling granizadas, lemonades and nachos with dips. The main reasons we were not ale to sell everything were the fact that it would have been out of our budget and also, especially after the first sell- which was being dedicated to drinks as we only had twenty minutes, we realised that most students in our school were in Ramadan. After taking this into consideration, we knew we wouldn't be selling much and would be better if we stuck to drinks and quick snacks.

Finally, for place, we had originally planned it out to be either in the canteen, where most people eat during lunch in case of bad weather or out in the courtyard whenever there was nice weather. Both of these places were selected by us to sell at as it is were most people are during both break and lunch time- our selling periods. However, with the nice weather, our sells resulted being outside in the courtyard. This is as when the sun was out and the skies were blue, we wanted to be able to apply this to our stand and the whole idea behind our business: ICSummer- with a summer mood. Consequently, I think that the place where we sold did indeed help us with our business as it attracted enough costumers- compared to the canteen which was at the time empty.