Team Structure: Sanjeevani-Embracing Life

'What does it take to be a great entrepreneur'?

Topic #4 "Sustainability of school business"

TOPIC #3 "Profitability of the School Business"

TOPIC 2 # "Student Motivation"

TOPIC #1: "Launching Our School Business"

SANJEEVANI-EMBRACING LIFE

 PRE LAUNCH ENDEAVOUR

                                               

Last year’s lucrative enterprise propelled us to add new range of products this year for which we required more members in the team. So we shortlisted the students who were good at art work, carpentry and culinary skills for preparing and designing our new products. In the beginning we decided to expand our business, by introducing new products .Earlier we were focusing only on potted plants, compost and green kits but this year we decided to embrace biodiversity that means plants, animals and human beings. For animals we planned to prepare animal shelters which included dog shelters and bird houses.

 People in Dwarka face a lot of problems regarding stray dogs so we have decided to approach societies and convince the RWA’s to buy at least one dog shelter from our enterprise to mitigate this problem. Few years back, we had initiated project sparrow, so we thought of selling bird houses to conserve them. The key reason for choosing these products was that our school is getting upgraded to class XII and lots of construction work is going on so we had easy accessibility to scrap or waste wood to prepare animal shelters. This immensely reduced our initial cost. In our meeting we came to the conclusion that in today’s fast life people mostly tend to skip meals .To target such people we decided to prepare a pack of roasted multigrain to fulfill this deficiency of nutrients. Our school kitchen was an asset due to which there was no need to outsource these packets. The environment club of the school is actively using the paper recycling unit by collecting and recycling all the scrap paper generated in the school. So we decided to add products from waste paper pulp like designing clocks, paper weights etc. This not only helped us to make our school a zero garbage zone but also enabled us to convert garbage into utility. Moreover using waste material will again drastically reduce our cost. In this way we were able to cater to the needs of all living beings around us.

As by adding new products our motive of running the enterprise shifted slightly, in our meetings we decided to change the name of our enterprise from Green Thumbs to Sanjeevani- Embracing Life with tagline Caring Hands With Green Thumbs. Sanjeevani literally means immortality which can reverse death. This is what our enterprise aims at- that is to reverse the harm caused by humans to the environment. We have also modified our business logo to match our newly adopted tagline.

The part of profit earned from last year business was used for charity like organizing free health check up camps in school ,donating books, clothes, food ,toys etc. to the underprivileged of the society (orphanage and old age homes). We had some amount with us to launch the enterprise this year but as we wanted to add new products we required more money .This year we raised the startup capital by starting class library from classes I-X. Actually according to the rules of school every student if fined for any reason need to donate a book as fine to the school library. Our library had lots of donated books and other story books which can be easily used for creating class library. We started giving books to students on nominal rent in rotation that generated a startup capital easily with about 3000 students in our school. This also helped to enhance the knowledge and vocabulary of the students.

LAUNCHING

After raising the start up money we divided the students into different teams. A team of students responsible for procuring raw materials was given time of three days to find the source from where we can procure the materials at minimum cost. Although we are trying to make maximum use of waste materials generated in our school, the marketing team purchased the raw materials which we need to outsource.

The designing team was given the responsibility to prepare and design the products for the launch on the first PTM of the current session i.e. 20^thMay’17 as we expected maximum gathering on this day. Simultaneously the technical team was busy in updating the face book page and packaging team was packing the products for sale. This year to keep a track on our finances, the financial team has got the bill book printed to avoid any lapse.

With all the teams’ geared working together in perfect harmony, our products were ready to be sold by 15^th May’17. We all were really excited for our first sale. The management of the school along with personnel from Department of environment, Delhi to inaugurate the school business enterprise. Finally the D day arrived and we displayed all our products (trying to be professional).

MAIDEN SALE

After inauguration many people started visiting our stalls and to our utmost surprise the first sale was of 10 Kg compost at once which motivated us .Honestly we felt as if we could not go through IIT or PMT in future we have an alternate successful career ahead i.e. we can become successful entrepreneurs.

CHALLENGES AND OVERCOMING THEM

But then we realized that it is too early to jump to this conclusion as there were times when people came and asked many questions. We kept on explaining and showing our products, purpose of charity, but they didn’t buy anything. We felt frustrated but our spirit and enthusiasm again pushed us and we started approaching each and every person in our school dragging them to our stall and finally we had a great sale.

A change in CBSE examination pattern has once again made scholastic areas more important than co scholastic activities i.e. less room for activities. Now striking a balance between studies and enterprise work has become a challenge. To fix this problem we allot duties to students in rotation .Some of us even stay back in school for half an hour to one hour with our teachers. We also carried a part of designing work home so that we could complete it.

LEARNINGS

We whole heartedly accepted the suggestions from our management, teachers and parents that can help us in improvising our products in future. We learnt division of labour where different teams worked together to make the launch a success. The high point was that although we were divided into teams but we never followed the strict demarcations as we were intermingled and helped each other in case the need arose. We also learnt dealing and convincing the customers which will definitely help us to run our business more effectively.

WRITTEN BY-

Asmi Jain and Navya