Assignment 3A - My Entrepreneurship Story

Assignment 3A – My Entrepreneurship Story     

One of the times in my life that I have been exposed to entrepreneurship or something entrepreneurship-related was sometime in fifth grade when we were assigned a project where we had to invent something. My invention was inspired by a classmate of mine, who I did give credit to during my presentation, who liked making these simple cloth pencil cases. I, being my over-organized self, thought those pencil cases were cute but unorganized because everything from pencils to the then-popular animal-shaped rubber band would be jumbled up in the pencil pouch and would require more effort to find and have more of a chance of getting lost. As a solution to that, I designed a rectangular-shaped pouch that was, I believe, four to five inches wide and six to eight inches long. It had three pockets sewn into the back of the pouch for pencils, glue sticks, and other things that could fit into a long, slender pocket, leaving a bigger space in the pouch for wider, bigger things, like sticky notes and a pack of mints. In addition to these pouches, the pouch opened and closed via a cloth flap and two metal snap buttons on either corner of the flap. My dad helped me make the pouch since I did not know how to work a sewing machine, and it looked great by the time we finished making it together.

We were required to do a demonstration of our invention, so I tried sticking as many things as I could into my pouch. It held a lot more things than I had originally thought, since it was able to hold a pair of scissors along with a glue stick, several pens and pencils, a small pad of sticky notes, and a small pencil sharpener. The girls in the class loved the pouch that I presented, and asked if I could make one for them. They even said that they would pay me for one since they knew that my dad helped me make the pouch. I ended up selling around five pouches to different girls in my class, and they all loved them. The pouch I made for my presentation lasted until the beginning of eighth grade, when the glue and threading began to wear out and split.

I enrolled in ENT3003 mainly because I was hoping the class would help me have an idea of how to better sell a book I have written and published. The book was published about two years ago; however, since the publishing company was small and not known, the responsibility of publicizing it turned to me, and I knew nothing about how to advertise and publicize a novel. The best I’ve ever done was sell a few of my books at book events at a public library and post about its publication on my Facebook page. Currently, my aunt and I are trying to work at creating a new relaunch for it. My aunt is handling the business side of things, and I wanted to take this class in order to get a better idea of the business terms and requirements she discusses with me whenever we have a chance to call and also to help her more in the future with the relaunch. I also believe that selling a book, especially when all the publicizing, advertising, and selling is done by an individual or a small group of people, is an entrepreneurial journey since it involves focusing on a target audience, spreading the word and expanding that target audience to people outside of the local area, and using and looking for resources to market and publish.