5. A visit from Jon Goodman

This last Wednesday, my class had a visitor named Jon Goodman. She had talked to us about the lifetime of a business, which is from getting it started to however long it last. She had brought up some interesting subjects as well as what she has seen as being an observer of businesses as well as starting a few of her own. As a student I should actually be starting research now if I want to start a business such as trying to contact similar businesses by email for student research or working in one of these company's as a low wage employee to gain ideas. By doing this you are able to get a lot more info since you can use the student card instead of saying that you are a rival business. As a business I guess that you do one of two things if you plan to grow which is sell your business, or go public with it(It has been mentioned a few times in this class about going public but I feel a bit unclear about what that exactly means). One thing that I took from being a small business is that you are either expecting to be successful with the business or you just want a small business to live off of such as a Mom and Pops diner that you don't really expect to expand and just pay the bills. One thing that she brought up that I thought was interesting is that entrepreneurs deal with a lot of stress and ambiguity. She brought up that she is a stressoholic and lives off of it, being her way of life. Last I would like to bring up that I thought that it was interesting about how the government views whether a business is successful or not is very subjective since it is if it closes compared to a persons opinion of if they did what they set out to do and the business accomplished what it is suppose to.

4. Strengths and weaknesses

Strengths:
1. Time Management
2. working well with others
3. perfectionist
4. Leader
5. Patience
6. Listening
7. Creating

Weaknesses:
1. Quiet
2. Can loose focus easily
3. stressful situations
4. nothing can be imperfect
5. don't have the ability to react quickly

-For some reason, I am not able to think of 10 strengths and weaknesses, I am sure that I have more, I guess that this must relate to loosing focus(weakness).
-As being a perfectionist which people usually like in company's I often have the problem that I don't like to see things be imperfect which to some people is kind of annoying. for example, I would be the person that, if I went to a friends house I would be fixing all the pictures that are not squared off on the walls.
-My mind tends to wonder at times when I am trying to focus on something so I try to fix this by doing multiple tasks at the same time and switch off on them so I can continue to work.
-I feel that one of my biggest strengths is patience because we live in a busy world where everything just seems to be getting faster and faster but the moment that we come across something that doesn't work at our usual pace, that we start to either get frustrated or angry at that device.
-To the opposite of this I feel that my biggest weakness is being quiet. I am not exactly sure why but it does seem to bother some people. A bit of a contradiction to this is that when I am leading a group of people(as in a group or as my job as a manager) I am able to speak up quite a bit and make sure that all the task get done in an orderly fashion.

3. A visit from Ron Kornfeld

Ron came to our class and talked about business plans. He starts company's for a living and his current project is Nimble source. Overall I think that he gave us some interesting incite from beginning a business plan to the finish(even though you are never done with your business plan updates).
One thing that I didn't know about busness plans is that you will need diffrent ones depending on who you are dealing with, being either investors or internally with partners or employees but I guess that I could see the diffrences as not wanting to share company secrets with outside people that could possibly steal your idea. Another thing that I thought that was interesting about this is that you keep track of each copy and put the name of the person that your giving it to on the page.
From his visit, one thing that I took away from this is that you need to have an excellent presentation with your business plan. It can't be too short or else the investor will not take you seriously. It needs to look appealing to the reader, such as being bounded like a book. Last but not least, you need to make sure that there is proper use of grammar and spelling through out your business plan and make sure that you prof read it, even read it backwards!
I had really liked his presentation and I thought that he was very informative about business plans, starting businesses, and presented himself very well.

2. Five Business Ideas

1. When you go to a restaurant and you are seated, wait a while until the waiter finally shows up to ask for your drink orders(and possibly meal orders) which he takes and leaves. A few minutes later he will show up with your drinks and ask for your meal orders, if you are not ready he gives you a few more minutes. After you have eaten your meal, where you haven't seen your waiter since so you could have a refill on your drink, need to either wait for him or hunt him down so you can have desert or get your check.
The point is that it is that sometime you get an awesome waiter who is always there when you need him(or her) or you get the waiter who takes a smoke break every 5 minutes and see them rarely which can be a big waste of your time. My idea is to start a restaurant business that has a touchscreen computer at each booth that you can place all your orders on(drinks, appetizers, meal, and desert) where you can add special comments to, can request for a refill, request for a check, or even call the waiter to your table. this means that the waiter works on your time and you don't have to go hunting down for him(or her).
2. When I was a painter in a painting company, one of the problems that we would come across quite often is that the extension ladders were very difficult to control, especially using a 40 foot ladder fully extended. so what I propose is to make a lighter ladder that is made of composite materials of plastic and metals that is just as strong and has a wider base to it that would give the user more control over the ladder.
3. after using my mouse for extended periods of time, especially in my job of computer science, I start to get pain in my wrist. truthfully I think the idea of the mouse needs to be completely redesigned. My Idea for a mouse is basically designed around the hand, basically a glove that has sensors on the fingertips. this way it can work on any solid surface. you would do the different buttons of the mouse by having different combinations of fingers down on the surface.
4. The other day when I was driving to work one of my speakers in my car came unpluged, and instead instead of me thinking o crap, I have to replace one of my speakers(because I didn't know that it had just came unpluged at the time) my first thought was that you notice the sound coming from the 4 directions tward you. My idea is to advance on surround sound by instead of just having right and left from stereo sound to increase this to front left, back left, front right, back right. This would bring a whole new level to music(being a musician myself) by bringing sound from 4 diffrent drections than just 2. Few possible problems with this is it could possibly be difficult to apply this to headphones since they are dual but with 2 speakers on each side that are slightly angled, this could possibly be done. The other possible flaw with this is that there is no music written to this and may be difficult to convence artist to switch since it would require more work for them.
5. My last idea is to start a painting company since I really enjoy painting and it is something that I am good at.

1. Entrepreneurship

This shared some interesting facts about the rate of success with entrepreneurs and actually was about right with what I would guess that the success would be with trying to start your own bussiness. From the article, I had also liked the line saying that entrepreneurs are not lone wolves but are more of leaders because this is basicly how my opinion changed after my first attempt at a bussiness. Just reciently, I had my first attempt at trying to be an entrepreneur which was running a painting bussiness. So as an under the table job with four years of expierience and a crew of fellow painters that I had worked with, I had painted a victorian house. Aside from the excrucating pain from trying to paint the enormious amout of detail and dealing with the customor which tried to nickel and dime me for everything, I really enjoyed the feeling of being my own boss and having control of the situation. As being a very good learning expierience, expecially for how well contracts need to be written out, this was basicly a trial run for a painting bussiness that I am thing about starting this next summer.