30A - FInal Reflection

Honestly, out of the assignment's we've had to do for this class, the Bug List Gave me the most difficulty. Trying to get my brain into the mindset of identifying problems and opportunities to create solutions was actually rather difficult. I hadn't ever had to actively think about the things that bug me in my life from a perspective of potential improvement.

The most formative experience that I had in this class actually having to get out and go search for people that had experience in the areas that were relevant to my venture in order to expand my social network. I had to talk to professionals who, in most cases, knew a lot more than me about what I was trying to do and what it takes to get a venture like mine off of the ground.

I definitely think this class has brought me closer to developing an entrepreneurial mindset. I have basically added another facet to my thinking, and always think about the practicality and marketing of ventures when I see them. I am able to appreciate and learn from the way that different people go about conducting and growing their business.

A recommendation I would have for someone who is taking this class is to watch ALL of the lectures. They are indeed worth watching and you also don't want to lose points on your cupcakes. :)
Also, I would suggest that you try your hardest for every assignment. It will only hurt you if you don't.


This is a picture of my business card, as I have recently become a freelance graphic designer. I am going to venture into many other fields of digital art/technology, so just wait for this business card to fill up with skills!

(Let me know if any of you need logos, flyers, or artwork! I would be happy to work with any of you!)

29A - Venture Concept No. 2

Joshua Philoctete

ENT3003

Venture Concept

Opportunity (The Who)

My target audience/customer demographic is the growing number of vegans that live in the US. We would be starting with a college town, like Gainesville, that has an increasing number of vegan students, among the also rising number of non-student vegans in the city. There are a few vegan restaurants and dessert places located in different spots around Gainesville, and some restaurants have, albeit usually extremely limited, vegan options. There are thousands upon thousands of people here on the run, looking for a good place to eat, and at least a marketable portion of these people are vegan.

There are no fast food spots where vegans can go and grab food. Being a vegan myself, I know what it’s like to be on-the-go, and not have time to prepare food, or simply feeling lazy and not wanting to make food for myself. I usually end up shelling out a lot of money on eating out, because there are very few vegan dishes that are cheap. Restaurants that have vegan options simply see them as a side venture, an oddity that they do not see a reason to put a lot into. A vegan cannot walk into a McDonalds and get a full meal off of the Dollar Menu. Our goal is to put that power back in the hands of our vegan customers.

This window of opportunity will stay available, and most likely grow a substantial amount as the years go on, and veganism moves away from being an obscure diet to being normalized within society.

Innovation

The product/service we are proposing is an affordable, plant-based, fast food restaurant. We would be offering a friendly menu; burgers, fries, hot dogs, rice and beans, different types of vegetables, and maybe even vegan cookies and brownies. It would be a friendly food haven (and hopefully heaven) for vegans, and it would look normal enough to be inviting to non-vegans who maybe want to give vegan food a try without having to look at a menu and not recognize any of the items on it except for rice and veggies. Simply put, we would make money by selling the food. TGI Friday’s buys Beyond Meat brand burgers for 3 dollars a burger and sells them back with fries for 15 dollars. We could do the same for $6-8, undercutting their prices, making food cheaper and easier, and providing a menu mainly made for vegan consumption in the process. Our menu would be filled with items like this.

We would also be open later than any place that serves vegan food, and would be able to add late partygoers to our customer demographic.

Venture Concept

For our targeted demographic, getting them to switch will not be something that we have to work. This is basically going to be giving a person who was trapped in the hot desert for days a drink of water. They will go to our product because there aren’t any like it that are readily available and easily accessible yet.

We do not have any competition, at least within this state, for a fully vegan fast food restaurant. That’s why this is going to work.

The packaging would be (hopefully compostable) to-go boxes, and paper wraps. The location would ideally be somewhere on West University Avenue, heading toward downtown, so that it is still near the college, but not inaccessible due to traffic. The starting employees would be me, my girlfriend Jennifer Gallot, and my close friend, Ethan Cathalina. As we gain business, we will expand and bring in more staff.

Three Minor Elements

Secret Sauce

We are a vegan fast food restaurant, competing in an almost uncontested market.

Looking Forward

We want to expand our menu, eventually adding a full list of items that would mirror those served at a McDonald’s or something like it, but for vegans. We would also like to normalize our recipes to where we could bring in staff and branch off to other locations without losing quality.

Next For Me

In 5 years, I want to have three of these restaurants. In ten, I want at least TEN of these restaurants open. This first venture is the gateway to a chain of vegan fast food restaurants, and to bringing vegan food off the alternative menu and into the spotlight.

Feedback

Everyone that commented agreed with my ideas.

The only feedback I got that included a suggestion was that I needed to do some other stuff for marketing aside from the punch card and other ad ideas. My solution is a commercial, which I could make myself in Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects, where a hypothetical meat-eater comes in to try one of our burgers and is instantly transported to a happy land of plants and happy, living animals, where Mother Earth herself comes to greet the person. The person is then transported back to the restaurant, and proceeds to asks for 3 more burgers.

28A - Your Exit Strategy

1. Identify the exit strategy you intend to make.

 I completely intend to stay with the business that I am developing and pass it down to the children in my family. It is my hope that we can always keep the business in the family, even as the generations go by, regardless of how large the company grows.

2. Why have you selected this particular strategy?

I have selected to stay with the company and protect it as a family venture because no one in my family has built a continuous source of wealth and prosperity. My mother raised me while living paycheck-to-paycheck and I want my kids to have all of the opportunities that some other fortunate families may have. A lot of my pursuits in life are because I want to pull my family out of poverty. I would like my kids to grow up and not have to worry about anything like that, and to know that they can do whatever they please because they will have a castle to come back to.

3. How do you think your exit strategy has influenced other decisions you've made in your concept?

My exit strategy, or lack thereof, means that I have to be completely invested in my venture because I am in it for the long haul. I have to put everything into making it work, and therefore, will try a lot harder to make it a long term success, since I don't plan on selling it off anytime soon.

27A - Reading Reflection No.3

I decided to read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.

Something that surprised me about Steve Jobs was that he was very strange. He did drugs, and tried strange diets. I would have imagined him as being a straightforward person, possibly finding things like that irrational.

I admired that he had such huge vision. He believed he could make everything happen and I don't doubt that he would have done many more amazing things if he were still alive today.

However, as with a lot of other highly intellectual people, I do not admire his lack of emotional understanding. Guys like Jobs are very goal-oriented, dedicated to advancing their study/field/industry, but often aren't able to sympathize with others.

Steve Jobs' most important competency, in my opinion, was his ability to predict what was coming next, in terms of technology. He was able to predict and create the next waves of technology on more than one occasion.

I was confused about his apple diet. Talk about weird.

I would ask him:
"What do you think about what exists in the cosmos?"
"How would someone who isn't good with computers go about defeating the learning curve it takes to get better at something like programming?"

25A – What’s Next?

Joshua Philoctete

ENT3003

What’s Next?

Existing Market

My goal is simply to expand my customer reach and to cement a menu that appeals to a wide range of people. Eventually I would like the grow the menu to include all sorts of fast foods so it could be a one-stop-shop for quick and affordable food.

Interviews

The first person said that I cementing the menu is a really important part of what I am doing, because the restaurant, at least in the beginning, should be identifiable for specific menu item (McDonald’s for the Big Mac, Burger King for the Whopper). They said I should get more into branding and developing the aesthetic of the restaurant that way it can be more likeable and have more people wanting to be there (for the “vibes”).

The second customer believes that I should try speaking to some local businesses, and attempting to collaborate with them on coupons or purchasing deals.

The third customer said that I should consider making a sort of punch card for visits so that, when someone visits, say 5 or 10 times, they would get a free menu item or something like that, which would encourage people to keep coming, eventually looking to get their “prize”.

All of the customers interview gave me some great feedback, and personally I think all of them were useful. I think the idea of a calling card item, our own sort of Big Mac or Whopper, would be a great item to push and to help give us a good name in the process. It would be our “friendliest” item on the menu, and people would immediately know what they are coming to try or to have again.

            I also think very highly of the idea of a punch card. When this person was saying this to me, it occurred to me how people go out of their way to win the prize at the end. It is a sort of mental programming that will have someone coming back to eventually win something, like a kid buying cereal boxes to get the prize at the bottom.

New Market

Being that this is predominantly vegan restaurant, a significant portion of my customers will be vegan. In the future, I would like to have developed our food to where even meat-eaters frequent because of how great the burgers are.

The first person said that I would be fighting an uphill battle, because getting customers to eat fake meat when they could simply have the real thing would be very difficult. They said that I would need to really develop a strategy to get these people in door otherwise they will not come.

The second person also had a response similar to the first, but they presented an idea as well. They said I should do something like a “challenge” where I challenge meat-eaters to eat our burgers and test how good they are.

24A – Venture Concept No. 1

Joshua Philoctete

ENT3003

Venture Concept

Opportunity (The Who)

My target audience/customer demographic is the growing number of vegans that live in the US. We would be starting with a college town, like Gainesville, that has an increasing number of vegan students, among the also rising number of non-student vegans in the city. There are a few vegan restaurants and dessert places located in different spots around Gainesville, and some restaurants have, albeit usually extremely limited, vegan options. There are thousands upon thousands of people here on the run, looking for a good place to eat, and at least a marketable portion of these people are vegan.

There are no fast food spots where vegans can go and grab food. Being a vegan myself, I know what it’s like to be on-the-go, and not have time to prepare food, or simply feeling lazy and not wanting to make food for myself. I usually end up shelling out a lot of money on eating out, because there are very few vegan dishes that are cheap. Restaurants that have vegan options simply see them as a side venture, an oddity that they do not see a reason to put a lot into. A vegan cannot walk into a McDonalds and get a full meal off of the Dollar Menu. Our goal is to put that power back in the hands of our vegan customers.

This window of opportunity will stay available, and most likely grow a substantial amount as the years go on, and veganism moves away from being an obscure diet to being normalized within society.

Innovation

The product/service we are proposing is an affordable, plant-based, fast food restaurant. We would be offering a friendly menu; burgers, fries, hot dogs, rice and beans, different types of vegetables, and maybe even vegan cookies and brownies. It would be a friendly food haven (and hopefully heaven) for vegans, and it would look normal enough to be inviting to non-vegans who maybe want to give vegan food a try without having to look at a menu and not recognize any of the items on it except for rice and veggies. Simply put, we would make money by selling the food. TGI Friday’s buys Beyond Meat brand burgers for 3 dollars a burger and sells them back with fries for 15 dollars. We could do the same for $6-8, undercutting their prices, making food cheaper and easier, and providing a menu mainly made for vegan consumption in the process. Our menu would be filled with items like this.

We would also be open later than any place that serves vegan food, and would be able to add late partygoers to our customer demographic.

Venture Concept

For our targeted demographic, getting them to switch will not be something that we have to work. This is basically going to be giving a person who was trapped in the hot desert for days a drink of water. They will go to our product because there aren’t any like it that are readily available and easily accessible yet.

We do not have any competition, at least within this state, for a fully vegan fast food restaurant. That’s why this is going to work.

The packaging would be (hopefully compostable) to-go boxes, and paper wraps. The location would ideally be somewhere on West University Avenue, heading toward downtown, so that it is still near the college, but not inaccessible due to traffic. The starting employees would be me, my girlfriend Jennifer Gallot, and my close friend, Ethan Cathalina. As we gain business, we will expand and bring in more staff.

Three Minor Elements

Secret Sauce

We are a vegan fast food restaurant, competing in an almost uncontested market.

Looking Forward

We want to expand our menu, eventually adding a full list of items that would mirror those served at a McDonald’s or something like it, but for vegans. We would also like to normalize our recipes to where we could bring in staff and branch off to other locations without losing quality.

Next For Me

In 5 years, I want to have three of these restaurants. In ten, I want at least TEN of these restaurants open. This first venture is the gateway to a chain of vegan fast food restaurants, and to bringing vegan food off the alternative menu and into the spotlight.