This past summer I
worked with a team in the iVenture Accelerator for student start-ups. In short,
our business model was to sell books to parents and caretakers of children, between the ages of four and seven, to help facilitate dialogue about social identities,
such as but not limited to race, sexual orientation, religion, and ability
status. I wish I had read the last three assigned chapters before dabbling into
entrepreneurship, since I would have been able to avoid problems that arose.
Our team was just
one of twelve in our cohort, and we all shared a space in Research Park. It was
expected that everyone in the iVenture program be at our space on every Monday,
Wednesday, and Friday, as outlined in the first week. As a member of the
program, I personally received $2,500 for the summer as a stipend and my team
received up to $10,000 to use for pushing our business along.
For the first
three or four weeks, everyone was there, unless they had a meeting with a
possible investor or the doctor. In those circumstances, the absent person/team
would make it known well in advance that they could not make it. I had assumed
that the people in charge of the program wanted us to be there because seeing
other people working on their projects around us was motivating. If that was
the purpose, it worked because being around people working on their businesses
helped network, but I also found it helpful to bounce ideas.
As it related to
our team, we never had to worry about whether or not the other members were
motivated. However, we had a few prior commitments that pulled our focuses away
from pushing our project further along. For example, one of our members has a
child, and because of that she couldn’t be in the office every day. My other
partner and I understood that they had to take care of their daughter, but we
went into the program expecting to have a full team in the office every day.
Prior to the summer, we never signed a contract stating what days we would be
available, but it was implied that we would all be there. In this situation, I
am not sure if a contract would have made much of a difference because no
matter what her daughter is most important to her. It’s understandable, but it undoubtedly
made us less efficient as a team.
Though it was
obvious that the reason why we were in the program was to get these
connections, we did not communicate that to the greater collective, so it may
have seemed like we were shirking since we were not visible. Directly, our
presence does not affect their production, unless they wanted feedback, which
was nearly every day. On one hand we felt bad since we couldn’t help more, but
we weren’t contracted to be there by paper, nor was there any tangible
punishment for not showing up. At times, we chose to stay home and work instead
of walking 2 miles in the summer when First Street was under construction.
The latter end of second
half of the program, our team met with publishers, graphic designers, and
potential investors, so it was difficult to be in the office every other day.
The process was new to our entire team, and I wish that we had more contacts
early on, since we did not know if we were being charged fairly for
goods/services. People tended to charge us much more when they knew that we
were sponsored by the university compared to when they did not. Also, we were
afraid to sign documents, because the price of a lawyer who was used to the
language was out of our budget and we did not want to commit to what we could
not afford, whether it be money or time. If I could go back, I would have educated
myself on how the people I interacted with interact with other people.
The pace of the story you told was very rapid. I thought I was with you most of the time, but at certain points you lost me entirely. So I will try to slow things down here and ask questions of the form - what did that look like?
ReplyDeleteYour business was selling books to parents of young children. I don't know if you are aware of this or not, but there used to be a bookstore in town called Pages for All Ages. When my kids were young, that's where we went to buy books for them. They were originally located in the shopping center on Kirby and Mattis. They subsequently moved to Savoy - probably cheaper rent and definitely more space for the store. They went out of business in 2009, a victim of the recession. Now there is a Goodwill Store where Pages used to be.
So your business was in some sense filling a gap that had been created when Pages exited the market. But you didn't have a bookstore. How did you get the parents to know about you? That part of story went right by me.
Then, it wasn't clear at all the way you described this, whether this really was a for-profit venture or instead a social mission. In any event, the purpose of your group and how it was expected to function ahead of time are both things I didn't get.
I did understand that there was some group disfunction thereafter - as you described it members had prior commitments. So that part I think I understood.
But in the next paragraph you talked about "these connections" and said it was obvious that was why you were in the program. It may have been obvious to you. But for me, I don't know what you are referring to so it is not obvious why that is important. In other words, you need to give more information to the reader to understand what you are discussing.
Finally, in the last paragraph, it seems you are not in the business of interacting with parents at all. Your business is with the publishers of books for children. The connections you are talking about, I assume, are with them.
So now, to take this full cycle, did your business model make sense? Did your group have credibility so that your potential clients would care to do business with you? If so, why. Put a different way, were you in touch with people who do research on early childhood education? Do the publishers want to tap into that sort of research?
Since I had such a hard time deciphering what you were doing, I will only comment a little about what Bolman and Deal have to say on the matter. It may be that there is no right team structure to make a team effective when there are many stresses on the group. So I really don't know that reading these chapters would have made a big difference for you.
But as a more general matter, I do think the ideas from our course can help you in subsequent ventures - at the broad strokes level. At the least, they should give you some additional things to consider.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis story was probably fit for a post about twice this size. First, I am going to try to
ReplyDeleterespond to things that did not make much sense, because that just probably comes
from information in my head that did not make it to the post.
Thus far, all of the marketing that we have done has either been pitching to friends and
family, investors, and people at grocery stores from a table.
We have problems with credibility, because none of us have a Ph.D in Social Work or
Psychology. We have the cosign of some university faculty, but that's about it. We've
done hours of research for it, but that is difficult to show to potential customers in an
elevator pitch. There are always more professionals we could talk to about our product,
and it will always be helpful to talk to more professionals who are interested in what we
are doing so we can sharpen it.
As far as our business model, we want to sell books in any way that we can. Amazon
publishing gives royalties of ~60%, so this is the route that we are taking until we can
find a publisher to back us. We're working on selling the book to parents locally to get
some traction, and a bit of market validation.
I think I'm having the same problem with Prof. Arvan, I didn’t really get the whole picture of your business either. It would be more helpful if you could include information on the content of your work, what you and your team needed to do on a daily/weekly basis. Are the 12 teams you mentioned collaborating or competing with each other? If collaborating, do different teams focus on different parts of the business? Besides, since this post is about team structure, I’m also interested in how your team is structured and how does it function, and how do team members collaborate toward the common goal (I guess selling books?).
ReplyDelete