Business Feasibility Mastery Journal
I apologize I haven’t been keeping up with the weekly posts I wanted to be sharing on this page. The past few months have been pivotal in almost every major area of my life, especially for the skincare company I have been working with, VitaliTree. Aside from major business changes, we have attended many trade shows this season, and I was already very booked for these months around the country as a DJ and a live audio engineer. While I still applied my actual assignments to Alchemystar (the social media network I am drafting throughout this graduate program and hope to pursue after) in this month’s course, Business Feasibility, it was an interesting time with VitaliTree to be learning how to make these observations and decisions. Pivoting has been a sort of theme in the office lately, and often intimidatingly so. We have completely shifted our management team with the exception of myself and one of two founders; the other founder parted ways to pursue other endeavors, which has been kind of sad but has also allowed us to start restructuring the business model in a few ways we’ve been wanting to. We have met new difficulties in funding that weren’t problems before, though, and this has caused us to pursue much more diligent sales & marketing outreach. Our product is already on the market, so the fact is that it’s just time to scale up our sales outreach. All-in-all we are growing much faster and making very positive changes, but the challenges and the stress are immense.
At the beginning of the IEMS program, I set my goal for this Business Feasibility course as, “(to) gain the most objective wisdom possible with which to judge my own business ideas and establish my models.” I would not say I was discouraged at all regarding Alchemystar in the idea’s feasibility as a business, but I would definitely say I got a major reality check. Even after taking courses on research and product development, this was the point at which I had to put everything I’ve compiled together and rate my qualities against my competitions’. Social media is an incredibly daunting industry. I will absolutely need a lot of help from many different talented professionals and venture capitalists, which means I will need to conceive some innovative ways to make money BEFORE even presenting my idea to them. Monetizing free websites is a notoriously slippery slope. Given the current stirrings in the mainstream media about social media, it’s the perfect time for a site like Alchemystar to launch if it were only ready, but it sadly is not and neither am I. The truth is that I need to continue getting my feet wet as an entrepreneur before I even fully grasp some of the implications of launching a business like Alchemystar with my hopes and expectations.
Fortunately, that’s happening, and this has been the perfect time to step back at VitaliTree and take a look at the bigger picture. We have a year of very small sales history, and we have a fairly advanced digital infrastructure in place to get clean metrics from a variety of sales channels at different rates. With this data I’ve been able to analyze our growth, given minimal marketing, and also measure growth during different marketing campaigns to gauge their efficacy. Comparing this to the competitions’ prices, their outreach, and the way people in the industry speak about all of us (feedback such as what they like or don’t like, etc.), we can not only see that our business has the potential to have a major impact on this market but we can do it in a positive way. This course has actually greatly helped me in establishing a plan to maintain consistent growth without giving in to the weight of bigger established brands. I intend to continue applying my school assignments to Alchemystar, as I hope to graduate from this curriculum with at least a rough model with goals and projections for that business specifically. Nonetheless, I am taking these lessons to my office and applying them at a real business in real time. Despite constantly feeling overwhelmed and challenged, I am so grateful for the opportunity to be learning this material at this time in my life. Whenever I finish a course I feel better about my potential to bring people amazing things with my ideas!
My strategies to achieve my goal started with releasing attachments to take a fresh look at my ideas. This has actually become a fairly standard mentality for me after the courses I’ve taken so far in this program, but that’s not to say I didn’t have to warm myself up to yet another fresh perspective. The next strategy was to get as many opinions as possible and then consider all of them. We actually had an assignment this month in which we had to survey 10-15 people and ask them questions about our ideas, so I was actually somewhat forced into utilizing that strategy. I learned a lot from it, though, and not just how to ask questions. I am implementing new ways to survey customers for product feedback that goes toward product development now at VitaliTree, which before I saw as too difficult and not presenting much value. I feel the opposite now, it’s pretty easy and goes quite a long way in making stellar products. Finally, I wrote that I wanted to journal my ideas to be able to return to them later with even more perspective. I was unable to keep up with this strategy, but this very blog post is inspiring me to more diligently report my progress and discoveries. I hope I am able to balance more of these types of interactions into my routine. A major goal is to publish more business, audio, and family related articles at my personal website – www.sterlinghbond.com - where I advertise my audio skills, and maybe automate this Tumblr account to share them.
