My Young Enterprise Experience
One of my favourite programmes on TV is 'The Apprentice'. When I started the Young Enterprise scheme in September I had visions of battling the other teams, fighting to come up with the best idea and defending our decisions in front of an intimidating Sir Alan. So did my experience match 'The Apprentice'? In many ways, yes! We faced the same difficulties such as coming up with a team name and delegating specific tasks and positions to people. We named our company Obsidian, (for non geographers out there Obsidian is a jet black hard lava rock used to make extremely sharp blades) reflecting our positivity and strength as a team, and this included 15 year 11 and 12s from each high school, meaning we were able to work with people we had never met before.
At our first meeting in September we elected all of our directors, with Oli Le Marquand being Managing Director and myself as finance director, as I wanted to expand on my knowledege of financial accounting and meeting deadlines. It took 2 long heated meetings to decide on the perfect product to sell to our Guernsey target market however we finally came up with the best idea - a Guernsey themed cookbook, called 'Oh My Gâche!'. Initially we thought this was a straightforward idea. However we were wrong. We had a time frame of 2 months to collect market research, search for recipes, make the recipes, hold a competition for the cookboook front cover, find advertising, edit the cookbook and advertise it on social media in order to meet our deadline of late night shopping in December. It was a chaotic 2 months and we did make some unforgettable (but funny) errors in the cookbook, such as the misprint 'heat under a girl', instead of 'heat under a grill'. However, our cookbook was a huge success, selling over 215 cookbooks to the public, which is many more than we first anticipated.
After Christmas, once all the cookbooks had been sold, we decided to shift our focus on to a new idea. However, this time, we wanted to plan a 'service' or event, as we wanted to be more innovative and original. We thought an idea that involved the whole of the local community would be most successful- So what better idea was there than 'Guernsey's first ever Colour Run'? We knew that this idea was going to be very time consuming and difficult to organise with insurance and permission from the States, but we were all so inspired by the Hindu festival of Holi where people throw coloured powder everywhere that we wanted to adapt that idea in to the form of a run. It was a HUGE success, taking place on Pembroke bay in March with 200 people ranging from families and friends to professional runners. Everyone had so much fun and Obsidian worked really hard as a team to ensure that the day ran as smoothly as possible, depsite the bitter force six and freezing cold weather! It was all worth it in the end and we can all look back and be truly proud of what we have achieved as a team. The difference between the on-screen apprentices and Obsidian, as a team, is that they were all about blame whereas we learnt the true meaning of teamwork and co-operation in order to succeed.
So it's been a tough journey. We survived the cold nights selling cookbooks on the High Street, we survived the late nights panic editing with printers deadlines, we survived Arctic winds marshalling 200 runners... we survived all that the business world could throw at us. And now 7 teams are reduced to 1 and we are faced with our final challenge – the Southern finals in the UK... and the dream of Alan Sugar pointing his powerful finger and saying the words...'You're hired'.
Morgan James
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