This has been an interesting week for me and my $100.00 challenge. I have had to make some major changes due to lack of resources for the product I had originally planned on doing. But! I was able to come up with some different ideas/plans and have the products that I need to get it all together and will be able to have everything ready to go. Later than I had originally planned, but it is getting there, slowly but surely. I have had to completely change my product. My target market will remain the same, but the product will be different.
Some things that we have focused on this week in B283 is our leadership/managing styles. We have learned a lot about what it means to be a good leader/manager within a business. Something that seems to have stuck out to me is that a good leader is going to be willing to make sacrifices. A good leader will put the people/business before their own needs or wants. Several of the articles that we read seemed to boil down to the fact that a good leader will make sacrifices and be very selfless when it comes to the better of the company and filling needs. The willingness to sacrifice and serve will be some major ingredients to becoming a good leader.

This week I have come up on some problems with our $100.00 challenge! I am going to have to rethink some of my ideas and if my product choice is really going to work out for me in the long run. I am having a hard time finding the supplies for my products. I am still searching, but I am also getting to the point where I need to start getting it all going. So, hopefully I will be able to get it all figured out. But, on a positive note, I have really enjoyed this weeks topic of study. We focused on customer service and how to keep your customers loyal. It is so important to have the ability to create a loyal client base and keeping them loyal. That is really where your revenue is at. If you can keep your loyal customers happy and wanting to come back, and even getting them to purchase more than they usually do, your revenues are going to increase even more than if you went out and tried to find new customers.
Giving good customer service is one of the keys to creating and keeping customers loyal. If you aren't going to be nice to a customer, than there is no reason for them to stick around. Especially if they can find the same product somewhere else. The point of customer service is to keep the customer satisfied and wanting to return to your store, even if they can find it somewhere else. I know so many people that have stopped giving service to so many different companies based on how they were treated. This is one lesson that definitely needs to be learned. 

This has been a very good week in B-283. I feel like I have learned a lot of valuable things. For today, we learned about marketing and the different strategies of that, what is effective and what is not, etc. There is so much information that you can get about marketing! I loved it, but at the same time, I feel like I don't know where to start with the marketing for my $100.00 challenge. This week I did an interview with an entrepreneur that owns a dance studio. One of the questions I asked him was what his best marketing strategy was for him. He told me that word of mouth is probably his most valuable marketing tool for his particular location and position. I thought that it was interesting that he said that way because I never really thought that the way you decide to market really can depend on where you are located that will determine how effective that particular method of marketing will be. But it is so true. I think I could honestly say that the majority of things I have gone to, I heard about from someone else. I didn't see any ad's for them, or billboards. I went because I heard about it from a friend that really enjoyed it. So for his particular business and target market, that is what works best for him. And in the long run, that method ends up saving him more money.

This week for class we learned a lot about budgeting and the different ways you can do it. Although I understand what I am reading, I think that I am still going to have a hard time once it actually comes down to setting a budget for my future business. There is a lot of detail that needs to go into it. But, I'm learning! For our $100.00 challenge I'm down to the point of purchasing the needed materials and starting my sales! I have finalized the different styles that I am going for and have actually talked to several people who would be interested in my product! So, I am very excited to finally get everything put together once the materials are purchased and ready to go! I feel like this is going to be the kind of tedious part of running this very small business until the rest of the semester, getting the necessary supplies and putting it all together. I am hopeful that once I reach the point of having everything ready to go it will all kind of go from there. Although, I am preparing myself for setbacks too.