Officially titled as:
Dragon’s Den Business Workshop
The aim of the session: Create a Business Plan, in groups, with a Business Model Canvas and to present it to the other students.
Yes, we had another workshop, this time a more gruelling 9am to 6pm. I did find the timetable of the day to be a little unfair as we had a 30 minute lunch break and two leg-stretch breaks throughout the whole day.
Overall we had to create a business plan for a made-up business and present it to the rest of the class and two “dragons” (they were members from the Bangor Business School I believe).
For the first hour, we were placed in random groups (we are only students, you know.) for which we needed an icebreaker and then we had to choose a project brief to follow.
Picking a Brief: “Snowdonia EcoTours”
Chosen from a list of 8 other projects, all of which revolved around North Wales/Snowdonia, Bangor University, animals and the natural environment.
The beginning of the session began slowly and was only made somewhat interesting by the building’s fire alarm went off. As much as fire safety is of the upmost importance – our lecturers stood around staring at the ceiling for a few minutes.
… This was of course to see if the alarm would turn itself off (despite informing us that there were no scheduled fire tests).
After deciding that the building was not burning down, we returned to the conference room to continue our project.
With sticky notes we filled in a Business Model Canvas about our ecotours – overall we decided that the best approach would be to make an Outdoors Experience Centre. The plan was to purchase a hotel, renovate some outbuildings as storage units and make it into a sporting/outdoors-hotel in the middle of Snowdonia.
After filling in the poster we then had to advertise our business. For this we were given an iPad and under 30 minutes to create an advert. Once we created a script and elected a speaker we found the perfect space to film our clip.
The Dragons
To finish off the day we took turns to present our business plans to some lecturers and business experts from the Bangor Business School. From there we received criticism and feedback on our plans and ideas.
Overall our group got a B: Decent but it’s obvious we aren’t business students.
Personally, I am not brilliant with group work nor presenting due to my anxiety, but I am happy with this grade. Furthermore, I’m an introvert and long sessions of being around others mentally exhausts me, this session really pushed me to my social limits.
iStudybirds 