Can young students really start a business? Can they really offer products and services to customers? We started the business project with lots of questions.
This course was not short of excitement. In the beginning there were two companies. However, at the start of day 2, leading her team, Weronika from Poland led a take over bid and became Managing Director of both companies. That meant double the money in the bank, double the skills and double the staff, which was useful because we had lots of work to do.
We worked as a team. Lorenzo and Giacomo from Italy led by Maria from Mexico did a lot of work on our new website. Marta and Mar from Spain with help from the company director, Weronika from Poland, created a brand identity, amazing logo and the all essential business cards. Maria from the UK and Giselle from Mexico were confident about becoming our sales representatives.
Our new company is called iVision. Our company offers translation services to local businesses in Ludlow. In particular we focus on helping companies develop a multilingual home page strategy to boost their search engine optimisation and attract more international customers. If you think that sounds complicated, imagine how much of a challenge we had explaining that in sales pitches to local companies! Luckily, we practised first, and with each pitch we got more confident, more fluent and more persuasive.
The sales pitches were tough. Sometimes people said “no” straightaway. What we learnt was the importance of resilience. We also learnt how important it is to speak with the decision maker. We learnt to take different approaches for different customers. Sometimes face to face cold calling worked best. Sometimes, using polite formal phrases, we wrote emails introducing our services and then followed these up with calls.
In 9 hours we had started a company and got our first order. We celebrated by going for a pizza at a restaurant in Ludlow. Not only that, but with our website established and with contacts and staff in 14 countries, we are going to continue the business after our course at More Than English finishes. Were we happy with what we had achieved? Well wouldn’t you be? We know we’ve achieved a lot in a short space of time. We’ve gained practical skills and we have gained confidence. Whether or not our business continues to succeed, we’ve learnt skills that could be very useful in the future!
