Meeting the BIG DOGS

There is nothing quite as nerve-racking as walking into a meeting with professional businessmen and women. Over the past week out group has come up with an idea that has received only positive feedback. It ticked the boxes according to Charles Maisel; it has the wow factor, it is scalable and it is a product that can go global. And this is where we ran into problems – our product is too big for us to handle. The technology involved to create this product is out of our immediate capabilities and in order to produce the product we would have to go overseas to manufacture it.

Nevertheless we presented our idea to our board directors which consist of the following businessmen and women; Mr. Chris Vermeulen, Ms. Danielle Harcourt, Mr. Frank Daubenton, Ms. Beth Durham and Mr. Chris Hosken. The meeting was a great success and we received some incredible feedback from our directors. It goes to show that there is an immense amount of value in getting advice from people who know more about business than you do. There were a number of questions that came up which we hadn’t thought of and this meeting truly presented to us the scale of our product idea.

An important skill which we learnt from the board meeting is the importance in taking criticism. Although everyone we have presented our idea to so far has really enjoyed it, there are many points which we simply haven’t thought of. In all aspects of life it is so easy to be blinded by the excitement of whatever you are doing that it becomes very hard to take a step back and really review yourself and whatever you are doing.

On a final thought, we all realised how valuable it was having directors of which four of the five have previously completed this course. Having said that, it is also incredibly valuable having one of our directors coming from the outside of this course so we get a completely new and fresh perspective on everything.

To close, there was one comment by Mr. Hendry that struck cold with our whole group and made us all feel a little bit of pride in the seemingly effortless work we have done so far and the comment went as such, “I run a two year Master’s program similar to the Entrepreneurship diploma (the course we are doing) at UCT and your idea is something that I would expect those businessmen and women to come up with.”