Week Update 4

This update is going to be mainly about the conversation I had with Rich Sednak. I already talked about him in my past post, but I want to go into more detail including sharing the raw notes and lessons he told me would be important and essential for virtually any business. 

Here are the raw notes that I typed during the phone call: 

1. What's more important, the plan or the execution?

Rich Sednak - plan 10% , execution 90% 

Investors care about:

1. Ideas 

2. Market

3. Team most important because they will execute 

Investors care more about the team because the plan is subject to change. 

Every business plan is wrong!! - There are faults in the plan that aren't obvious 

Make sure that people want it 

Make money from other sources (Jorge and Nick) 

Tssprint.com 

So the first thing that I typed is a question that I’ve be accustom to asking people older than me and I get different and pretty interesting answers. Here I asked Rich and he replied that the execution is far more important. He said that the execution is 10 times more important than the plan. He said that this was the case because all plans are subject to change and that no plan should ever stay the same. He said to make sure that I made a plan that can be altered and changed so that it can fit whatever avenues we choose to pursue. He also chalked this proportion up to the fact that the plan can change, but the team won’t. The people that will be executing won’t change so you have to make sure that you are working with some one hungrier than you if you want to accomplish your goals. 

Then he began just giving me general ideas about what investors look for in potential businesses. He said that the three main things that they will look for in a business plan is a person who can generate and convey ideas in a clear and concise fashion. I’m good at speaking and explaining so I think I can present my ideas in an attractive and informative fashion if need be. Then investors look at the market. This includes competition, if it will grow, how it will be shifting in the future, what other factors influence it’s profitability, and things like this. Before an investor gets involved and puts their own money on the table they want to make sure that their dollars will grow. So they do their homework and gather all the information they can. I’ve already explained the importance of choosing a good team to work with, so I won’t go into that again. 

He then touched again on why plans evidently must change. He talked about hidden problems that you will run into and ones that you could never plan for. So your team gain must be versatile enough to adapt and change. Resistance to change is futile. 

And some thing that I was told by Aayush, my dad and rich was to make sure that we have an audience. To see this, we might take a tip from Rich and use a website where we send them our design and then we get a cut of the shirts they sell. We will get around a fifth of the money we could be getting, but this will give us an idea of the audience we will be catering to. 

And finally, we caught wind of another business in the school who will also be selling shirts. The people in charge of this are our friends Jorge and Nick. I got to talk to them and discovered they get each shirt made for about $15 - $16 per shirt. Then the mark up will be up to $40! It seems ridiculous to me, so I thought maybe we could get the shirts made for around $3 -$7 from our supplier, sell them to Jorge for around $10 - $12, and then have them save money while we make a couple dollars on the side for our use. Rich thought this was a great idea and definitely something we should do. 

So as you can see, Rich gave us some pretty useful advice that we will be able to use going forward.