Busy Time

Lately I have been really busy because of assignments and exams. I handed in my Business assignment couple of days ago. However I still have doubts about it. My assignment was preparing a business plan for a company. This company had to be unique to some extent. First we prepared a brief business plan as a group project and we made a presentation. This part of the assignment is 5% of our final mark. The individual work was preparing a full business plan according to our presentations and the brief plan.

We decided to open a pancake take away for group work. It wasn’t that bad, because the information about the sector was accessible. We mostly used internet sources. City University’s online resources were great help. We had full access to all business journals and that saved a lot of time.

I think as a group we spent most of our free time at INTO London’s resource centre since the environment was suitable and we found really beneficial books there.

However my individual work had to be more detailed since it is 15% of my final mark. After conducting a detailed research about restaurant business, I decided to focus on marketing side of the plan since I found many useful materials that I could use.  Especially National Statistics Office’s website was great source, since I found reports about population, spending habits, food consumption and recession to support my work.

Basically my plan consisted of executive summary in which I defined the business and product, pestle analyses, SWOT analyses in which I explained strengths and weaknesses of the business, competition, advertising and future plans.

At the beginning, preparing a project with a group was extremely difficult for me since in my country we weren’t encouraged to do work as a group. I was the group leader and struggled to organise time and people. However I talked to my lecturers about it and I noticed necessity of working as a team. In business life individual performance is really important, yet team work comes first because success is not achievable alone. Team members propose different ideas and workload is shared between them. In addition to that, it is a good preparation for university, because as far as I know we will be given many projects as a group work.

The social aspect is really important as well. Normally I am not really good at making new friends but when I started doing this work, I had chance to meet new people and made many new friends.