$20 Boss was one of the many options we could choose from for InnovatED 2021 (for Term 1 and 2). The main challenge of $20 Boss is to by yourself or in a group, start a successful business and make money, all with a $20 per person (in your group) loan, that must be paid back at the end of the project, with interest.

The company I was a part of is called Chocolicious and is also run by Grace Simons and Nicole Zhang. We got the idea to call it Chocolicious after making our decision on selling rocky road. We that thought because the rocky road is mostly chocolate, to include that in the name, so we came up with Chocolicious. Then, we needed to decide on ingredients, we wanted to stay classic, but also use popular ingredients. So from that thinking, we came up with the current ingredients we are using now.

The morning market was quickly approaching, and we needed to meet up to make the rocky road, but we also realised that we needed to have all the packaging ready for the rocky road to go into, and used our class time efficiently to prepare the packaging, make labels, and cut labels. I was mostly designing and printing the logos, which took a while as they needed to be a perfect size.

A couple weeks before the market, we put our rocky road on presale, using tasters to persuade the customers. This ended up working, as from experience, I can say the rocky road tasted amazing. I may have had a few more than a couple, but it was definitely worth it. We ended up making $145 in presales in our business.

On the actual day of the market, we made sure we were 100% prepared and ready. We did this by bringing our own brightly coloured table cloth, display crates, and many more things to make our stall more aesthetic. Compared to the other stalls, ours definitely stood out, as others used the school-provided black table cloth. We tried our best to communicate with customers at first, and we quickly improved our selling and communication skills, so we could actively talk to the customers, keeping them interested. This plus the actual product must have worked because we made a total of $MONEY in the market, and $MONEY altogether from the project. Meaning that we each got $MONEY.

Throughout the project, we used our capabilities to improve the product, our skills, and our teamwork. I think the capability we used the most was communication. We used this from the very start, all the way to the end, from deciding name, product etc, to communicating with customers, and each other as we reflect on our business. We also used resilience, as we needed to use this when printing didn’t go to plan, or when ingredients we wanted to use were to expensive. We bounced back and were resilient as we edited something to reprint, or found another alternative for the ingredient.

Overall, I heavily enjoyed $20 Boss, it was a great experience, strengthening my skills, and my relationships with my group members. I highly recommend it to anyone else thinking of trying it in year 8.