Process

20 dollar boss was an Innovat(ED) project which helped us improve our skills of business management, collaboration and communication. The process spanned one and a half terms, and during that time we underwent many different aspects involved in creating a functioning business.

We began by creating presentations, pitching our ideas in front of a small sample audience. The best of those presentations were allocated the roles of CEO, and were then tasked to choose their group members. The rest of the 20$ boss cohort had to sit interviews with the CEO’s, who took note of the business partners they wanted. After the groups had been chosen, roles such as designer, creator, planner, finance manager were given and the planning stage began. I was the CEO of my group and I had chosen the idea of bag ornaments as our products. We plotted out the materials we would need to use, how long this would take us, and set up a “scrum” board to help keep us on track.

We set up a teams chat to help us organise our prototypes, cost spreadsheets and photos.

We decided we were going to make roughly 120 ornaments, and at around the halfway mark of the process we collected our materials and began to facilitate the creation of our products. Here is a photo of our first prototype, a basketball design which we would hope would appeal to an audience of younger students.

After some technical difficulties with our custom orders which Mr. Scotti helped us with, we created our logo and began to sort out our products. We finished with a total of 115 ornaments, plus some customs. We had to change design ideas numerous times to what we thought would suit our target audience better. Here is the logo we used to advertise and what we put on our custom order forms.

We finished the 20$ boss project with a total of 312$ revenue, 252$ of that as profit. Overall, it helped me to improve my business management skills, communication and collaboration.

ASC Capabilities

The capabilities I used were effective communication, courage, and determination. At times the project seemed overwhelming, and our progress was severely halted by technical issues with our file formatting in regards to the lasercutter.

My group members and I started off by not thoroughly understanding each other’s ideas, but in the end we were able to clearly share what our valuable opinions and ideas. This helped us improve the capability of communication, and in the end it was a worthwhile investment. I can take away many things from this experience.

Courage and determination were used when times were getting tough and we were making little to no progress.

Overall this was a very emotionally and idealistically profitable experience, and one that I will treasure.