The process undertaken by the individuals within the group to generate and agree about the opportunity implemented in the business plan
There are five members in our group: Lok Yin, Wing, Sze Kei, Ya Ching and Hoi Yan. Most of the members are from Hong Kong, so we decided to start a business in Hong Kong. Since that all of us know the market and customers in Hong Kong well, it will be easier to do the business. In the Mouse Potato’s business plan, we divided works into different parts, and each of us took responsible in the parts that we are good at. First of all, Wing has done the exclusive summary and venture overview. For the exclusive summary part, she analyzed the whole business plan and wrote a summary about the business. For the venture overview, she has set up Mouse Potato’s mission statement and briefly introduced what our business is. Lok Yin and Hoi Yan, two of them work together in market analysis, market plan and critical risks parts. They did a lot of research in analyzing surrogate shopper services in Hong Kong, including the competitors, customer. Due to Instagram shop is common and popular in Hong Kong so they have specifically focus on some surrogate shopper in Instagram shop to be our company’s competitor. In the critical risks part, Lok Yin and Hoi Yan generally evaluated the risks that we might have to face in the future, it can help us to prevent the risk. Besides, Lok Yin has done the financial plan to estimate how much are we going to spend and how much are we going to earn. She has done the income statement, cash flow and breakeven in this part. Sze Kei has done the management team and funding request parts, she generally introduced how is the Mouse Potato’s management will be formed, what team members do we need, what skills should the members have and also the background of the team members. In the funding request part she talked about where is our money from and she used a pie chart to explain how we are going to use the funding. Ya Ching has done the operation part and exit strategy part she has used few figures to clearly explain how the company is going to operate. Within the operation part, she also did a Gantt chart to show the development timeline of the company. In the exit strategy part, she has mentioned how we are going to exit the market if we do not wish to continue the business anymore or if the business has failed eventually. The parts of the above were written separately but we have discussed a lot before we work individually. Therefore all parts were agreed and discussed by all of the group mates and we have a well communication with all participants so all of us understand the whole business plan. Also, every time we have a meeting, we will explain what each of us has done so far so that we can all review other group mate’s work and give opinion to them to edit it.
The process of working together on the business plan
After the grouping, we have carried out our first and quick meeting in week 4 for introducing ourselves and make sure all of us understand the project nature and what standard we shall reach.
During the meeting, we simply reached the agreement on picking the business of foreign purchasing and the services we are going to provide generally. And each of us have been done some quick researches on different companies which are in the same industry, looking at their objectives, business structure, also how they probably run their business and the way they promoted their company to the target customers.
Next, after decided which business we are going in, we started working on the important main sections that should be included in the business plan and dividing the work. The main parts were listed clearly and each of us has to pick one and respond for that. However, instead of bearing whole of it individually, the whole group got the insight into each topic together first and acquired a mutual understand on that, and has drafted some details that should be included at the