To Author's Page
The Entrepreneur’s of Tomorrow competition is inspiring, daunting, a lot of work and the perfect first step for a young entrepreneur into the wide wide world of business. For me, the competition helped me accomplish things I hadn’t thought possible; writing a business plan for my market research app, presenting in front of a large audience of business people and in the end winning first place. So I’m sure you have all heard of EoT, it’s a course that takes place at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management for all teenagers and young adults in Frankfurt. The course includes monthly meetings in which you learn about different aspects of business and mentoring sessions to help fine tune your ideas to help you write your final 20 page business plan. I am writing this to share my experience in the competition in the hopes that it may inspire, help or entertain you on your journey through the Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow.
In late 2015 a speaker from the Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow came to my school to tell us about the competition and I was instantly excited. I am interested in business, I can’t wait for the day I can leave school and start my very own Apple or Facebook, so I signed up with a group of my friends.
The meetings started around a month later in the autumn and I loved that it made me feel like a proper university student; we went to the university in the evening, sat around in a circle in surpassingly comfortable chairs and talked about interesting and difficult business subjects.The atmosphere of the meetings was welcoming. Entrepreneurs of varying ages, backgrounds and schools had come together because of a common interest and the room was always buzzing with conversations and questions.
We had the meetings roughly every month and each time there was a selected professional speaker who would explain their success stories and companies, this varied from car washes to clothing companies and it showed how business people can have such different and interesting walks of life. After the speaker had inspired us and left us eager to be as successful as them, they would teach us a specific business element that would help us write out business plan, from finance and marketing to writing the plan itself and presenting. These presentations helped me a lot since as at 16 years old my knowledge of business was very limited and they explained things very simply and relevantly.
Finally, we would finish the sessions with mentoring, in this time the students could talk to the many advisors about their business ideas. This was the most valuable part for me as I got the opportunity to pitch my ideas to experts and get their advice, perhaps there were some legal aspects I hadn’t thought of, perhaps they thought that the product was too complicated or perhaps there was already something similar available. This mentoring helped me sort through my ideas and eventually led to my successful idea, “Love It?”.
My business plan was Love it?, a social media app that helps to provide market research data for companies on the buying habits and opinions of teenagers. It is difficult for companies whose target audience is teenagers to get a lot of data quickly, it’s hard to spread your questions to a large audience and fast feedback is crucial when dealing with the quick-changing trends and opinions of young people. Love it? invites teenagers to complete different types of activities submitted by companies by providing a reward system in which completed activities can be exchanged for free sample products from the companies.
It took me a long time to come up with Love it?, I only came up with it around a month before the business plans had to be handed in because during the competition I realised how hard it is to come up with a really good idea. Sitting down at a desk and begging an idea to appear on the blank paper sadly didn’t work, no matter how hard I tried. Strangely, I would often get random ideas in day to day life which I would then have to quickly scribble down. Another problem I had was that if I came up with an idea, even if it was not that realistic, I would love the idea so much I wouldn’t want to see the faults in it and would insist on going forward with it. I had to learn to look realistically at my ideas and find problems in my own work, a process I wasn’t a fan of. Something that helped me over come this was the mentoring sessions, if a businessman pointed out the problems in the idea I had to finally evaluate the idea and let it go. I finally came up with Love It? because I was trying to find a way to get feedback from teenagers on one of my possible ideas and I thought how amazing it would be to have a service like Love it?. So, if your reading this and you are currently in the competition and panicking about what you final idea will be, don’t worry too much. Weird ideas and feeling stuck is all part of the painful but apparently rewarding process and the right idea will come.
Once all the classes were done, all the speaker had spoken and I had finally come up with an idea, it was time to write the dreaded business plan. We had months and months to write the business plan, but I being a silly teenager with terrible time management skills, let the months slip away until two weeks before the dead line. So I sat down that weekend, cancelled any other plans and didn’t leave the house, and worked until all 20 pages were finished. It was the most frustrating and stressful weekend of my life but luckily since then I have not procrastinated as much. I advice you to not do it like this, learn from my mistakes and start writing it early. Even a few pages a week will help you steadily build your plan so you don’t end up like me shouting at a computer scream because you don’t understand finances.
Around a week after I submitted the plan I got a phone call from the competition informing me that I was in the top five. I was so happy, slightly surprised because the finance section had been almost nonexistent, but I think they saw potential in my idea. I had a few days to prepare my presentation for the grand finale and of course felt nervous, the idea of standing up in front of a large audience and business professionals to present my idea did not sound like my normal fun Saturday afternoon. But when the day came, the experience was amazing. I was last to present so I first got to watch the other four groups, all of which where amazing and had such clever ideas. When it was my turn to go up and present my plan, I got over my nerves because after all, it was my business and I knew all the ins and outs of it, now it was my job to explain it to the world. Just a small break later we were finding out the results and I found out I had won. It defiantly made the classes and the weekend of business plan craziness and my nerves and preparation worth it. After I won there was a frenzy of meeting people who wanted to congratulate me, ask me questions or even offer me help in my future business endeavours.
This project gave me my first step into the business world and I am still so grateful for it; it showed me all the different aspects of entrepreneurship that I love but also the harsh reality of how hard it is. It has taught me a lot about myself, that I may be a bit of a last minute worker, that I have to trust myself when I’m nervous and that hard work pays off. The experience gave me a lot, besides the obvious 1000 Euros which I am trying my best to save, now I have an amazing experience for my CV, a promising business plan, business contacts and an amazing experience to inspire me to work harder.
Frankfurt School gGmbH
Adickesallee 32-34
60322 Frankfurt am Main
26 October, 2016