Lessons Learned 15 October

The greatest challenge is going to be time management. I understood this going into this class but it has really been a challenge this week. With my business MINDS-i, I’ve worked over 71 hours this week. I’ve been struggling to keep up with my classes and to be honest I’m surprised that it’s only Saturday and everything is practically done minus the discussion board posts. Despite the excellent material in this course I find myself struggling with the material not because it’s challenge but because I believe that most of the work is unnecessarily redundant. The discussion board posts seem to be the worst of it, requiring students to post multiple times and multiple days. I can see how it has a great intention of having an ongoing discussion but it just doesn’t work out that way. I’m a little disappointed in my $100 challenge because I have a great product and business, plenty of work to do and plenty of money to be made but I just don’t have the time to do it because I’ve spend all of my time writing about my plans, commenting on discussion boards, and all the other work in this class. This week I’ve done nothing for my project, except the assignment of setting a budget. I did manage to raise $20 for the project, and print stock certificates but that’s basically a novelty item. I also don’t really need to raise money for the project considering I’ve already sold over $200 worth of bowls with another $100 just waiting to be made. In short, the business is great but I just don’t have the time to make money. At this point I’ve considered hiring someone to just turn the bowls for me and paying them whatever. Considering the high margins on the bowls, if I sold a bowl for $20 and it took 1 hour per bowl I could afford to pay the Washington state minimum wage of $9.47. That would leave me with a contribution margin of 53%, which is not bad. That could be an option, looks like this is all that I have time for today, now to do some discussion board posts.