This week, we have been celebrating Enterprise Week, a week that we always love and enjoy! Throughout the week, we have been working as our own companies, designing and making products to sell to other classes for £1 each. Our aim was to make a profit that we could then use to buy something for our class to love and enjoy.
We began on Monday by creating our company name, logo and slogan. Our chosen product was scoubidous, and we decided on the name Scoubas, with the slogan ‘Scoubas are in the Scobiz!’ We explored a range of familiar logos, noticing how many popular brands use primary colours and simple shapes to make their designs recognisable. We used this as inspiration for our own logo, while ensuring that it was unique to our company.
We also wrote persuasive scripts in preparation for our Enterprise assembly, where we would have the opportunity to advertise our products and encourage other classes to place their orders.
Throughout the week, we were fortunate to welcome two parents who shared their experiences of working in different industries. Our first visitor spoke to us about working in IT, introducing us to the history of computers and the different career opportunities available within the industry. We also explored what salaries in IT might look like, giving us an interesting insight into possible future careers. Our second visitor introduced us to the world of shares and the stock market. We took part in a group activity involving buying and selling shares, helping us to understand how the market works and why the value of shares can rise and fall.
We also welcomed a visitor from Barclays Bank, who delivered an informative workshop about gambling and debt, encouraging us to think carefully about financial decisions and the importance of managing money responsibly.
On Wednesday, it was time to present our products during our Enterprise assembly! Some of us performed our persuasive scripts, and our advertising clearly worked, as we received around 90 orders to complete! This was in addition to the scoubidous we were making for ourselves, which we were also very keen to purchase!
The rest of the week was spent creating our products, including a range of colourful scoubidous and mystery bags to add an extra element of excitement for our customers. Our mystery bags included four different categories: Common, Rare, Epic and Legendary (as well as Scuba Specials).
We had some scoubidou experts in the classroom who were fantastic at supporting others, but we were particularly impressed by the resilience shown by everyone. Making scoubidous was certainly tricky to begin with, but we continued practising, learning from our mistakes and helping one another improve.
Our teamwork was another real highlight of the week. We organised ourselves into different teams, each taking responsibility for different parts of the process. At various points, we even had our own production line running! We demonstrated excellent reciprocity, sharing our skills, supporting one another and working together to complete our orders. We were still busy making products right up until Friday to ensure that all of our customers received their purchases. It’s safe to say that our hands were rather sore by the end of the week!
To finish, we reflected on the learning powers we had demonstrated throughout Enterprise Week, particularly our resilience and reciprocity. We also considered the financial side of running a business, looking at our sales, the cost of our materials and how we could calculate our overall profit. We are now looking forward to deciding how to spend our earnings on something that our whole class can love and enjoy!
It has been a fantastic week of creativity, collaboration and problem solving, giving us a valuable insight into what it takes to run a successful business.
What do you think is the most important quality needed to run a successful business, and how did you demonstrate this during Enterprise Week?
