Mr. Rob Coons, who is the Co-founder & CEO of Scout
Military Discounts, delivered a presentation about his life as an entrepreneur
for our class. One of the very first things that Rob made is that: to be a
successful entrepreneur, one needs to know how to play the home games—knowledge
of self will take on further in their career. Learning that Rob was passionate
about running businesses, I think that he really meant what he said: to really
know what you are good and not good at, so that you can play the home field
advantage and be successful by emphasizing on your specific skills. For me, Rob
was the first guest speaker that really talked more in-depth about the obstacles
that he had to face and overcome in order to be where he is now. He brought up
the event where an investor pulled the plug right before their product was
ready to go on the market. The lack of funding at the crucial moment was a
heavy set back. Although his current
product is still in development, his company through all the struggles, is
currently in a good place in terms of progress and preparation to launch and
expand their business. Through all the ‘shady’ incidents that happened mentioned
by Rob, one of the things that I got out of this presentation is that, business
means business; you will almost always at least encounter people who find ways
to get advantages over you unethically and that you should always be ready for
those encounters and have a plan B in case partnerships/deals don’t go as
planned. Relating to our class, Rob’s slide
on ways to generate revenues had me thinking by comparing what I’ve had in mind
so far about ways to bringing revenue. I feel that my scope was still too small
(inside the box) and that Rob’s presentation brought up a few suggestions that
might be useful for my Business Plan.
Being a service-based business, there aren’t that many things that are considered intellectual property that need to be protected. The only thing that I can come up as being closest to needing intellectual property is the copyrights to the business’s website code. The code is used to create the business’s property and is part of the company’s property. Although not directly belonging to the intellectual property zone, securing a domain name that closely resembles the business name is also a must we are trying to run our service orders through online website. As far as the business model goes, it is a market full of similar service, hence similar business models. Getting a copyright to a business model that everyone knows about is not very beneficial. However, I think the business will have a good number of trade secrets including distribution methods, customer profiles, and advertising methods. As the business aims to gain reputation through advertising agreements with local stores
Comments
Post a Comment