When starting a business, knowing your skills and how to market yourself is the biggest key to success. When you have a service that fulfills a need within the market, great things happen. That’s exactly what occurred today.
We were required to produce a profitable small business with a loan of $20, and five hours. Determined to not use any of the seed money, we thought hard on what trades we could ply as a group. One of our group members had been doing IT work for six years for friends and family and I myself do web development professionally. The idea, therefore, was an IT/Web Development service for the small businesses in Crested Butte, a service that was only available in Gunnison, the next town over.
We split up into two teams, the marketers and the workers. The marketers went around to businesses asking if they needed any web development or IT help. The workers would then move in and solve the problems. We received profit on a donation basis, with our base asking price at $75. In retrospect, we definitely could’ve asked for much more than $75, but it was a good learning experience in how much we’re worth.
Our group consensually decided to split the money evenly between us all. We walked away with $85.50 at the end of the day. We came up with a business plan that met the needs of the community and was incredibly successful. Carrying on forward, we’ll continue to maintain this idea and rake in the profits.