Saturday, December 13, 2008

Money Multiplier

DE has been an interesting course. Before I got to AIM and in fact during the first semester I was pretty sure that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. But somehow during the course of the two terms here I postponed my becoming an entrepreneur. It makes sense because I fully appreciate that before becoming an entrepreneur I have to be enterprising. Easier said than done! Not that its very difficult as such to spot an opportunity and make money. But sometimes its tiring to constantly keep looking for opportunities. Even if you find one, there’s always a feeling that no matter what the actual outcome is, you could have done it better… all in all, it is quite tiring but at the same time exhilarating to spot and do something.
When Rachna, Shibani and me ran a tea stall for a week as our walkabout it was a lot of fun. For the first couple of days it was almost as if we were doing an executive MBA with over 8 hours being put into the tea stall… but at the end of the week, each of us netted PHP 3500 and that felt so awesome… it was worth all the toiling – to make money out of almost nothing, knowing fully well that things were completely dependent on us.
So when the Money Multiplier project was given to us for DE it was very exciting. A few teams got together and decided to organize a multitude of events to multiply money. I thought it’d be a huge success… but I also realized then that when you’re doing something entrepreneurial, it’s better to work with people who’re at the same wavelength commitment and goal wise because with too many people things get a bit scattered. But all said and done, the experience was pretty great. For those 12 days AIM was transformed into a mini-carnival. There was poker going on at one place, the tea stall at another, Wii playing at a third, dart competition … you name it, we thought of it…
We weren’t able to execute all the ideas due to the amount of work load, submissions and assignments but otherwise we’d have had a movie showing, tee-shirt printing and table tennis competition.
My partner Vijay and me managed to make about PHP 10200.
The initial 200 was converted into 700 through a poker tournament we arranged positioned as professors versus students. This 700 was then converted into 1200 pesos through the tea stall. Vijay managed to find a deal in which we made about 9000 pesos. So all in all 10200 was earned by us in 12 days. Making money is truly a satisfying feeling, especially since we’re at a business school. It has been projects like this which have re-iterated to me that I am capable of being successful. Given the current financial crisis we’re in, everybody has fears and doubts about what the future holds. Such projects teach you to constantly look for opportunities. In fact nowadays my mind has automatically gone into automatic opportunity seeking mode. The other day I was having lunch at Thai in a box and I felt that a restaurant like TIB would do really well in India and I went up to the waitress and asked for the owners number. I plan to find out the restaurant / franchising policies while I’m back in India and if possible actually try and take TIB to India. Even if I don’t manage, I’d have learnt something new about an industry I personally would like to get into at some point of time in the future.