The Jumping Bean Day 4

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Originally uploaded by Teen Entrepreneur Boot Camp

Day four of The Jumping Bean mainly focused on the appearance of the store and the press release. To kick off the process, after splitting into groups, students began write paragraphs of the press release. This basically took half of the day, after a delayed start, and much coaxing by Pam and Shireen.

Then, after a short lunch break, some of the teen entrepreneurs started to work off an original equipment list, and comparison-shopped on the web to find what we need and the sizes that the items are going to be. Some other students took another computer and found southern drinks, such as the “Virgin Mint Julep” and
“Good Ol’ Alabama Sweet Tea”. The timing was perfect, because just as the equipment list was being printed, the architect was ready to speak. He helped us measure the store, using a long tape measure; essentially supervising the entire planning process.

To top off all of the day’s activities, we were able to taste the cakeballs from Sage American Bakery! Most of the students thought they were excellent! In my opinion (Donovan) they were quite good. They will surely be a great success!

Day 3 of The Jumping Bean

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Originally uploaded by Teen Entrepreneur Boot Camp

Today’s events of The Jumping Bean saga were particularly special. The students ventured out into the field, uptown to 260 Madison Ave, to sit through a presentation by Julia Gaynor, a publicist for Affect Strategy, a public relations firm. In this hour-and-a-half presentation, she talked about how to make the press interested in a story, in our case, our espresso bar. She clearly conveyed what to include in a press release and informed us about a journalist’s deadlines and other technical terms related to the subject matter. We thank Julia Gaynor very much and hope her advice makes or breaks our experience with the press.

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Soon after a short train ride back down to Fulton Street, and a brief lunch break, we practiced an art called “spitballing”, which is a very reliable form of brainstorming. After breaking into groups, we finally met our goal of creating an opening sentence that would hook the mind to our press release. Tomorrow, we are going to write the press release and hopefully send it out in a few days.

Day Two of "The Jumping Bean"

As the sun rose and business people flooded the streets of lower Manhattan, the planning of “The Jumping Bean” continued with ease. Day two started off with group brainstorming for a main sales product. Soon after some creation of ideas, the group stumbled upon a great new idea: cake balls! As opposed to previous sessions, “The Jumping Bean’s” specialty item will be a baked good instead of a drink. Cake balls are balls made of a variety of cakes combined with frosting and dipped in a candy-like liquid, such as fondue or caramel, which are mere examples of the vast league of baked goods we’ve entered.

In addition of contacting many vendors of various items, Pam, the Director contacted our baker, Jen from “This Chick Bakes”, to propose the cake ball idea. We sincerely hope that the baker’s plan works out and our cake balls work out well. Pam also took the students out into the South Street Seaport Pier area to cross-market, or collaborate with other vendors to promote our espresso bar. We inquired from a representative from Circle Line and gather brochures from the many NYC tour buses, such as Gray Line or Coach USA.

The day went on and after splitting into several groups; we started to pull some crucial aspects of our espresso bar together. One group contacted some rubber stamp and paper goods vendors and printers. Another filtered which celebrities we should invite to our opening. Finally, a last group thought of ideas of an apparent theme. We brainstormed those ideas, overlooking many themes of different natures. The theme went from vintage to vintage New York to Mexican to southern to Americana to "South of the Border" to Aztec. After much arguing and suspense the theme of "Jumping Around the World" came to mind, since many people in the area are tourists.

The afternoon flew by and it was 3:30 and "The Jumping Bean" didn't have a tag line. We brainstormed, using the thesaurus and the base word - travel (which is the basis of our theme). After coming up with words such as voyage, globetrotting, and other words not commonly used in everyday speech, the slogan literally floated into the brain of one of the students.

After a long day of work, we are now officially working with "The Jumping Bean - Your destination is just a sip away!"

Day 1 of The Jumping Bean

Today, Teen Entrepreneur Boot Camp kicked off a new session with the start of a new espresso bar/bakery in the South Street Seaport vicinity on the corner of Front and Beekman Streets. Upon piling into the drab-walled building at the early time of 9:00, students were off to a spectacular start. By immediately defining crucial terms, such as networking and marketing, the students formulated a plan for advertising and marketing.

After a quick lunch at the South Street Seaport mall, the group welcomed a guest-speaker, Ipshita, who is a professor at Pace University’s Graduate School. With her came one of her former students, whom she spoke and enlightened us with her knowledge. Ipshita’s presentation included a few exercises, which confirmed her explanations about marketing and networking. Then, under Ipshita’s professional supervision, the class broke up into three small groups to brainstorm coffee-related names for the store; all while sampling cookies from a local baker at “This Chick Bakes”.

Finally, as the day died down and the students were getting tired, each small group derived three name choices, which were narrowed down by a democratic voting process. The final three names were “The Battle of the Beans”, “Whipped”, and “The Jumping Bean”. Upon the final vote, “The Jumping Bean” was unanimously voted as the name for our new espresso bar.

Ground Booty: Day 8

Today we finished our business plans! Two speakers came to help us today to write our final and complete business plan. We split into four groups and each wrote a business plan. We than picked the best one which we will give to john, the owner of the frying pan, as grounds for our temporary business. After lunch we split into groups. We are coming down to the wire! The business opens tomorrow! How crazy?!?! One group went to put our post cards in the mailboxes of the buildings across the street, one group made buttons as our lowest giveaway prize, one group researched agua fresca recipes, and one group printed out the tickets for the treasure giveaway. Our shirts come tomorrow and we start business! Aparently News 5 is interviewing us! Its so exciting I can' twait! After the groups finished, we learned how to make our espresso drinks. That is the most important part!

Ground Booty: Day 7

Today we started fast and got down to business. We are all tired, but we are motivated to finish what we started. We set up the projector and began plugging in numbers. We started a moch business plan. We had to take into account insurance, taxes, employees, products, and rent. We did what we could saving the rest for tomorrow. After lunch a professional franchiser came to talk to us about what it takes to make a business go from a small corner store to a large franchise. He was an extremely interestng and fun guy. Once more we split into groups. A large group went to harass every day people to give our elevator pitch and hand out flyers. They say that was really great and fun! Another group looked up licenses and permits needed to start a business. They also looked up starbucks and dunkin donuts barista wages. A third group went to martha stewarts office and actually saw her!!! JEALOUSY! The end of the day was the best! Our espresso machine came! We began to set up our bar to figure out where we wanted to put the machine! It was 5:00 so quickly and we had to call it a day.

Ground Booty: Day 6

Over the weekend we had sent out the press release. At the beginning of the day we got out first real taste of the business. We saw the poster!!! The poster looks great! We actually got 2. One big and one small. We hung up the large poaster on the bow of the ship. It took a while, cutting string and attaching it. After the poster was all set we began talking about the menu. We split into groups for the rest of the day to cover more ground. One group contacted news papers, one caontaced radio shows, and television news. We asked for contacts, and sent our press release. Another group spent the rest of the day finishing the flyers which we needed asap to send them out. We got quotes from different printers and decided on the company that gave us the best deal. We got 1,000 post card for $200. This was a long, but eventful day!