Abingdonian 2017

67 www.abingdon.org.uk Summer Term Young Enterprise What is Young Enterprise? Young Enterprise is a fun other-half activity that happens on Thursday and Friday afternoons. At the beginning you are split up into groups of about 12 students. Mentoring the students are two Business Advisors. The group then works together to elect the important roles like Managing Director, Finance, Sales etc. allowing them to decide and run everything about their company. The Business Advisors don’t act as teachers but help guide the group. The 2016-17 Young Enterprise teams were involved in a number of ventures during the year including selling VR- headsets, plaques, phone accessories and many other products. They all made huge progress throughout the year not only selling the products for large profit but also learning key skills. Why would you choose Young Enterprise? I would recommend Young Enterprise for anyone who has thought about having their own business. I myself learnt many skills from being a managing director. Some of these were simple, for example how to plan and run an effective meeting, how to control a group of friends from going off track, and how to organise them. My company Unika encountered many problems and challenges during the startup phase that had to be solved. Other important skills learnt were how to design and produce a product that would sell to our target market. My experience in Young Enterprise Last year I was the Managing Director of Unika, we had a brilliant year. Our company attended five trade fairs and our team was extremely successful, receiving four awards. Unika decided to make customised plaques to sell, we spent many hours in the Design Technology Department designing our product and testing it on the laser printers. After many meetings we had a product ready to be sold but that was just the beginning. We created a website, where you could order our product and social media accounts. Everyone in the group had a role and was interested and engaged. Of course we wanted to make as much money as possible to have a successful company and this acted as a driving force. When we set up our stall at SHSK, we were so excited. We talked to customers that had interest in our product and gave out our details in return. After so much work it had finally paid off. Our website and email also allowed us to create customers’ own designs and send them out. This though is only half the story. If you are thinking about doing Young Enterprise, you won’t be successful straight away. Unika had many challenges and problems, probably more than any other Abingdon Young Enterprise group. For example the Design Technology Department said we could not print out plaques using their machines as students needed them for the A-Level and GCSE coursework. This meant that we had to find another place to print them. During this long, frustrating process, the morale dropped in the group. This was one of our lowest points. Luckily we did finally find a company that would print our plaques for us. I really enjoyed the year and everyone else in my group did as well. We all got some money and had a brilliant experience. We attended five trade fairs and our company was extremely successful receiving four awards. I would recommend this to anyone who is interested in business as you will learn so many skills. David Harding 4MP, Henry Insley 4CB and Henry Pickess 4JTT