With only 2 days to go until the Area Finals at Kingsweston House, the Phonic Farm students were busy making final preparations.
Billy started the meeting as usual by handing out actions for each of them to complete ahead of the big day. He decided that the 3 students who presented at the Area Heats (Billy, Lily and Tom) would continue to present at the upcoming Finals. This meant they would spend the remainder of the meeting finalising their pitch.
With the other focus being the stand, Hannah, Joe and James were given the main responsibility of ensuring everything was ready to go. As Operations Directors, Joe and James ensured all the materials required to make the stand from the base to the baskets, till and mini shopping trolley were ready to put onto the mini bus. Hannah as Marketing was then responsible for ensuring all the decorative items and marketing materials were ready to go from labels on the baskets to business cards, roller banners and branded sales leaflets.
With these responsibilities gone, the others were given the important task of finding all the missing elements from around the school. Max took the lead by heading down to the Art Department to secure the easel, black card and chalk for the price list. Once he’d completed this he headed off to the Junior School to borrow a teddy duck which sat in the trolley at the Area Heats as a little added touch.
Whilst all of this was taking place Billy, Lily and Tom were busy writing their pitch using the bullet points including the presentation which ranged from their learnings to the journey they’ve been on to the overall brand and product. As the deadline for completing and sending the presentations to Gillian was on Sunday, the students could fully focus on presenting. Once they had finalised what they were going to say, Clare and I sat down to listen and time their pitch. We were both so impressed with the content however to all our surprise, they had over 1 minute and a half to spare at the end. As the presentation is limited to 4 minutes, this is quite impressive. Clare and I then began to give pointers on what additional content they can include – the main being to focus on the product development from a cookbook to recipe cards and the full scope for a set of 26 using the characters, the way they have built the brand and maintained a strong consistent message throughout and a full explanation of why they are called Phonic Farm as this was pointed out as a misunderstanding previously.
After this the meeting ended which was perfect timing as the students had a lot to take away and help improve the content in the presentation.
The next step on Phonic Farm’s journey is the finals! Wish them luck! To get live updates on the finals, why not follow Phonic Farm on Twitter @PhonicFarm? If Twitter isn’t your thing, then make sure to check out my next blog which will be live on the website by Friday 27th April 2018.