Phonic farm are hard at work ahead of the regionals!

by | May 9, 2018 | Blog, Community

With the Regional finals in sight, the team were back at work today with an impromptu meeting due to the Bank Holiday.

Following on from last week’s productive meeting, Billy started the meeting reviewing the actions which were given out. He started by asking if anyone had done sponsorship research. Max had been working very hard and spoke to the team about his connections with Western Power Distribution (WPD). Due to this link, he had managed to get them to donate £ for branding, printing and travel purposes. What an achievement! This is exactly the boost they need to step up their game with regards to marketing, promotions and appearance. The company are also in discussions with a two other companies regarding sponsorship and potential product collaboration. This is all very exciting, and it will be great to see how this moves forwards. Billy and the rest of the team have a lot of work ahead.

The next action being revisited was the idea of producing a 5th story based on their Young Enterprise journey. Hannah and Lily have been developing ideas for this story and are in the process of writing a draft outline ahead of the meeting on Monday. Whilst this was being discussed, Tom, the Finance Director came up with another idea. He put forward the concept of producing further recipe cards but in foreign languages with the aim of teaching children how to read languages such as French in a fun and creative way, with the addition of Phonics where possible. His idea was an instant hit! Ideas started flying around the room from Penelope the Pigs adventures in Paris to Sophie the Snakes stroll to Seville. When discussing ideas, the students began to think how they could link this to a school’s curriculum and therefore went down the route of French, Spanish and German as those are the 3 most widely taught languages in UK schools. This idea has a lot of potential, but it is now about seeing it through to the end. Hannah and Lily along with producing the 5th story based on their journey, have now been tasked to produce a further 3 concepts before Mondays meeting. They decided to split the 4 stories between them to make it more manageable. It will be great to see what they come up with.

After all the idea generation, the discussions moved onto our social media platforms and Tom, the Digital Directors plan to create a video campaign. His idea consists of making a video like the ones Haribo make where the adults do childlike things and are voiced over by children. His basic plan of action was discussed, and ideas started to fly. With all these ideas, he is going to get a script and full concept ready to present at the Monday meeting. As well as organising this video, Tom has been asked to produce a social media strategy with regular updates posted via Hootsuite to all our platforms. He has also been asked to focus on website development as we will have these new stories, characters and blogs to add as well as a link to our online store front on YE Marketplace.

Following on from this, Theo and Tom spoke about their summary sheet of finances to date. This has been developed to accompany the overall business summary as key reminders ahead of the finals to ensure consistency. To add additional knowledge, Tom and Theo have now been asked to find out the specific breakdown of sales for each product. This will ensure they are on top form ahead of the difficult questions the judges will ask at the Regionals.

After a substantial amount of time spent reviewing last week’s actions, the students could move onto todays agenda. Billy started off by congratulating Max on his fantastic sponsorship achievement from WPD and re-emphasized the importance of everyone asking for funds where they can. This conversation was swiftly followed by one about clothing. In previous heats and finals, the students had been mixed in their appearances and therefore wanted a consistent look moving forward. Theo and Enis were tasked to do some market research on the costs of white shirts and embroidery now we have the funding to do so. Once they had gone on a hunt for prices in Tesco’s, discussions started with Hannah with regards to a plan to get photos of junior school students using their recipe cards. Billy and Hannah plan to use their connections with the junior school to get a range of photos taken for use in their presentation. The conversation then turned to YE Marketplace. The students company had finally been accepted and put live on the site, but they have been having a slight issue with how customers can purchase their product as it is a pick n mix style affair. With this, James and Joe have been tasked with contacting the developers to see if there is a way of setting up a drop-down filter or a comments box.

As you can see a lot has taken place and a lot is still to be done. The students are working so hard, I personally believe that winning the company programme is exactly what they needed to boost their confidence. They are all aware of the amount of work they must put in ahead of the finals and are all ready to take on anything that is given to them. It is all very exciting, and I can’t wait to see how all of these ideas develop. 

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