As you know, we absolutely love to get involved in the community and support local projects so this year has been no different.
Throughout the academic year 2017/18 Dunkley’s have proudly decided to partner with Bradley Stoke Community School (BSCS) to launch Young Enterprise – an enterprise programme to help inspire and equip young people to learn and succeed.
Last week, Young Enterprise fully kicked off with a launch event at the RBS Building in the centre of Bristol. Representatives from all the Bristol based teams got together to meet each other, learn from previous experiences and better understand the newly re-designed company programme. Myself, Clare (who is the BSCS centre lead) and Billy (the MD of the ‘student business’) attended the launch.
The company programme is the ‘competition’ which BSCS, Nicole and Clare will be taking part in moving forward. The aim of this programme is for the students to form a business, elect a board of directors, raise share capital, then create, sell, and market products, attempting to generate profits. The team with the highest profits at the end of the academic period along with the best brand awareness and other key factors will be crowned as the Young Enterprise champion 2018. We hope to be that champion so, I will keep you updated on our progress regularly…
Following the launch event, the team met for the first time with me (Nicole) coming along to introduce myself as their Business Advisor who will be supporting them throughout the process giving real ‘business insight’ and mentoring.
During the first meeting, the students decided on their roles with Billy becoming MD, Lily becoming Head of HR, Hannah as Head of Marketing and Theo as Head of Sales just to name a few. As well as deciding on roles, the team started to brainstorm ideas on what their product should be.
The first decision that had to be made was if the company we are forming was going to be a profit driven organisation or a social enterprise. The students quickly concluded that they wanted it to be a profit driven organisation with a proportion of their profits going to a charity at the end of the year. So the question was, which charity to choose? They thought it would be good to link the charity to the products they produce and sell.
Billy, the MD put forward a suggestion straight away, Lawrence Weston Community Farm, which he had previously voulenteered for and knew needed some support following a fire earlier in the year. After a little pitch, the team decided to support this charity and then started to think of the products they could sell.
Ideas started flying around the room from phone cases to products with animals on ranging from cuddly toys to bibs, beanie hats, t-shirts and tea-towels. After a rather long discussion, the team narrowed down the product options to 4 animal based branded items; tea-towels, bibs, bags and aprons.
Research is currently being undergone by the students to consider potential suppliers, designs and selling costs based on other competitors in the market…we will have to wait to see what the outcome of this as well as the decision on the final product is at next week’s meeting.
Look out for my next blog to find out how the team and the product ideas are developing. You never know, by next week we might even have a company name as at the moment we are ‘Bradley Stoke Team 1’ which doesn’t have the best ring to it…
Meet the Team
From left to right we have: Lily (HR Director), Theo (Finance Assistant), Hannah (Marketing Director), Billy (Managing Director), Nick (CSR Assistant), Daniel (CSR Director), James (Operations Director), Enis (Sales Director), Joe (Operations Assistant), Max (Company Secretary), Lewis (Sales Assistant), Tom (Finance Director) and Thomas (Digital Director)