My Unfair Advantage

Here's what you need to do.

• Generate a list of all of the resources in your venture (produce a list of at least 10 resources that you already possess). This can include your human capital, social capital, financial capital, and capabilities. You may also discuss the organizational culture you intend to create (but, obviously, it's not a resource that you have, now.) 

For my project, I changed gears and switched to a water park that is college themed and student/family friendly.

A list of my unfair advantages:

- My keen personal ability to fish for customer feedback

- Attention to detail

- Established drink limits and a strict anti-drug policy that keeps customers safe

- 5 years of water safety & aquatics program experience

- Large handful of interested investors

- Completely new market and only slight competition from local pools

- Large market that brings in fresh customers every 3-4 months

- Human capital as recruiting employees would be easy when offering competitive wages

- Knowledge of aquatics wages and labor specialties to bolster employment

- Lax liquor laws in FL make it a great place to start a bar-based business

VRIN

• Fishing for feedback is essential to improving my product/service without expensive surveys etc.
• My personal attention to detail allows me to find and fix problems before they arrive
• Drug and Alcohol limits/restrictions are standard to ensure safety at public areas or parks and are easy to copy
• 5+ years of water safety and aquatics experience is relatively hard to copy and is extremely rare for someone of my age.
• Interested investors isn't very new or unique to a spry company.
• A large, relatively untapped market creates a large opportunity for Economic profit to be made within the first decade or so until competitors begin to create copycats.
• The market that brings fresh customers every 3-4 months is very unique and only really occurs in college towns. it provides waves of new customers.
• Extensive knowledge of labor and wages in the area  allows me to recruit employees with experience from bars and aquatics departments all around North Florida.
• The liquor laws in this part of Florida are allow for bars to easily be opened without too much red tape. It is unique to the South East U.S and is relatively tough to copy. 

Top Resource:

--My top resource is most easily the size of the current market. With it, I can attract both investors, employees, and customers from afar due to the massive economic profit that will be earned shortly after opening the first few parks. The only issue is paying royalties for licensing.

My Secret Sauce

1) Describe five ways in which you think you have human capital that is truly unique.
- Motivated: Because of my mental training at a relatively early age, I am able to stay motivated and charge hard no matter the adversity faced. I credit this skill to team sports, competing in MMA tournaments, and training from the U.S. Army.
- Organized: It is in my nature to be highly organized to a "T" and in most cases I am seen as "anal" by my peers. I believe part of that is from a tendency to set standards high and not budging.
- Receptive: I can talk very well, however my strength in social environments is the ability to observe subtle cues and other signals given away in the sub-context of their voice, body language, and word choice.
- Aggressive: My aggression fits very well with my other qualities. The aggression I use is often met with those other three qualities to make it easier to capitalize on small windows that are revealed within social events and be able to quickly draw on organized knowledge and resources to do so. It also gives me the motivation to gamble on something seen as "too risky to others"
- Opportunistic: with "Carpe Diem" being one of my favorite phrases, I recognize that the biggest missed chances at success and happiness are the ones that aren't taken at all. With that in mind, it is very rare to see me not using almost every situation to benefit myself in the long run.

2) Interview the five people who know you the best.
-My family is currently busy with taking care of my sister during her surgery and my best friend is deployed to Africa so my interview-ability is severely limited in this situation although I would love to hear my about my strengths from them, it's selfish to distract them from more important matters.  

3) Reflect on the differences. 
- I have a general idea of how other people view me as needlessly analytic and subtly aggressive but also surprisingly well researched. I know that I often catch others off guard with how much knowledge I compile and use regularly and how quiet I usually am if I am clueless to a subject. I wish I had more criticism from my close ones but I'm currently quite alone and have a difficult time receiving feedback from any current ideas.

My Customer Avatar

My customer in this post is a college student in her mid twenties with a young child.
The idea: Create a water park in Gainesville that caters to both college students and families.
She's a young, struggling mother who has a hard time balancing her college education and taking care of her 3 year old child. Back before life took over, she had a vast set of interests like sports, reading, and traveling.However, now she is focused on her child and her classes. She drives a dark green Honda Accord sedan from the early 2000's and keeps the passenger seat messy as well as misses many of her routine maintenance benchmarks. Her kid is the result of a past love and failed engagement at the end of high school... he's not adopted although sometimes his mom wishes he were out of pain. She reads throwaway romance novels and watches murder shows not because they're good but because it passes time more quickly. She votes liberally because the public education taught her and as an act of defiance to her parents. She likes Bernie Sanders and Hilary Clinton because they follow her ideals and offer a temporary solution to her immediate needs. This person doesn't share much commonality with me other than being a student and is in fact the opposite of me in almost every way.. I decided to profile this customer as it is the typical college town citizen with a little bit of a twist.

PortmanWho?: Absotively & Suretainly

Absotively= Absolutely + Positively: 100% Confirmation of a request made by someone else

Suretainly= Sure + Certainly: see Absotively definition and add a lot less enthusiasm

People were definitely offset by my words. At first they would ask if i meant one or the other or if I jumbled on my words. After someone got used to or repeated one of the phrases, I would switch it up and use the other to continue the confusion. Sometimes it took a couple of hours of consistent conversation and other times it took days of small talk before someone would get used to one or the other. My bosses didn't really like it and kept trying to correct me because I was saying it to customers and confusing them too. My family and close friends however quickly dismissed it as just another weird thing that I'm known for doing.

Halfway Reflection

For this exercise, I'd like you reflect on the past two months. In your blog post for this exercise, pretend that you're talking to a student from next semester's course. What would you tell them?

1) Tenaciousness is a competency. What are the behaviors that you have used (or developed) to keep up with the requirements of this course? 

Tenaciousness as a competency: I believe the most useful trait for this class is being able to analyze and look at things from a third person point of view. Specialize in looking for problems and researching solutions as well as social skills as you will need to be able to meet and interview tons of strangers for extended periods of time so get comfortable with talking, asking specific questions, and keeping someone's attention.

2) Tenaciousness is also about attitude. Talk about a moment or two when you felt like "giving up." What pulled you through? Do you feel like you've developed a tenacious attitude during the past two months? What experience or experiences most contributed to this?

Tenaciousness as an attitude: I feel a little bit more tenacious as I approach the halfway point however up until now, I realized that I wavered in tenacity and commitment to the class and its workload which I definitely need to improve upon. I believe the biggest contributing factor to it is a loss of focus due to sudden financial hardship experienced about 2 weeks through the course that took all of my attention away from accomplishing my work.

3) Three tips. What are three tips you would offer next semester's student about (1) fostering the skills that support tenacity and (2) developing the 'tenacious mindset' ?

3 Tips:

1) Work on being direct, friendly and to the point while keeping people's interest peaked.

2) Get used to an extensive workload ie: it is a 4 cr/hr class but you'll end up doing about 10 hours of work and lectures weekly

3) Think of your idea as your baby and do anything to keep it alive and thriving.

Idea Napkin No.1

1) You. 
Who you are. What your talents are. What your skills and experiences are. Also: what are your aspirations? Specifically regarding your business concept, how do you see this business (if you were to start it) playing a role in your life?

-I am Christian Ellis, a mid semester Junior at UF CALS and in the Florida National Guard Artillery.

-My talents are working under pressure, maintaining a proper work and living environment, creating and enforcing rules, standards, regulations, finding key flaws and failures in economics and daily processes in an analytical sense.

-I am unsure what my aspirations are quite yet, however I do want to continue to serve our country while I am young and able bodied. Afterwards, I believe my role will fall along the lines of product quality management, security contracting, politics, or economics.

-My business concept is merely a concept. It doesn't really relate to my specific skills very much and I have no experience or knowledge on civil engineering or road/electrical construction.

2) What are you offering to customers? Describe the product or service (in other words, how you'll solve customers' unmet needs).

-My current product offers a solution to frustrating traffic problems in small towns and developing metropolitan areas via consulting, engineering, and construction.

3) Who are you offering it to? Describe, in as much detail as possible, the demographic and psychographic characteristics of your customers. Think especially of this question: what do your customers all have in common?

-All of my customers share a common need: efficient roadways and are all local municipalities/ communities. At the point of contacting me, they are surely frusterated and have exhausted all means.

4) Why do they care? Your solution is only valuable insofar as customers believe its valuable to them. Here, explain why customers will actually pay you money to use your product or service.

Places like Gainesville and the rest of Alachua county will be quick to contract help from my company because the citizens of the area are sick of having to pay for inefficient roadways in wasted time and fuel.

5) What are your core competencies? What sets you apart from everyone else? Also: what do you have that nobody else has?

What sets me apart from others is a vast economic and analytical sense. I am able to spot inefficiencies that are hazardous and frustrating to individuals as well as having the knowledge to anticipate the cost of my changes along with the cost of going without them in methods such as a production possibility frontier. My business strategy is always lean and mean.

I don't believe my five elements quite fit together. I think that my civil engineering and construction capabilities don't match the requirements to pull a company like this off. I would have no idea where to start with recruiting engineers and construction workers etc. At first I might make a small team of engineers and sub-contract construction companies until I can build my own to work alongside them and eventually take over the whole process. Getting customers at the beginning as well as capital and employees will be the toughest part, however after five or so years of development, it could make a good accounting profit and possibility an economic profit as well.

Reading Reflection No.1

1) You read about an entrepreneur: Andrew Carnegie

• What surprised me the most about his life was how a man who came from almost absolutely nothing eventually used his natural smarts, intuition, and strategic prowess to overcome so many obstacles and challenges to end up as the richest man in the world (at the time) and only working 3 hours a day. This is also what I most desire about the shrewd, cutthroat individual known as Carnegie.
• What I didn't really admire about him was how dirty and ruthless many of his strategies for economic dominance were. They ended up hurting a lot of people in the end
• Did the entrepreneur encounter adversity and failure? If so, what did they do about it?

2) Some of the biggest talents that I observed from this entrepreneur were negotiation prowess, trend capitalization, and hard ball "take no prisoners" strategy that allowed him to quickly create a massive steel monopoly.

3) One thing that confused me about Carnegie was how he would be unnecessarily brutal and ruthless in his business practices in order to prove a point and further secure his metaphorical throne.

4) If I were able to ask two questions Andrew Carnegie and why?
-How would you capitalize on the current market & its trends starting from the bottom again? So I can use some of his strategy and insight for the future.
- If he could give me the secret to time traveling because that's obviously the only way I'd be able to talk to him.

5) For fun: what do you think the entrepreneur's opinion was of hard work? Do you share that opinion?
He frowned upon doing unnecessary hard work and saw personal disdain for doing hard labor however, he also recognized how important it was to his empire and worked hard (mentally) in short bursts.
I do not exactly share these opinions although I understand where he is coming from and would probably be the same way in his shoes. I take pride in the hard work that I currently do and the lessons it teaches me.