Saturday (31^st) and Sunday (1^st)

This day was rather depressing seeing as the ‘Bokke’ seeing as the Championship was taking a break for the weekend and would only start again on the 7^th. This was crying shame and the boys in our group were absolutely heart-broken!

Blah blah blah.... its holiday!!! Haha

Friday (30^th)

On Friday we had a guest lecturer, Lisa Firer, who is some form of artist and overall spiritually gifted human being. Needless to say we had our doubts after the previous lecture where we sat and left, smelt and tasted raisins. However, in this lecture Lisa introduced us to the art of meditation which was surprising relaxing and peaceful. None of us had ever meditated before and was a wonderful experience for all of us.

The mediation – use one’s natural capacity to tend to the sensations of the breath. We practiced both focused awareness and opening up more broadly. It is vital that you find a place and position that is comfortable and where one can be mindful without being disrupted.

After this Lisa couldn’t resist breaking out some food and we made marshmallow towers which were sooo delicious! We really enjoyed this lecture as it opened our minds to a new art that many of us had never experienced.

Through this entire class I semi-blacked out from shear excitement that we break up for HOLIDAAAAAAYYYYYYY!!!!!!! Oh yeah! Nothing else matters.... See ya next term homies.

Thursday (29^th)

On Thursday we didn’t meet as a group and the delegated people ( Dean and Shea) were organizing our future sale day in Stellenbosch. We decided to create a Facebook group about the event to get people excited as well as give them enough time to plan their studies around this day so they are able to attend and come buy our bags!!

Generally Thursdays are rather painful and frankly quite boring with a capital B. We have Politics of Enterprise which is surprising not used as a torturing technical in the middle east however I believe any man would crack after a solid 2 hours. We learnt about the value of business contracts and the benefits of having good legally sound documents when forming relationships in the business world such as partnerships and contracts with suppliers. This did strike a chord as we believe that a legal contract would’ve come in handy when dealing with our producer. If we had drawn up a contract to define our relationship with our supplier we would have been able to include a penalty clause for products that do not meet the basic standards, which would also be stipulated in the document. A legal document can also be used as protection and protect business’s from getting messed around by their suppliers. We would therefore not pay for our previous stock to get fixed, and it would be the supplier’s problem.

We also watched a movie about sustainability in South Africa regarding our wildlife which is one of our country’s greatest assets.

Wednesday (28^th)

On Wednesday we had our usual group meeting at 11am before our genesis meeting. The general moral of the team was down and we were not motivated to sell anymore bags as we feel like we had lost confidence in the product. However, there were a lot of positives we tried to focus on coming out of our last director’s report including the possibility of having a sale day on the 7^th of September in Stellenbosch. The 7^th is a Saturday and would be at the famous Stellenbosch ‘slow market’ where people from the surrounding areas and beyond come to sell anything from clothes to steak rolls. We were keen to get our bags back up to top quality and rename our brand in a positive light. This was a big turning point in our group as we feel like it was a first proper defeat and it couldn’t have come at a worse time. This is where we as a group need to come together and overcome our defeat by picking up our heads and move forward. We have to treat each fail as an opportunity to learn from our mistakes and rather see it as a chance to improve our product. This is a valuable lesson to learn especially being an entrepreneur as there is a high probability that you will fail in your first 5 years of business. Thomas Edison’s famous quote about failure below.

Tuesday (27^th)

After the directors meeting yesterday we decided to perform an AAR (after action review) and look over the feedback we had received from the directors about or product. It was apparent that we had a rather serious quality issue and almost no quality control process. Anthony had stated that two of his three bags are broken and he was worried about the possible repercussions of us having to fix customers’ bags.  We as a group decided it would be for the best to send the remain stock we had left back to the manufacture and ask her to double stitch the connection points to prevent any more bags from breaking. This situation was very hard to deal with and the group really took a blow to the confidence and moral. We were unhappy about selling products that did not live up to the expectations of the customer.