PR Liaison
Hi! I'm Yue Feng, a year 2 Banking & Finance student in Nanyang Business School. I'm in charge of liaising with suppliers, public, NTU and other external parties.
I hope that Chop Chop! will be able to create value for our customers to help them have an improved dining experience in school.
Entry 27: Completed First Order and expansion into Vending Machines
21st March 2019
Yesterday was our event for our first catering customer. Shu Rong went to collect the food from the pickup point which our supplier delivered to. I went to where we stored our boxes of drinks and brought them over to the event venue. While Shu Rong and I were helping them to unpack and display all the food and drinks, the event organiser told us that he was quite happy with our services and told us that we would probably hear from them very soon as they have another event coming right up. That was great news!
Moving forward, our group has been discussing the past month about a possible venture into the sale of snacks in school using vending machines. Alvin had discovered the opportunity and had been busy working with vending machine suppliers and also the school. This was quite a big contract and we scrutinised both sets of terms and conditions. I tried to be as critical as possible when going through the contract to foresee problems that we could encounter. We eventually added in a few terms of our own into the contract and signed it with both sides. Installation of the vending machines would be on 1st April. Hopefully this would be a profitable business segment for us.
Entry 26: First secured customer
6th March 2019
Our group has finally secured our first customer and have issued out the invoice. Our customer is an event organiser from WSC that will be holding an event in mid March. During the course of the negotiations, our customer had counted their strength wrongly and just when we were about to issue the invoice, they told us about it and we had to change the figures. Our group was having a discussion about whether we should raise prices because the customer was looking to reduce the pax from 100 to 70. This would affect our profit margin quite considerably if we continued to charge the same price per pax due to the fixed costs.
Initially, we were quite mixed about whether we should raise prices, raise the minimum order pax or to maintain the same price as a gesture of goodwill for our first customer. If we did not raise prices, we would earn lesser but we wanted our customer to be extremely satisfied with us and come back to us again in the future or recommend us to other event organisers. I did up a scenario analysis for the P&L for the event for the various solutions that each of us proposed.
Out of all the scenarios, I proposed that we raised $0.10/pax instead of asking to increase to 80pax from the 70pax that the customers had. Just by looking at our financials, it is obvious that we would earn almost the same amount regardless of each situation, but what was different was that we would charge our customer $308 if we asked to increase to 80pax and would only charge $276.5 if we asked to increase $0.10/pax. $30 less!! Hence I was of the view that we should choose the latter option so we earn the same amount but charge our customer much less. I showed this to the other co-founders and explained my point to them.
Additionally, after considering that the customer had initially approached us with a budget of $4/pax, even if we increased by $0.10/pax, we were still within that budget. From our past experiences with organising school events and talking to event organisers, we also realised that some of the events hoped to spend all their allocated budget as much as possible. This was because they were afraid that if they did not spend all their money, the school will cut their allocated budget in future years. (What a system in NTU haha..) Hence, we decided to raise the price by $0.10/pax and our customer later agreed and we proceeded to invoice them. Looks like we will be having our first customer under the new business model!
Entry 25: Meeting at Hive
28th Feb 2019
We had a face to face meeting at hive earlier this week to talk about the business progress. Some of the things on the agenda was the creating of a standard ordering form, talking about potential new customers and getting more suppliers on board. We also had quite a conclusive decision about the value proposition of our business and I will update that part on the team blog.
Because of how we always had one person as a point of contact with our customer, a lot of times the rest of the founders may be unaware of the whole situation. To change this, we wanted to try publishing everything on our shared google drive. So we made use of the previous supplier and customer list we had created back then and we told every one to fill it up immediately after any developments they encounter as a P.O.C. . With that, we also realised that we would need to ask all our customers the same questions such as event details, time, place, number of meals needed, number of pax etc. Hence we came up with a standardised ordering form our customers could fill. We would then contact them directly afterwards to confirm the details. This helps us keep a record of the basic details and also reduce the back and forth communications we need to do with our customers so we can simplify the entire customer journey. After just a few days, we already have 3 event customers who filled up the form!
Secondly, we also sourced for new suppliers together and messaged one of them to ask for a discount. We started off by asking for a 10% discount (which we felt were quite high as it was our first time messaging them and we expected them to negotiate it down to a lower %). However, they agreed immediately. I guess they were quite attracted by the prospects of continued sales into NTU.
Entry 24: Networking events
24th Feb 2019
I had attended the Overseas Entrepreneurship Homecoming event. It was an event that showcased the business of several NTU students and alumni. Most of them had went on the OEP and were also part MIE in the past. I learnt quite a bit about their journey and also the key reflections they had. There was a business that was about connecting school events to students. How it worked was that event organisers would approach them and they would help broadcast these events to students on their telegram channel. There was quite a bit of following they have built up on their telegram channel. During the networking session after their showcase, I went to talk to the founder and spoke to him about potential collaborations. Since event organisers would be looking for him, I asked him whether they would be willing to mention our services to these event organisers. He was quite willing to do it as it would also help him to offer better services to those event organisers. He also walked me through common issues and his understanding of events happening in NTU and more specifically, the constraints these event organisers had. It was really a great learning experience.
As for the other events we are working with, Banyan orientation has been progressing well and we found a cheap and good buffet supplier. Checked with Binjai's event and it is still pending approval by the school. This is quite a lull period as there weren't many events. Hopefully we would get more in the 2nd half of the semester!
Entry 23: Some updates
14th Feb 2019
Someone from Binjai Hall had approached me to supply Onigiris for their upcoming event. We talked about details such as qty and pricing and agreed on a price of $2/pax for 200pax. Now we would have to wait for her to get her event proposal approved by the school before she formally put in an order with us. Hopefully nothing would go wrong and we would be able to supply them.
We had missed out on the CNY event for Hall6 because we were not able to settle our invoicing issue in time. We were too slow and missed such a great opportunity. Nevertheless, we have set up our LLP and had used the negotiations with hall 6 and have gotten the invoicing format. With this, we would now be able to produce invoices that adhered to the regulations of NTU.
Right now, we are also working with Banyan to supply them for orientation. Their requests have increased and wanted us to help supply them for several meals throughout their orientation in Aug. This included breakfast (which we sourced from polar), lunch packed meals (which we are thinking of nasi lemak/RE&S bento) and also a finale night dinner which would require a buffet (still sourcing). This event was a large deal and if we can complete it, we would definitely improve our P&L by a lot.
Entry 22: Skype meeting & different roles
3rd Feb 2019
We had a meeting today to discuss our direction moving forward. We have generally decided that we would transition to a catering for events kind of business. However, whether we would cease operations at hive immediately or continue for several weeks until we have secured deals for catering. I was of the view that we should cease immediately, reasons being our lack of manpower (2 on internship) and also the large amount of P&L losses that we suffer. In order to break-even in terms of gross P&L, we would have to sell about 100 onigiris for every shipment but we were only selling about 70 with which a portion was because of friends supporting us. I felt that we should cut our losses immediately and focus on the catering side. However, some of the others felt that we should continue selling, reasons being traffic flow may increase since more students will be back in school. Hence, we decided to split our group into 2, one group to assess whether we should continue operations at hive while the other group will focus on making the catering model work. I will be in the catering group as I was already working on it before this skype meeting.
Entry 21: My take on the business so far
1st Feb 2019
I felt that it would be really hard to continue our operations at hive. After being at the booth almost everyday, I experienced first hand the difficulties. Our location was bad. There was not much traffic flow. We were in competition with the cafe at hive and people at the area were people who had already bought their food and were eating there. In spite of marketing efforts online, it seemed like we were wrong about people wanting to pre-order to help skip the queue. I feel that most people even though they complain about the queues, they would still prefer to queue rather than going through the hassle of ordering online. This was the issue I faced when talking to some of my friends who wanted to support our business. They told me that it was so much easier to order on the spot to make payment. This led me to think that maybe we should rethink our value proposition and improve our business idea so we could overcome this.
Another thing that really bothered me was that we did not have a legitimate physical booth. From what I feel, I personally wouldn't want to buy any food from a random popup stall. That was my opinion from the start but the other founders had convinced me otherwise, they felt that they would and I thought maybe most people would differ from my opinion on this so I went along with it. However, having experienced selling at the booth first hand, there is a tiny bit of regret that I didn't stand firm and convince everyone to accept my point of view.
Lastly, I think all of us worked really hard. Our sales targets were off so we ran around the school outside our booth hours to clear our inventory. We went around the school near to dinner time and approached people one by one, going to seminar rooms one after another to sell our Onigiris. Alvin went to his tutorial classes and went to the front to talk to the entire class immediately after the prof ended the lesson to sell to his classmates. Kaixiang who was on internship came back to school after work to sell onigiris at his CCA. I went back to hall and approached my hall mates to sell onigiri to them. As we were thinking about the catering business, I also approached my hall president and pitched to him about what we did. I took 3 onigiris to let him. He liked it and said he would support us but he does not foresee any events that would require packed meals in the next few weeks but nevertheless, he would approach me if there were any. Even though we may not have stellar sales figures and were making a net loss currently, I am really proud of all of us for persevering.
Entry 20: Week 1 of Operations
17th Jan 2019
We have concluded the operations for our first week. Sales has not been up to expectations. We made on average 25-30 sales of Onigiri out of the 80 we wanted to sell per day. Although the sales figure were justifiable as we were just starting out, the losses we made were not exactly small. Selling at hive also had other problems such as us being in direct competition with the Hive cafe which may likely stir trouble in the future if they were to complain about us. We needed to rethink our strategy.
During our first day, a staff member who was buying from us actually asked us if we were able to bring in Onigiris for an event he will be organising. Catering for events would be great for us but we would need to solve other issues like ensuring we hit the minimum order qty we order from our suppliers.
Nevertheless, when Eunice and I were at our booth on Wednesday, we reached out to student organisations using our Chop Chop Instagram account to look for ways we could cater for their events as well to help increase our sales for Onigiris. The result was quite unexpected. After talking to some of the hall committees through social media, they expressed interest in catering food from us but not for Onigiris. They wanted meals like packed lunches that they could give out during their events. One of them wanted the food catered for next week and another wanted us to cater for orientation which was still 4 months down the road. This sounded great for us. We had wanted to bring in bento sets after Onigiri and I had also secured the nasi lemak supplier when I was looking for alternative suppliers for chop chop.
However, upon further discussions, we realised a major problem, most of these student organisations needed receipts/invoices to claim for their expenditure from the school. The school required the invoices to be from registered business entities.
We had an emergency skype meeting that night, mainly to explore our direction forward, whether we should cease the operations at Hive and to look into possibly catering food for events instead. There were many things we needed to work out and the group could not decide the direction as there were equal votes for both.
Entry 19: Official Launch
12/01/2018
Had a last discussion before roll out today to sort out operational stuff. Worked out order cut off times, added some infographics and videos done up by Eunice and Kai Xiang onto the website. Hopefully we would be able to garner enough sales and not get any unhappy complaints by food vendors in the south spine area.
The rest had also went down for bento food tasting with our suppliers while I was busy with the website. Comments from them were quite disapproving of the bento and the photos taken showed that the bentos looked quite bad. We are thinking about not taking bento at all and carrying more food. Power Nasi Lemak lowered their price down to $3.70 per pack from $4 but was still quite hard for us to carry it and sell it at an acceptable price.
We also discussed about getting sales from large student activities in NTU so that instead of finding external caterers for events, we would become the number one choice to supply food in NTU. Shu Rong found an event for 157 pax but they only had a budget of $3.50/pax. It was quite a large order but it would only be possible if we are able to get power nasi lemak to lower their price to about $3 which seemed quite impossible to me. Nevertheless, I tried asking them to quote me a price for this order and I'm currently waiting for their boss' response.
Entry 18: Website & Ordering system
11/01/2018
Spent the last 3 days with little sleep, learning the basics of setting up a website. Learnt a lot, made several mistakes but I'm finally done. I'm so happy I was able to come up with a fully functioning website, with an active inventory management system. The past few days were spent on google, searching for guides, meddling with code and trying to obtain every thing at the lowest cost possible. Many E-commerce site building tools were paid software with monthly payments and they would also charge a commission fee for items sold. This was not financially feasible for us and hence I looked far and deep for open source software. Furthermore, we were not an entirely online business but one that takes orders online, collects money using 3rd party app PayLah! and then having a physical collection point for customers. Many customisations needed to be done and hence required a lot of meddling with code and getting help from friends and strangers online for advice on the coding aspect.
After I was done with it, I tested it continuously and also got the others to try testing out the system. I tried to automate every thing possible, e.g. when customers ordered, they would trigger email alerts, inventory would be automatically deducted in the system, etc. Automation was essential during busy peak periods where we had no manpower to spare.
Also, I tried to make it a simple ordering process for customers just like they would experience when they shopped online The system also needed to be as simple as possible for the other founders to use as nobody had much experience with coding. I wrote out a document with a step by step guide to handle different scenarios for the others to read so they knew how to use the system. Lastly, I also considered various situations that customers will face and provided improvisations for customers as much as possible (e.g. wanting to order today and collecting tomorrow). After hundreds of test runs, the website was finally ready and would be used as our ordering system after our grand opening which would happen in 3 days.
Entry 17: Banner printing, site reccee & Website
08/01/2018
Eunice had asked me for help to source for banner and sticker printing. Her printing company currently would not be able to supply the roll up banner in time for our video shoot on this Thursday. I had some experience with a printing company that had a short lead time and helped her to ask them. Amazingly, they printed the roll up banner within 1 working day. However, stickers would require us to go down to their shop because it required more customisation and since we only needed it before our opening on 14th, I left Eunice to print that with her original printing company.
I also went down to the hive today to check out the area we would be selling at, took photos to update the others and also took the dimensions of the tables so Eunice could design and print a table cloth to allow us to have a more premium image.
Lastly, our current ordering system which was the google sheets system suggested by Alvin, although would be effective and would have no costs other than us needing manpower to maintain it, seemed to be quite unprofessional. It was a sufficient system that does its purpose, but it allowed everyone to see everyone else's orders. This was a double edged sword. If there were many orders, people would see all the orders and may be more tempted to order also but this would also mean if our sheets was empty with no orders, everyone would know and who would be willing to be the first to order from us? I thought about creating a website with an ordering system but due to me having little to no coding skills, I didn't want the others to place too much hope on me and told them that I would try developing the website but the rest should think about improving the google sheets system because I would likely fail.
Entry 16: Food Tasting
04/01/2018
Today, our team went to RE&S and had a food tasting session to try out the different Onigiri flavours. After all of us tried the Onigiris, we felt that tuna mayo was the nicest, followed by terriyaki chicken then salmon. We decided not to carry salmon tartar and would only carry Unagi on special occasions as Unagi would be sold to us at a higher price than the rest. Other than that, our supplier also said they would be willing to supply us the bento sets and we would be able to carry it by end January. Later than our scheduled opening but we would have to make do with only Onigiri for the first 2 weeks. More importantly, we hoped the Bento sets would taste good and be a differentiating factor to the food sold around school.
At the same time, negotiations with power nasi lemak is still ongoing. They quoted me a price of $4 per set but were willing to waive shipping charges since we were buying for long term. This was not good enough for us, even though it is an expensive brand, this was still a steep price for Nasi Lemak. If we carried it, we would have to sell it at close to $5. This was an acceptable price for Japanese Bento but for Nasi Lemak, we doubted whether anyone would buy it. I tried to further negotiate with them and pointed out that we would be having consistent orders almost every day for such a long period. The person said he would go back and discuss with his boss before getting back to me. Hopefully they could lower it enough for us to sell it at an acceptable price in school and still make a profit.
Entry 15: Contacted a new supplier
28/12/2018
As the search for a new supplier continues, I narrowed down to the west area. Firstly, it would probably lower our delivery cost instead of getting our food delivered from our current supplier's kitchen in Taiseng. Secondly, the food will probably come in a better condition if delivered from a nearby kitchen and we would be able to get more loyal customers.
I was looking through Jurong Food Hub directories to source for suppliers. Unfortunately, many companies there were suppliers of wholesale or fresh meat and poultry. There were close to no large kitchens that operated there. However, I managed to chance upon Boon Lay Power Nasi Lemak. Most people who stays in the west would have heard of this famous Nasi Lemak Stall. They have grown to become quite a big company and now does food delivery and catering as well. I contacted them and during our initial conversation, they seemed to be very keen to supply us, didn't have a high minimum order quantity and did not place much emphasis on wanting a long term partnership with us. Quite different from RE&S which could be due to Power Nasi Lemak being a significantly smaller company.
Entry 14: Confirmed Onigiri Prices & MOQ
22/12/2018
Supplier has gotten back to us about the Onigiri prices they will be supplying us at. We had proposed a price of $1 each but the final price they gave us was $1.25. It was still reasonably within our budget. However, the bigger problem we faced was that they required an MOQ of about 150 pieces per delivery. This was way beyond our projected sales figures. I don't think we would have been able to sell 150 pieces every day consistently. We needed to think of another way to go about this or there would be mass food wastage and money would be going down the drain.
Entry 13: Potential new suppliers & target audience
18/12/2018
Alvin and Kai Xiang went around pioneer today to talk to stall owners to source for alternative food we could carry and sell. They found this store owner selling lei cha who was willing to supply us with lei cha. I tried out the lei cha that they brought but was not very impressed with it. Firstly, it was a meal that was quite bland and seemed to be something that our current target audience who are NTU students are not likely to eat. It was something that would likely appeal to old folks more. At that point in time, we had an idea to sell the food to the cleaners in NTU. Many of the cleaners are quite old and upon talking to a few of them, we realised that meals were not provided for them. Many of the meals in NTU were too expensive and they often packed their own meals to bring to work.
At this point in time, we felt that it may be possible to supply the cleaners with lei cha or similar inexpensive food for their daily lunch meals in school. However, we also discussed about how if we were to ask their company to purchase the meals from us to provide to the cleaners, it may mean that the cost would be deducted from the cleaner's pay. We didn't want this to happen as it seemed quite unethical to be earning at the expense of the cleaners who didn't make much money.
To find out more, we went to find the NTU office in charge of the cleaners and got the contact for the contractor who supplied the cleaners. I messaged the contractor and he said it was a good initiative to provide the cleaners for food, but however, he confirmed our fears that the cost may be deducted from the cleaner's pay if it went through. From that, I felt that we shouldn't proceed with this idea. What we could do instead would be to ask the company for help in advertising to the cleaners who will individually order from us if they wanted food. However, we felt that lei cha alone would also not be enough and thus after discussion with the rest, we put this idea on hold. After all, we still were in the midst of discussion with our original japanese food suppliers and decided that we would look elsewhere for other back up suppliers
Entry 12: Business proposal + Meetup with SAO
14/12/2018
During our discussions with RE&S, the talk on a formal business proposal came up. Onigiri has been pretty much confirmed on their side as they just need to work out their prices but they were willing to supply us. On the other hand, they were quite hesitant about providing us bento sets, especially after the various food poisoning cases that were in the news. They expressed interest in looking through our business plan, especially in the long term stability of our project. RE&S seemed to be concerned about any liabilities that they may have if we sold their bentos and any problems like food poisoning occurred. They were probably thinking about whether it was worth it to supply us, about not just the profitability for them from supplying the bentos but also having a path into the NTU market in the long term.
We are nearing the year end period where many people will be on leave, thus we wanted to give them the report asap so we could wrap up discussions fast to roll out chopchop on time. However, this week Alvin would be overseas, Shu Rong would be busy at internship and Kai Xiang has been called back for reservist. Eunice and I will have to come up with the report and get input from the rest whenever they were able to do so. Me and Eunice decided to start off by modifying the business plan that we submitted to Prof Roderick back then. Our business had changed in some areas and hence we modified these parts. Also, I thought of ways to modify the report to cater to our supplier. We focused on the advantages they would gain from working with us, especially on the section about "long term plans with our supplier". After all, this report would be important in this juncture where we were convincing them to let us carry their bento sets.
Lastly, Eunice and I also had a meeting with SAO face to face to discuss about why our proposal to sell food in school was rejected by them. Although we knew it was unlikely the school would bend their rules for us, our main motive for going was to find out about the rule more in depth so that we were able to pivot Chop Chop to be able to infringe on any rules. However, SAO side did not know the regulations in detail and said the regulations were made by Leasing department. They were only relaying the information, hence it was kind of a wasted trip and we would have to go directly to leasing.
Entry 11: Consultation with Prof Roderick
08/12/2018
Met up with Prof Roderick today, what he said about our problem made sense. There was no point blaming NTU and SAO for their conflicting stance on selling food which took up much of our time. As an entrepreneur, one should go about solving problems instead of blaming others for any problems that occur. I felt that we were just frustrated with SAO for throwing problems at us but the right thing to do would have been to think about solving the problem instead of blaming SAO.
Afterwards, we also had our own group meeting where we discussed other things like duty roster, operational flow etc. Another issue that may potentially affect us would be the recent food poisoning saga in the news. This may have adverse effects on us as we see that our supplier may only want to provide onigiri but seem to be not very keen in providing us with bento sets. I knew we would have to try convincing them to provide us with the bento sets. At the same time, I decided to go back and look for alternative suppliers. I didn't want to rely on only one supplier and these other suppliers can serve as backup plans in case our original plan fails. I voiced out my concern to the others.
Entry 10: Meetup with supplier
06/12/2018
We had another meeting with our supplier today. Agenda for the meeting was to discuss different alternatives with them since our sale of bentos in school has been rejected by SAO. Initially, we had also though of selling Onigiris but the concern was that it was not a full meal which would not give us substantial profits to cover our fixed costs. Hence one main agenda I wanted to discuss during the supplier meeting was the shipping costs and also the minimum order quantity which was tied to it.
After meeting with the supplier, we also had our own group meeting to come up with various alternatives in case SAO rejects our Onigiri as well. I feel it is important that we always have back up plans so that we can tweak and pivot immediately. However, in the midst of our discussion, we also received the email from SAO that our plan to sell Onigiri has been rejected. We were really confused about SAO's stance on selling food as they kept giving us different reasons to prohibit the sale of food.
In my mind, I was thinking of pivoting and changing our idea completely to not sell food. We would need to look for new suppliers but the rest of the work wasn't hard as we were already in talks with SAO and we could set up a booth in school anytime, so long as the product was accepted by SAO . However, this was quite a drastic change and I wanted to hear the Prof's view on our problem during the next consult before I suggest this change to the others.
Entry 9: Gaining school and regulatory approval (2)
25/11/2018
On the route to gaining approval, I was rerouted through SAO staffs because of how our business operation would fall outside the jurisdiction that the individual SAO staff would have control over. It also all came to a dead end as there was no more reply from them. It was a good thing I had done this in conjunction with waiting for NEA's reply. In the back of my mind, I also had some doubts about whether the school really knew about the license we would need. All the different school parties I had talked to simply talked about getting the "relevant regulatory approval". I realised it was because of how there were multiple different regulations governing various different food selling scenarios. It was all too complex and nobody was really certain what licenses were needed for our special case.
Thankfully, NEA called me back over the past week and told me that we would not need any regulatory approval for our food store. Our operations were not covered by any regulations and thus we would not need to apply for any licenses. While on the phone with NEA, I also told them that we would need NEA's explicit statement that there was no license required just in case the school wanted to know when we were submitting our Push Cart application.
I relayed the information to the other group members. Hopefully we would still be able to open our business on time after all the waiting we had to do. I started to understand why the Prof talked about having to manage our time well. In our case, we had to deal with NEA and also the school. Both of them required considerable waiting time before they got back to us and we could have better optimised our activities so that we could do other things while waiting for them to get back to us.
Entry 8: Gaining school and regulatory approval (1)
18/11/2018
Over the past few weeks, I've been trying to gain approval for Chop Chop! Other than the approval for the type of food we could sell, we have been trying to find out what regulations or licenses we needed to get. We initially thought we would have to get a food handling license and we were looking to book the course in December. However, I went to dig deeper into the government regulations and even looked through the statutes which I had some luck in understanding because of the business law module I took in year 1. What I realised was that there was no regulations or law that covered the type of operations we would be having. There was nothing in there about selling packed food to customers at a temporary store location. I then looked through the types of NEA regulations food businesses would need in different scenarios and again there was nothing that would apply to us. Most of the regulations were for the preparation of food. If we were not going to open the packet, it looked like there was no regulation covering that.
If there was nothing that applied to us, does that mean we would not need approval? To find out more, I called up NEA directly and asked them about the regulations we would need for Chop Chop!. The officer on the phone told us that she would escalate the issue to the licensing department and they would get back to me in about 1 to 2 weeks.
Understanding that this would take awhile and because of how the timeline is tight, I decided to try asking the school directly at the same time as they may have had some experience with food store cases in the past. I got a contact of an SAO staff from a friend who had previous experience working with. My friend had worked with the SAO staff last year to gain approval for the sale of food in hall. However, I could not get through on the phone. Hence, I had no choice but to send an email. Hopefully, either NEA or the school would reply us soon.
Entry 7: New food menu survey with more in depth questions
11/11/2018
After the previous meeting with our supplier, we looked to address their concerns about having more detailed information about demand in NTU. I felt that it was a legitimate concern that I personally also had regarding the amount of demand there was for the food we were bringing in. We looked through the entire menu for all the brands under them and narrowed down on the sets that we could potentially bring in to sell. We then crafted a new survey asking respondents to rank their food preference and also the price points they were willing to pay. We spread the survey and Eunice, Kai Xiang and Shu Rong will be presenting the results to our supplier during the next meeting.
While talking to the NTUSU pushcart person in charge, she told us that we had to gain approval from Student Affairs Office (SAO) and she could help us submit our application for that. She suggested for us to also come up with an backup plan in case our bento sets were rejected. With that in mind, we came up with the plan of also selling sushi and Onigiris since the school has no food stalls selling them. However, this would be quite a limited plan because of how we would likely not be able to sell any raw fish sushi. Nonetheless, we looked forward to discussing this backup plan with our supplier.
Entry 6: Settling the venue
04/11/2018
I was in touch with ODFM through the help of Vivien from NTC and it seems like we will be unable to secure the free lots long term for our booth. The school told us that we are able to book them but it was subject to availability. I went to check out the booking system and realised that there were already several bookings for the concourse lots at Koufu for the next semester. Certain days were also blocked out due to school events. This means that we were unable to secure the lots long term and would have to operate on a very irregular basis which was not ideal for us. I think we would have to settle for the NTUSU Pushcarts and incur rental charges. Hopefully this would bring about stability in our operations.
Entry 5: Company visit & negotiation with Supplier
26/10/2018
We went down to our potential supplier's office in Tai Seng to find out more on how we could work together. It was an eye opening session which helped me learn a lot. One major mistake I think we made was that we did not prepare sufficiently for the meeting with the supplier. We had hoped to be able to find out more about our supplier's product offerings, however, our supplier was an extremely large chain with multiple different brands under their belt. It seemed like the supplier was open to working with us by offering us any of their products and seemed to be looking to us to tell them what we wanted exactly.
Hence on hindsight, I feel that we should have went deeper into researching what exactly our supplier could provide before meeting them. Instead of asking them what they could give us, we should have narrowed down and chosen a few products to ask them to provide.
Furthermore, we could have done up a slide presentation to them so as to visually express our ideas and to also show them our survey results instead of merely talking verbally.
We were quite lucky that the company representatives meeting us were young adults who had experience in Singapore universities. They were able to understand us quite well and were very willing to work with us. Moving forward, we are looking to decide on what exact items to offer on our menu and to also work towards gaining the school's approval for our store. This would involve us obtaining the food handling license which we are looking to do asap.
It is an extremely packed and rushed timeline and I hope we are able to start our business on schedule.
Entry 4: Operational Flow
19/10/2018
Our group had a long discussion today about the operational flow. We went into the specifics of the daily operations and we worked out the different viewpoints we had about how we should carry out our operations. We decided on having 2 queues, one for online pre-order collections while having another for walk-in sales. We also drew out a timeline for the entire process, from ordering with suppliers to the closing of the booth.
It was a fruitful discussion and we went back to finish up our parts in preparation for the presentation tomorrow.
Entry 3: Exploring the options for our booth and also a word of caution on regulation.
14/10/2018
I was in contact with a member of the NTU Student Union (NTUSU) and asked about the location (Concourse outside Koufu) and got the following information.
There were typically 2 types of booths at that area. One was done through the renting of the union's pushcarts while another method was the booking of Lots which managed directly by the school's Office of Development & Facilities Management.
The difference between them was that these Lots only entitled the students to a table and a space for them to place their goods for sale instead of having a pushcart. However, the Lots were free of charge to students while there were rental charges for the pushcarts which would be quoted by NTUSU.
Additionally, I got word from the NTUSU member the selling of food through the pushcart and Lots will be subjected to both government and school regulations on food. She told me that the school was typically very strict with its vendors on food handling.
I conveyed these to the group members and decided to look into the possible regulations we may have to adhere to.
Entry 2: Surveying of NTU students
6th October 2018
Our group came up with a survey as part of our primary research to find out about the feasibility of our idea.
We wanted to find out whether the general NTU population faced and felt the same problem we had with the long queues in Koufu. We were mainly targeting students who were from the nearby schools such as NBS, SSS, HSS, SPMS and EEE. Another objective we had was to find out the type of food students were looking for and the price point they were willing to pay. We thought about how best to phrase the questions so as to obtain accurate results.
Afterwards, our group spread the survey through our contacts and hoped to gain as many responses as possible.
Entry 1: Idea generation
29th October 2018
This was the 1st ET9135 class we were attending. Prior to this, we had decided to start our own idea generation process after watching the previous batch's business showcase. Many of the ideas they had were interesting such as Cokun which I felt was quite innovative. I had hoped we would be able to come up with innovative startup ideas like that but on the other hand, our team was one with many business students. I felt that we were people who were more financially inclined, we were better at counting the dollars instead of being the inventor. I felt that many of these innovative ideas with their R&D processes (like the soap bar business) were not really suitable for us, especially with the short time lines in this module. At last, we narrowed down to 3 business ideas.
We still could not narrow down on one specific idea but we were quite inclined towards one of our idea which was a blazer rental services. We brought this idea to class to share with Prof Roderick but got some crucial feedback about the inventory management we would have to do. With that, our group decided to scrap the idea and at last decided on providing a no queue food store business.