On 17th Febraury, as part of my Bioenterprise and Employability module, I took part in a Dragon’s Den workshop. What is this I hear you ask? Well, to clarify, yes we did have to speak in front of some ‘dragons’ but not as scary as the ones off television!
To begin with we were sorted into groups and given a choice between developing a business plan to expand the university natural history museum or Treborth Gardens. Our group chose the museum and decided to expand it by including more rooms, a cafe, a gift shop and a in-door petting zoo along with interactive boards and activities as well as special events. The purpose for this was to enable us to understand the workings of a business plan, which is our current assignment.
Working in groups, we went through section by section of a business plan and wrote our ideas down, such as marketing, funding, potential competition, target audience etc. Upon completion, we had the fun acitivity of creating our own 20 second promotional video for our chosen buisness. Our group worked together well, and ideas flowed and we soon had a script and a direction. We completed this task quite quickly overall and were pleased with the results.
Following this and retuning to our business ideas, we were to come up with a talk to promote our business to last 4 minutes in front of 3 ‘dragons’ who then asked questions. This was the final activity and we finished about 4pm after an 11am start. To complete the workshop, the group the dragons chose to be best won a prize as well as those that had the highest grade from evreyone else (everyone’s talk was peer reviewed by the remaining groups).
For me, I found the experience quite long and tiring due to the length of the day, but due to the amount of work we had to do in what was actually quite a short period of time, seemed apt enough and we were permitted breaks etc which I personally found helpful. The group work worked out better than I first imagined; I ended up with a decent bunch of people and we worked well together and equally which I believe helped in taking off individual pressures and helped develop skills in team working, problem solving and ommunication. I think the overall experience will be useful when I write up my business plan and will hopefully be an asset if I ever set up a business of my own. If I had to make any improvements for the day, I would suggest splitting the time across two days so it is not so long. Also better recording equipment would have been better and less stressful to use! I did not really like the ‘competition’ aspect of the day either, our group unfortunately was not one of those chosen to win a prize (not being a sore loser here!) but I believe we worked just as hard and had some orginal ideas. Perhaps everyone should have had a prize!
animalgal16 