Monthly Archives: November 2009

Email From Warwick Student’s Union

Posted on by stevebarnesblog
9

Yesterday we received the following email:

To whom it may concern

This is to inform you that we do not allow unauthorised flyering around the halls of residences on our campus.

All unauthorised publicity is removed on a regular basis.

Should you wish to advertise with us then please see the options that are available to you by clicking on the link below.
www.warwicksu.com/mediasales

Regards,

Helen

Project Leader

Warwick SU
University of Warwick

For me this is like lighting the touch paper, I have found the attitude of the students union towards pretty much any students setting up businesses to be appalling. Warwick is a university recognised around the world for it’s entrepreneurial activity and I find the lack of support from some (definitely not all) sections of the university disappointing to say the least, when they try to place obstacles in the way it just makes me angry. I wonder if they send similar emails to all society presidents for every leaflet they deliver to halls of residence? I suspect not – this is all about trying to squeeze revenue from anything considered to be advertising.

Anyhow my response is below, judge for yourself if my point of view is correct. I also copied the email in to the president & communications officer of the SU. Lets see if I get a response!

Hello Helen,

You may be surprised to learn that E-resistible.co.uk is a business venture started by University of Warwick students. I can only assume that you are unaware of this as I cannot believe that an email such as this would be sent to the union’s own students who are attempting to be entrepreneurial. The fact that you are unaware of this demonstrates the lack knowledge that the senior management of the SU has about daily student life.

In early 2008 when we were just beginning our business I wrote an email to the Communications Officer of the SU (James Gatsby Pete) asking for some assistance with getting our start up off the ground. All we wanted was some backing verbally from the SU & perhaps a news article from the website, instead we were brushed aside and told that we were competing with the SU’s outlets. This is completely untrue as the SU does not operate a delivery service for Chinese, Indian, or Pizza during the evening hours.

Undeterred we proceeded with our business idea on our own and students loved our service and E-resistible began to be looked upon as a successful Warwick start-up, winning last years’ Be Your Own Boss competition run by Warwick Entrepreneurs. Suddenly Warwick has wanted to use E-resistible as a tool for positive PR, we have had features on the “Entrepreneurial Spirit at Warwick” in the following newspapers.

The Independent (national) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/higher/campus-dragons-the-entrepreneurial-spirit-is-soaring-across-universities-in-the-uk-1049816.html

The Birmingham Post http://www.birminghampost.net/2009/02/11/recession-forces-graduates-into-self-employment-65233-22901489/

Press Releases using us from WBS http://www.wbs.ac.uk/news/features/2008/12/04/WBS/student/entrepreneurs

Last year’s boar http://theboar.org/news/2009/jan/6/warwick-entrepreneurs-win-e-resistible-reward/

We’re used as an example in this year’s WBS prospectus.

Just this week I traveled for 4 hours (unpaid expenses) to give a talk at Internet Enterprise Day (part of Global Entrepreneurship Week), see the event here http://warwickuni.eventbrite.com/ If you read the boar just this week you will see that one article entitled “Entrepreneurship Talks Inspire” mentions E-resistible yet again.

We invest money into societies at Warwick sponsoring the Poker society here http://www.warwickpoker.com/events/event.asp?eventid=219 We also sponsored the Nordic Society last year.

I don’t really feel like I need to give further examples as to E-resistible.co.uk‘s value to the University of Warwick. We have been used for positive PR many times and you may wish to consider allowing us to leaflet on campus as a form of payment for all the free publicity we have gained the institution over the last 18 months.

You can probably gather that we feel very poorly treated by our own students union and receiving this email just confirms that feeling of bad taste. I may suggest a goodwill gesture of you featuring E-resistible.co.uk on warwicksu.com?

Please feel free to call me on the number below if you wish to discuss this matter further.

Regards,

Steve Barnes – Director
E-resistible.co.uk

Being As Tight As A Duck’s….

Posted on by stevebarnesblog
Reply

When you come up with a business idea even if everyone tells you it’s amazing and the best thing since sliced bread the one thing you don’t know and can never know without going to market is if your going to make money. This is a huge risk and quite frankly is the number 1 reason why some people start their own businesses and the majority of others don’t. There are so many good ideas out there that will never been started because the person isn’t able to hack the risks involved.

However being an entrepreneur is not about taking enormous risks, it’s about being in control of all the risks that you are exposed to and reducing them as much as possible. In the early stages of a start-up the main risk is that no-one is going to use or buy your product and therefore you need to find out if this is the case as early as possible. This means getting a version of your product to market as cheaply as possible to test your idea & see if there really is demand out there.

When we launched E-resistible at the University of Warwick as a test market in May 2008 we had a minimum of functionality, zero search engine optimisation and no idea if people would use the service. However this didn’t matter, we had got to market with 18 restaurants on board, customers could place orders and we could learn if it was possible to make money from online takeaway. Fortunately for us we discovered that the Warwick students did like to order takeaway food online and that with the right strategy we could replicate our successes in other cities throughout the UK. However, if it was a total disaster we could have walked away relatively unscathed at this point with only our time and a small amount of money lost between the 3 of us.

A person’s time & effort are the most important ingredients to get a start up off the ground, and the best part is that they are both free! It would have been tempting in the beginning to pay money to take an advert in the student newspaper or employ people to drop leaflets. Doing these jobs ourselves meant that we were at the front end of the business talking to all our prospective customers in the halls of residences and conveying our enthusiasm for the service, our cost base was zero because our time was free and we gained valuable feedback about what people liked & wanted from such a service.

The nightly operations of E-resistible were run from our bedrooms in the student house therefore rent = zero. Internet = zero, phone bill (using our mobiles) = zero, artwork for leaflets (my girlfriend is a very good graphic designer) = zero. Throughout our period of running in our test market we didn’t have to open our wallets once. This was very important for us because we didn’t have a clue if we could get a return from any activities, so by spending nothing it didn’t hurt us if we didn’t get a return.

When making any investment decision in a business you have to know that if you spend X now that you will get Y back with a certain probability over a period of time. If you don’t know what that Y will be then it’s probably best not to put the money in until you know. Since our launch E-resistible.co.uk has grown infinitely more complex with different systems handling different functions of the business and of course we have invested cash into many areas, the difference is now that we’re sure before we put the money in what our return will be & when we will get it.

I will say now that we have made some pretty big mistakes along the way which I will talk about in other posts so this advice is not something that we adhered to all the way through. But then again no-one gave us this advice so we have an excuse for being naive!

You put so much effort into earning cash from a new business so the best way to make money is to not spend it, basically just think like a duck’s arse.

My Relationship With The Gym

Posted on by stevebarnesblog
1

The gym & I have a very “off/on” relationship where far too many things come in between us and far too much effort is required to maintain the habit of going regularly for more than about a month. I am a member of a very nice DW Fitness gym in Gloucester and my attempt to get into shape usually goes a little like this.

1.) Decide to get in shape & go back to the gym.
2.) Go to gym & do everything ridiculously hard because I feel guilty about not going for ages.
3.) Unable to walk the next day & can’t go to the gym for another week.
4.) Go every day for about 5 days.
5.) Start to feel like I’m improving.
6.) Get bored with repetitive exercise.
7.) End up going away with work for a week.
8.) Arrive back in the office to a mountain of work so gym gets forgotten.
9.) Have about 2 months off before beginning at point 1.) again.

This rinse & repeat cycle has been going on all through university & has continued since. I am now at point 1.) again and I am determined this time to keep maintaining regular exercise as I always feel 10x better for it. I think my problem is thinking that I have to go every day and I’ve failed if I don’t, then once I haven’t been for a few days just not bothering. I’m going to try and make more time for the gym around work but we’ll see how that goes.

We’ll just see how successful I am this time!

University of Warwick Internet Enterprise Day

Posted on by stevebarnesblog
3

Last friday 11th November I was invited back to the University of Warwick to give a short talk at their Internet Enterprise Day which was part of Global Entrepreneurship Week. The day was hosted by Warwick Entrepreneurs in the new £50m Digital Lab. The guys from the entrepreneurship society are very experienced with putting on great events on campus each year and this day was one of the best I have been to.

The first hour kicked off with a showcase of local university start-ups and demonstrated the amount of creative & entrepreneurial activity that is occurring everywhere in a place like Warwick when you bring intelligent and motivated people together. I won’t mention them here because I actually want to do a separate blog post on each of them as they are all good ideas. I did my piece on E-resistible, giving a brief story of how we got started & where we are today, I got quite a few interesting questions from the floor which had to be halted to keep to the time schedule. After a few more speakers the conference broke for lunch and I was surprised by how many people wanted more information about the website, the challenges we had faced and advice on the next steps to take with their business ideas. This is another reason I wanted to start a blog, just maybe there are some people out there who do want to know what we’re up to!

I don’t really feel qualified at 21 to offer anyone business advice as there are far better qualified people than me to help students with their start-up ideas, however there are also a lot of people giving advice who don’t have a clue so I figure I can give someone my opinion and let them make up their own mind what to do. Often the best advice is to talk to as many people as possible, this is what I do when considering a decision/idea, it ensures that you have considered every option as friends & colleagues will look at the decision/idea from a different perspective.

By the time I had finished talking to everyone the conference had started back up again and unfortunately I had to leave for home. The morning I spent was a lot of fun and judging by the response from the people in attendance they will be pretty inspired to go back to their halls & create the next Google, Facebook or Twitter. I’m going to be following the progress of every Warwick start-up closely because I’m sure that one will hit the big time fairly soon. I’m also going to be working flat out to make sure that the one to hit the big time 1st is E-resistible. ;-)

1st Post

Posted on by stevebarnesblog
1

Hello All,

I’ve been inspired  to write a blog for a few different reasons.

1.) I have seen others doing a fantastic job of writing blogs which I enjoy reading & find interesting.

2.) I continually get asked hows the business going? and what am I up to? I never know the answer to these questions as I never know if they are just being polite or if they are genuinely interested. This will hopefully help those who are genuinely interested!

3.) I’m at a really exciting part of my life with new experiences & lessons being learned every day. I hope that this blog will serve as a history of my personal development working for E-resistible.co.uk so that I don’t forget everything that I do as life seems to be flying by.

I’ve added a box to the right so you can subscribe to have new posts delivered to your email if you want to keep right up to the minute with the updates! It may also make it less tedious than checking back for new updates.

Feel free to comment even if it’s just for banter, I’d love to know what you think of the posts or if you want me to write about anything specific.