Social Enterprise and Business Challenge
On Saturday 12 March the four teams of Year 9 students, who are taking part in the Faith & Football charity’s Social Enterprise and Business challenge, headed to the Grafton Centre for a day of trading. After a lot of hard work over the last two months to raise initial business finance, source raw materials, and produce their products, this was the first opportunity for the girls to try and sell their products to the public. The four teams taking part in the challenge created a business each – the names of which are: Amou, Cambridge Confectionary, Charmlings, and The Foodery.
The teams arrived at 8.30am to set up the stalls – having considered the marketing and presentation of their stalls and products, which they did very well. The girls also produced business cards to hand out at the Grafton Centre to raise awareness of their companies, and developed customer feedback forms to gather information to use to improve their businesses in the future.
Despite a fairly quiet day at the Grafton Centre the girls actively sought out potential customers, drawing people’s attention to their products, and explaining that the money raised all goes to charity. By the end of the day each business had a turnover of at least £100 and, taking costs into consideration, each business made a profit. This is an excellent achievement (according to Forbes 90 per cent of business start-ups fail) and reflects the perseverance and ingenuity of the young entrepreneurs we have here at St Mary’s School, Cambridge! The girls have already learned so much from the experience, not only by developing their enterprise knowledge but also their employability skills, such as teamwork, communication, problem solving and risk taking.
The teams will be trading again on Saturday 9 April at St Andrew’s Centre, Histon, and would love to see some friendly faces showing support! Following on from this the girls will then need to write up their experiences, as a team, reflecting on their successes and failures, and will enter into the national competition. Well done to each of the girls for their achievements so far – what an excellent opportunity for the group.