With the end of the year, however, also comes the end of the school semester, which usually consists of an unhealthy pattern of stress, little sleep, and wait for it…lots of coffee. But once you pass those two, three weeks of high stress, where you swear to yourself that you won't pull through--yet always manage to do so--you get that liberating feeling of "ah!" I did it.
Running a business, however, is very different. It's not like with most of our school assignments where we can simply cram for a night, and ta-da! we're done. It's an endless homework assignment were we are constantly filled with these "ah!" moments, but where we can't let ourself get too lose right after one because we need to maintain a pace of hard work throughout.
Together with this disappointment, however, came a highlight, and that is that as one of the CEO's of Blendz, I was given the opportunity to create an environment that allowed us to reduce the fluctuations of our business cycle, to aim in maintaining a full-time period of expansion. The way we did this was by assigning specific roles to specific people. Doing so allowed all thirteen of us to gain a certain feeling of OWNERSHIP within an area of the business. This ownership has pushed us to see the value in planning long term because we have a much greater sense of responsibility for a specific area of the business.
When I look at Blendz today, I see how much we've all grown individually and also how much we've all grown as a group. We constantly say that to really learn something, you need a combination of CONTENT and EXPERIENCE, but this semester at Blendz has truly proven this statement for me. I doubt that if I would have taken a business class, I would have really learned the value of long term planning, or the importance of challenging others to maintain the culture. The disappointments and failures, together with the highlights and successes that we've experienced through Blendz have equipped us with the necessary skills that we'll need to succeed in the business world and in our lives.