Entrepreneurship Workshop for students

Amersfoort – February 7, 2018

I look back with great pleasure to the Entrepreneurship Workshop that I gave at the the Atrium in Amersfoort. The case that I had prepared for the students was: ‘My own e-commerce fashion company.’ Eight groups of four students competed to make the best pitch. This consisted of presenting the business plan in English and an outline of the website.

As an introduction I asked the following five questions:

1. What is entrepreneurship? (Please use your own words.)
2. What is the legal minimum age to be an entrepreneur?
3. Is it necessary to have a Chamber of Commerce number for entrepreneurship?
4. Is it necessary to have a tax authority number to be an entrepreneur?
5. What is the startup amount for entrepreneurship?

In order to be 100% certain that I could answer my own questions (2 to 4) correctly, I first rang the Chamber of Commerce myself.

The workshop consisted of working through the following case:

Choose an unique name for your e-commerce fashion company and choose an original slogan

1. Check whether the company name is available (www.kvk.nl)
2. Check whether the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is available

Make your business plan:

1. Choose your target customers (woman, men, girls, boys, babies; gender, age, countries, etc.)
2. What are your Unique Selling Points (USPs) for getting traffic to your website and selling your products?
3. What functional activities are important to run your company well?
4. What is your marketing strategy to support your business? (Think about: Facebook, Instagram, Vlog, Blog, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), etc.)
5. How will you organise your supply chain? (a) production, (b) inbound, (c) warehousing, (d) outbound
6. Design a website for your company. (Think about: attractiveness to target customers, different languages, easy to order, easy to pay, easy to ship, customer service, security, etc.)

Just as in the real world, the whole process involved listening properly to each other, understanding each other, cooperating, making decisions and implementing them jointly. The presence of foreign students from an exchange scheme made this workshop extra challenging.

I would like to thank the Atrium for making it possible for students aged between 15 and 18 to get a concrete feel for entrepreneurship. I must of course also compliment the students. They did their absolute best and came up with some original results!