Brandon Smith
Takeaways
The most important things I took from RBE this semester are very important lessons I will use for the rest of my life. I learned not only business lessons, but also life lessons. I learned that if you care about something, you are more likely to try your best to make it the best thing, idea, business possible. While working with my business I realized this by noticing those of us that were really pumped up to run the company compared to the ones that had doubts. If we didn’t think we could be successful we wouldn’t have made two sales for profit and we wouldn’t have been able to be approved by the funding board.
I also learned that having fun while working hard makes life easier for everyone and things always seem to fall your way. If I was working with a bunch of guys that I did not like I would not have enjoyed this class nearly as much as I did. There was not one business meeting where we weren’t all smiling and having fun while working at the same time. One of my suggestions to future students was to do more than just work with your team. My team would walk from class together, hang out outside of class, and go on road trips that turned out to be very fun. These experiences created a bond that showed when we presented to the mentors and the funding board.
A take away that I found looking back, was that many business ideas can be possible, as long as they are taken seriously. Every group in this class can make money if they try hard enough. It is all about the effort that is put into the ideas. My business was a T-shirt company but it wasn’t that we were the same T-shirt company as all of the years in the past. Nowadays it isn’t so much about coming up with new inventions, it’s about making old inventions or ideas better.
The biggest takeaway for me was simply the experience the class forced on us all. Experience is a very important intangible asset that is hard to scale but is a very good characteristic to have when entering the business world. All of the small aspects of this real business experience will extrapolate in the jobs we will work at in the future and because of this class, we will all have a better understanding of the business models as a whole. Overall I am very glad Butler offers this class. For those that believe this class should be taken as juniors or seniors, I believe they are wrong because this experience will be good when we are interns at different businesses. This class has taught me lessons I am glad I learned now and not in three years when it could be too late.