Although I have just learnt Business Management course since this year, I am always very passionate towards Business related activities: For example, last year, I had tried buying goods from Singapore and selling them online in China, and gained some profits from this small business. Dragon Ventures provides me with a great opportunity on knowing how to set-up my own business, which is something I would like to do in the future.

The first few sessions of Dragon Ventures is basically brainstorming and discussing ideas that we would like to do for our business. I would observe the niches in daily lives that could be a business opportunity and take notes of my findings before each session, so that I was well-prepared, and was able to share my ideas with the others and contribute in discussions.

One plan I had come up with is the ‘instant hotpot’ business, because I found that nowadays, most of the teenagers are obsessed with instant food as it is convenient and easy-to-cook, especially for the people in the Boarding House which I observed. During the weekends, there are also lots of people going to HaiDiLao which is a famous Chinese hotpot restaurant, and many people love it, which I do as well. I started to think that why can’t I combine these two together to make ‘instant hotpot’. Although it has existed in China, it is still not common in Singapore, and many Singaporeans don’t even know about this product, which could be a niche in the Singaporean market. Therefore, I planned to buy instant hotpot from China and introduce it to the Singaporean market through online sales, supported with social medias such as Instagram, Facebook.

I shared this plan with the others in the activity, and we spent lots of time on evaluating the plan. Many people were interested in it. They thought that instant hotpot was a really attractive product, but they also argued that there might require some complicated legislation for me to buy the products from China and import them to Singapore. This could be a challenge for me because I am still a junior right now and I need to focus on my study, while the legislation process could require a long time and large amount of energy. Therefore, we decided to save that as an idea and keep brainstorming.

Since this business was only my rough idea, I was open to all the opinions and questions from the others, and I think these discussions really helps me to build a business mind-set. From those discussions, I could also see the advantages and disadvantages of my plan. I think this is something I should keep up with in the future – being open-minded and listen to others’ perspectives, even though they might oppose my own opinion. The other people could analyse my work objectively and might even have better ideas building on that, which would really help me to improve my work.

LO3: INITIATIVES (Planning & Initiating Activities)