Dealing With The Business Angels

My group which is the ice cream group had a meeting today at class with the business angels. We were going to try to reveal to the business angels that they could safely invest in our business. However, since this is the first time that were doing this activity, we did not clearly know what to do. The business angels asked us some questions about our plans. We mentioned a couple of our ideas about our marketing strategy like producing a different flavour every day, opening an ice cream shop chain and also doing some catering. However we were not prepared enough so we could not be successful. This activity made me understood that actually getting Money from investors is really hard and before looking for investors, one should look at each detail of the business he is going to start and be sure that his ideas are innovative enough. On Friday the Soundmap group will be talking to business angels and hopefully we will learn more about creating a good communication with the investors.

“Soundmap” and “The Ice Cream Dream” Case Studies

In Monday morning's class, we worked on two case studies and had some discussions about them. One of these was about a company named Soundmap which produces audio walks for he tourists travelling to London. The company wants to expand its business however it is looking for business angels that would like to make investements to their business. The other case study was about a woman's dream about opening an ice cream shop. She needs 80,000 $ to start he own business and is searching for investors too. After our discussion the class got divided into three groups: The Soundmap group, ice cream group and the business angels. We are going to play a game in our next class and the main goal of the groups in the game will be to assure the business angels that their businesses are worth to be invested so both groups need to come up with some strategies to be successful.

Throughout the discussion Mr. Sen mentioned some new terms to us such as a solicitor. We learned that a solicitor is a lawyer that Works in United Kingdom and gives companies advice about what to do intheir businesses. An important point mentioned was that a solicitor is not the same as an advocate. Moreover we looked at three forms of protections and the differences among them: Patent, copyright and trademark. Although all three of these elements are three forms of protection and look similar, they protect different things. A patent is essential in securing the ideas and technology of a company whereas a copyright prevents other companies to use the companies pictures and texts. Lastly, trademark protects the logo of a company. Moreover we had a discussion about an investor and a Money lender. We learned that a Money lender gets his Money back with a certain interest rate after investing in the business. On the other hand an investor might get a percent of the annual profit of the company that he invested into.