Earn while You Learn

Topic: - “STUDENT MANAGER – We earn while we learn”

An entrepreneur is a person who can undertake business uncertainty, manage people, venture ideas and assumes significant accountability to inherent risks and the outcome. Mostly people become entrepreneur after a good number of year’s experience of their job, but I was lucky to get this opportunity in my college, which happened in 2^nd semester at Amplify BVU DITM Pune. Along with my course I started managing business of college cafeteria. I am a student of bharti vidya peeth, pune pursuing PGDBM was entrusted responsibility by CEO Mr. Joy Basu and HOD Brig. Gurmeet Singh that Anshu Nayyar and his team shall manage cafeteria administratively, we were directed to increase menu of eateries in cafeteria and manage it make it a profit centre, today my team had been managing the cafeteria successfully since last 3 month as per our college directives.

And I learned a lot about managing business practically thro our business school.

In Amplify campus, rooftop cafeteria was not doing well due to less return on investment. So I along with my team were assigned a task of making a business plan to get increased return on investment. Ten students from different streams were selected from our college to make a presentation for running cafeteria. This was an exercise to judge our conviction for the task. We presented our project and analyzed the opportunity as per our understanding, we just have to use our potential business acumen and lead the business of cafeteria in the right direction.

The constraints were -

• less footfall
• Cost of cooking & maintenance of cafeteria was too high
• College students were the only customer visiting cafeteria.
• No expansion plan by cafeteria owner – i.e. withdrawal symptoms were apparent

Subsequently the students were of the point that

· The menu was not enough

· Food articles were not hygienic

· Prices high w.r.t. to adjoining back market prices

· Service was very poor

· Staff was not at all polite

Our objective was to provide high quality, hygienic and cost effective food in a student friendly environment.

We adhered to-

1. “Best Service, More Customer and High Quality, High Profits”.
2. “For the Students, By the Students”

This helped us lot in creating a totally different image. Our cafeteria had problem of less customer turnover, in our case it was not the problem of footfall as students were there, but low quality food and poor service was making them run away.

Our cafeteria business plans has 4 strategic components:-

1. Strategic Planning
2. Finance Department
3. Marketing Department
4. Customer Relationship Management

Our team was allocated as per their personal capabilities. The basic objectives were to provide good and hygienic food at affordable prices. Also few South and North Indian menus were included. Birthday parties and other associations were discounted. Our focused market or the target market were-

1. COE students
2. Amplify students
3. Architecture
4. Medical Girl’s hostel
5. Environmental college

Our aim was to capture 60-70% of the students present on the above campus.

To upkeep quality of food items and the sales support services was an integral part of our marketing strategies and this was done by the following system adhered :

1. By weekly feedback from customer

2. Daily quality check of food and cafeteria ambience

3. Priority was given by virtue of schemes and discount to birthday celebration and mass gathering to the students

4. Discount coupons and other schemes were given

The first step was to see the present scenario i.e. what actually people want and what they are getting. This was done by feedback forms.

Our students team went to different locations to tap new customer for our Cafeteria.

Customer expects quality, and we did not comprise with the quality which result in very huge success which even we don’t expect. Our turnover doubled.

Following were the figures

Earlier Present

• Avg.Sales/day Rs.3500 Rs.8500
• Footfall Very Less Increased
• Other campus Customer Negligible Environmental and Architecture College

• Menu upto 15 items Up to 50 items and target is more then 100
• Profits Less than 30% 50-55%

We belonging from a business family I know the basic business principles and with the help of college professors we implemented those at cafeteria project. Our team consisted of a marketing team which includes Surya Dev Singh , Manoj Negi and Sankalp Tiwari, we all worked for business generation and expansion. We also worked to improve supply chain management along with Kedar Gosavi, and Sandeep Shrivastva . Most importantly we had Finance team which includes Himani, Arora, Neha Singh and Ankit Shrivastva, who keeps a check on our day to day costing and profits. Last but not the least we have Customer relation team including Priyadarshani Swain, Nisha Vishwakarma and Puneet uphadhyay, which help us a lot to improve customer relations by working on their feedbacks.

At present we had made the cafeteria a profit making centre and are able to provide basic food articles to the students within the college and from adjoining areas. Now at present we are keeping a close eye to consolidate the working of this cafeteria, make it generate more profit of its own, & sustain we are still improving the cafeteria and already we have one more project of restaurant in our hand.

While managing cafeteria the trade taught us a new lesson everyday. But in total it has given us a strong base for our future and we all believe that one day we all will be successful entrepreneur in our fields.

We students as a group had monitored the working of cafeteria from loss making centre to profit making centre, and now we can understand the sense of pride and belongingness of a mother or a father. We had learnt a lot on site. This is trade integration, this is the experience that a business organization is able to teach to students of a business school. This is a life time experience and it could be summarized that a budding new entrepreneur is in making at Amplify mind, in all sense a true business school which produces, helps them become an entrepreneurs……..