capstone
It’s been a long road
It really has been a long road. Last night, I finally delivered my Capstone project after a slight delay. It went extremely well and our hard work really showed.
I first started this MBA journey in September 2013, and since then, a lot of events have occurred personally in my life. I lost four of my family members including both my grandparents, my baby niece, and my mother. When I lost my mother in March of this year, it was such a profound moment in my life not only because she was no longer going to be here, but also because her death brought something out of me that I never knew existed: my voice.
My mother, a Colombian-born woman, was not the best speaker. She could definitely have a full conversation, but her limitations in English caused several hardships for her career as she wasn’t able to articulate her points across as well as compared to some of her counterparts. Unfortunately, this also meant that she was taken advantage of in several situations. I vowed that I would be the voice that she never got a chance to have and on the day of her funeral, I found my voice and delivered a beautiful speech in her honor.
Last night, I learned to use my voice again to deliver my Capstone presentation and it feels so great to say that it was a success. Of course, it involved several weeks of practice, but in the end and in front of a crowd of people, it really did come down to using my voice to deliver the message in my own words. So to me, finishing my MBA is not just about putting a title to my name, it really means learning how to speak for the first time.
From Mush To Movement
Last Tuesday we learned an important lesson…”it ain’t over until the professor speaks”. Our professor asked us to run down our outline for the Capstone, but then he started asking us probing questions, and eventually after a few anxiety attacks, we ended up going into a completely different, but much needed direction. I’m sure there will be more.
Coming from the bid world, this wasn’t too shocking for me because I’m used to scrambling to add last minute changes before a proposal is due. We’ve even stopped working on a bid completely after hours of research and meetings revealed that we were heading in the wrong direction and we didn’t have a great chance of actually winning, so we cut our losses. Unfortunately, we can’t “no-go” our capstone.
But what was magical throughout the chaos of our long Tuesday night class was that we team leads and the project manager all put our heads together to figure out a solution. We used our individual strengths to pull through. That, my friends, is the key to success in a team. Having a strong support system that not only keeps you on your toes, but also helps you place your feet in the right direction is critical to a “smoother” project. We listened to each other and our brains went from mush to movement.
Don’t Forget to WIFM
Let’s face it…we’re selfish and inpatient when it comes to marketing, especially my generation of millenials. We don’t always have time to read through every article or look at all the pretty ads unless there’s something in it for us. BTW, thank you for reading đ
WIFM or “What’s in it for me” is extremely important; imagine that your customer is asking it with every marketing piece you put out there. It’s even more critical for small businesses such as the Shaw’s Center and Campanelli Stadium who can easily get lost in the crowd.
But let’s back up for a second. You might have noticed in my earlier posts that I’ve changed from talking about the Brockton Rox to the Shaw’s Center and Campanelli stadium. The Brockton Rox is the baseball team, Campenelli stadium is where they play, and the Shaw’s Center is a 15,000 square-foot convention center attached to the stadium. This is a very unique situation for the business because they not only have to focus on the WIFM for their baseball fans, but also for event planners (both personal and professional).
After our cohort did some initial research about the business, we realized that their baseball side of business, “The Rox”, is actually well on its way to success. They are starting to get the WIFM right for their Rox customers. Where they need more strategy is on the event planning-side of their business…how to get more customers to rent out their two facilities. In many ways, the business is starting out from scratch with their marketing of these facilities. We’re doing a ton of research to better understand their target market and even identifying potential buyer personas to help them build out better content that’s more tailored to their audience and of course that answers the question: What’s in it for me?
By the way, we only have four more weeks left! We’ll be wrapping up the written portion of our project within the next two weeks and starting on creating the presentation. Yikes!
Round One: Pulling it All Together
During the past two classes, everyone in the cohort gave an update on where they stand with their part of the Capstone consulting project. We’ve broken it down into three major areas: financial structure, industry environment, and marketing.
The advantage of doing a Capstone on a small business is that you get your hands in everything and you almost get too much information. One of our major struggles will be deciding which areas we should continue honing in on because unfortunately we can’t do it all, especially not in five weeks.
We’re targeting the “low-hanging fruit”, the areas that need most improvement, can be easily implemented, but that also will reap the most benefits.
Our first written analysis is due on Tuesday so it will be interesting to see the whole project faintly coming together. We’re almost there, guys!
Focus Your Niche
I came across an article in Inc.com recently that truly epitomizes the Shaw’s Center/Campanelli stadium and many other small businesses. How does a business increase sales in a declining market? It finds other niches of course! The Inc.com article talks about how businesses in the wedding industry such as bridal shops, are narrowing down their focus to strongly target groups like older brides and gay couples to name a few. They don’t spend their resources on areas they “think” they can compete in; they invest in what’s truly within their reach.
How does this apply to our Capstone?
The Shaw’s Center and Campanelli stadium offer a very unique value proposition for very unique clients. Our job is to figure out who these unique clients are so that they can easily find exactly what they’ve been looking for. This might be in the wedding industry or it might be in a completely different area. Our research so far has shown us that this business has a few opportunities to not only increase its market share in the wedding industry, but also penetrate an entirely new market that’s more locally-based.
I don’t want to give away too much of our project because it will all be presented in our final Capstone project in August, but let’s just say that the demographics in Brockton cannot be ignored. We’ll be looking at all angles to leverage the Shaw’s Center and Campanelli stadium location and potential customers that surround them.
S.M.A.R.T. Your Way to the End
We have 8 weeks to analyze the current Campanelli/Shaw’s Center business, identify areas for improvement, capture it all in a written document, and then deliver our findings via a presentation.
Did I mention that most of us are working full-time, have children to care for, and that this is all going down in the summer after the worst winter ever?!
Yeah…this means that it’s imperative, essential, mandatory, _____ (fill in your own desperate word), for us to stay on track of meeting our deadlines. The only way to do that is by setting S.M.A.R.T. goals. Each week, we will all list out goals that we need to achieve.
For example:
These goals have to be very specific; otherwise, you’ll fall into the trap of being overwhelmed with trying to complete too broad of a goal. If you say that you’re going to conquer the world, how exactly will you do it? Will you team up with Pinky and the Brain or hack every drone on earth? And by when will you accomplish this lovely task?
Still don’t know how to start? Think of it as a to-do list. Most of the time, when you write to-do’s, they’re pretty specific. Walk the dog…but with a S.M.A.R.T. goal twist, it becomes Walk the dog around the block by 4pm. Easy enough to write, hopefully just as easy to do!
Planning the Marketing Plan
Where do I start? How do you start? What’s a marketing plan, anyways? You might think you need to go through your Marketing text book and include the marketing mix, 4 P’s, etc., but as I’m finding with this capstone project, you just need to start small. Things can get pretty overwhelming if you try to apply everything you’ve learned from your marketing class, so just focus on the basics first.
In our case, we have a complex situation in which we have to create one marketing plan for two different venues: Campanelli stadium and the Shaw’s Center. These two venues are completely different…or are they? They both offer entertainment for people: one where your getting entertained and the other where you’re the entertainment. So, knowing that, we can continue on with the basic questions and start to shape out our marketing plan:
- Who would like to be entertained or entertain? (Target Market)
- Would they find information on the Campanelli/Shaw’s Center easily online? (Digital Marketing)
- What other ways can they be pulled in? (Promotions)
- Are there ways to make this easy and efficient for staff? (Marketing Tools)
I’m sure that these items will change by the time our final capstone is due, but I think it’s a good start. We’ll definitely start getting our creative juices flowing!
SO WHAT do we do with SWOT?
Good old SWOT…You sit down, brainstorm, and come up with all these thoughts, but then what?
That’s where we’re at now with our Capstone. We’re in the early stages of developing a detailed SWOT analysis of the Brockton Rox and the Shaw’s Center.
As with most small local businesses, it’s not very easy to find valid information on the internet. You have your local papers, customer reviews, and in our case other similar leagues to the Rox, but several aspects can only be understood by experiencing it firsthand. In other words, weâre going to the stadium for our next class.
Unfortunately, the season doesn’t start until June 4th, so we won’t catch a game, but it will be good to sit down with the staff and ask them key questions to better understand their business. Once we have that clear picture, we can start thinking about what to do with the information. How can we help the Rox continue growing? How can we increase awareness of the Shawâs Center? Our team has already started brainstorming crazy ideas for different events they can have. Thatâs always the easy part.
What wonât be so easy is evaluating how factors like the proposed casino will impact them or how to improve their margins without increasing ticket sales or reducing quality. We’ll have to really look beyond the information that we’ve gathered for our SWOT and ask so what?
“What can we do with this information to add value to the Rox brand?”
Let’s Do This!
On May 
19th, we will officially begin our capstone project. Within the next 12 weeks, we will be taking on a real company as a group of consultants, evaluating the business and providing detailed feedback.
My MBA cohort has been joking around because our last class was relatively smooth compared to some of our previous courses, so we called it “The Calm Before The Storm”.
It could very well be that, but as I look back at where we were when we first started, I see that we have come a long way. For me personally, I’ve seen how I’ve developed confidence in myself, one major thing being my presentation skills.
I had a lot of expectations in the beginning. 1. I thought I would be reading 10Ks fluently, 2.doing marketing plans in my sleep, and 3. be highly respected by my peers. I can tell you that number 1 is definitely not all there and I hope the third one is somewhat true. Number two is totally true…I dream about SWOTs and Porter Fives all the time. I hope that some of us paid closer attention in our lectures!
Well, there’s only one way to find out. Let’s Do This!
P.S. Thanks to my classmate, Lisa, for getting this cute gift for Stella. She’s my mascot!
Andrea Lebron 