It was the end of the week, when I was walking with my business group towards the other side of school to take some pictures for our business presentation.
My business group? Yeah. In the Innovation Academy we are working on a project called “Get Over Yourself”. The goal of this project is to create a business of our choice, but not only for the sake of starting a business and creating profit, but to actually look beyond ourselves and add value to our community. The business my group and I are working on is CrepeZ. CrepeZ is about serving different crepes to our community; whether they’re sweet or salty, we work on creating the best products we can and having actual interaction with our customers by preparing everything in front of them, right in the moment. This was the second week of prototyping our business and products, and overall, it was very successful! Of course we had some difficulties and struggles, but this is just the start.
So going back to the PANCAKES…. We were happily walking, while we discussed about our sales, our successes, our areas for improvement, our future plans, etc., when we came across a little heart chalkboard that had written in it “Pancake Friday! 2 for s/. 8”. All of us immediately stopped walking and freezed, some of us holding each other, staring at that promotion sign - it was as if we were resembling the typical scene of a terror movie in which the characters run into the “scary thing”. |
Of course, in any other scenario it would have been amazing to find this “Pancake Friday! 2 for s/. 8” sign. How isn’t it gonna be amazing to have pancakes being sold in school?! But in our case, it was everything but amazing. It was tormenting, misleading, treacherous, disappointing, bothersome and annoying. As the four of us, the CrepeZ team, looked into each other’s eyes, we could understand exactly what we were feeling without saying a word. Who could have the effrontery and shamelessness to start selling PANCAKES one day after we were selling CREPES??!! To clarify, the only slight difference between PANCAKES and CREPES is that crepes are thinner than pancakes and that pancakes tend to be sweet while crepes can be sweet or salty. Anyways, besides this very slight differences, PANCAKES and CREPES are basically the same, they’re like siblings, everyone knows that.
Alex, Gaby, Rafa, and I were shocked. We couldn’t even put in words how we were feeling. For some reason we felt kind of betrayed and it actually hurt a bit. We couldn’t finish processing it for a while, until we went back to class and shared this anecdote with Corey.
Once we talked about the topic and started getting our inner peace back, we realized, that this topic that bothered us so much was something very good actually. First of all, it an excellent sign that we had created an actual impact in our community and in the people and businesses around us, starting by this Lekker man, who must have seen us as an actual threat to his own business and as a good and successful idea as he somehow “copied” or got “inspired” by it. Not only was this proof that we had added value and created an impact in our community, but it also served us as an extremely valuable lesson and experience. What a better way to learn about business than to have to confront the actual struggles and challenges of it? And, what a better way to learn about competition than having a real competitor to compete against? We got a real TASTE of real life competition. After all, this project is all about learning, adding value, creating impacts, and getting over ourselves.
At first, a challenge may seem very tough, disappointing and annoying, but we need to learn to seek this challenges and surpass them, as they will definitely then become a valuable lesson.