<p>fendergirl - I am curious about the stocks idea. Is it something that a lot of time is spent on or is it more of an individual activity? I’d like to work on something that everyone will enjoy doing and learning together as a club. </p>
<p>Forgive my…uh…lack of knowledge, but what does a business plan actually consist of? It is something that people will actually use as a beginning step towards getting a business started? I will try to learn more about this.</p>
<p>When you mention visiting local businesses, do you mean we request to see how they work or that we request for them to show us what each person does /functions as in the company itself?</p>
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<p>as per the stocks, what we did was set up an online portfolio on some website (i want to say it was yahoo.) we set it up like a fake game. each group had like 50k of fake money on day 1 to invest… you had to choose different stocks to invest in and spend the whole 50k. once a week you could make any changes you wanted to, however you didn’t get any additional money… so if a stock was doing poorly you could take your money away from it and put it into something that was doing better, etc. the group who had the highest percentage gain at the end of the semester didn’t have to take the final. </p>
<p>and yeah, many people use business plans. i actually recently had to help my mom make a business plan for her company. Just google “business plan” i’m sure you can learn a lot about it… it’s good to do as a group… especially if you’re doing a comprehensive plan. I made one for a crime scene clean up company and it was very neat.</p>
<p>as far as the businesses, you could contact a local business and just explain that you’re from the blah blah business club and are interested in seeing how the operations work at the company… Maybe they will offer you a tour, or maybe you can shadow someone for a day, i don’t really know… i’m sure all companies are different. in one of my classes we were assigned a project where we had to interview a manager from a company on what they do and this and that. i interviewed someone from Tyco Electronics. It’s just a good way to do some networking, esp. at a young age.</p>