nan | 楠木

8.9 Sleepless in Beijing

In the morning, we had a consulting session with professors and professionals. Our consultant was not very pleased with the quality of all the teams he consulted. Out of the 5 teams, 4 were involved with opening cafes. He thought that we were not being creative enough, and as advice, he told us to change plans if we had the time. Of course, we didn’t, so discouraged as we were, I was pretty adamant on seeing our plan through.

In my view, the consultant’s opinion was formulated on our midterm report, which he did not read through carefully either. And of course we had a very rough midterm report. We had formed plenty of good ideas, but few of them got written down, and as a result our midterm report was only a brief sketch of what we were really planning. So I was confident once we fully conveyed our ideas into words, we would have something very impressive.

In the afternoon, we got down to the business of serious work. I thought we would split up the writing work and get down to business, but instead we spent the whole afternoon in further discussion. It felt like there was no end to the amount of detail that we had to cover…

I was kinda disappointed that we still had not started on our final plan, since it was due noon tomorrow, and we knew we had a ton to write. Still, we all agreed that we would be working all night, which meant we still had some time. But it was going to be tough.

I brought my notebook and coffee to the girls’ room. After one cup of coffee, I felt I was in good shape to work hard. Tana wanted me to start working on the powerpoint presentation, since she thought we would not have time to do it the next day. I agreed. We had not figured out a truly efficient way to split up the writing task, so I might as well work on something totally different. Plus, this way I could go over the whole project myself, and do some more thinking in the process.

I worked for 5 straight hours on the ppt, finishing a rough draft at around 2 am. Tana had done the marketing part of the business plan, and Mika was working on the organizational part. We then spent a good deal of the next 3 hours working on the financials, doing the numbers, estimating cost and income, and eventually profit earnings. It was hard work. In the end a lot of calculated guesses had to be made, since we did not have sufficient data. We kept tuning down our estimates, getting smaller and smaller profits, but I thought we were being far more realistic and practical in this process.

The day ended at 5 for me. We decided that we needed a few hours of sleep, so we can work in the morning to meet the deadline. I went back to my room, exhausted, and dropped dead on the bed almost immediately.