News • 5 January 2003

What a week!

Being in Young Enterprise is great fun but also a serious commitment, participant Louisa Diacono tells Ramona Depares

Monday: Early as usual for school, though to tell the truth the Young Enterprise company I’m in this year – called Touch Wood – is on my mind a lot these days. It’s not easy to keep up with both school work and deadlines and Young Enterprise commitments! Life is a bit of a race right now: against time, against the other teams, against the deadlines… But that’s part of the fun, I can’t stand not having anything to do.

We are twenty-three students in Touch Wood and we’re a great team of nine boys and fourteen girls. Yes, the girls rule! Most of us come from San Anton school and already knew each other, but some of the students are from the Sacred Heart. Young Enterprise is a great way to make new friends.

Off to our production house in Lija after school: we have to keep up with the production quota!

Tuesday: Meeting today, to discuss the company’s progress and what not. We have come up with two different products: one is a mail organiser that is like a big envelope with dividers – very cool and useful, especially when it comes to making sure your letters don’t go missing. Our other product is a fruit-bowl, but it’s difficult to describe it. It’s not just any old fruit-bowl, the shape is quite unique. You have to see it – or better still to buy one – to understand what I mean. Choosing the products was not an easy process, but it was a democratic one. To get twenty-three people to agree is not an easy task! We had to go through several session of brainstorming so that the managing director, who’s called Sarah, could come up with a list of various products. The mail organiser was the first one that we all liked and agreed on and then some time later we also decided on the fruit bowl. The process of choosing was quite scientific and involved marketing research and questionnaires.

Wednesday: My turn to go to the production house today. The mail organisers are actually produces by us, so the whole team pitches in according to the roster. We joke that it’s like being on the production line. Matthew, the production director, makes sure that the process runs smoothly while Rebecca from quality checks every product in the end. Believe me, producing one single mail organiser requires every individual team member to co-operate. That’s one thing I’ve learnt from Young Enterprise: the whole team is important, everyone is needed. And there is so much more to the company than simply producing: Mark makes sure that the budgets are kept while Eliza does research on the materials, varnish etc to use… Great fun is had by all.

Thursday: Some of the team members had to go to the carpenter’s today, to check on the progress of the fruit-bowls. This particular product we’re not doing ourselves: the wood requires a particular tool to shape it and so we hunted around for the carpenter with the best price. Thank goodness it proved to be viable. But it’s not easy to get the carpenter to meet his deadlines: because we’re young, not everyone takes us seriously immediately. Luckily they soon realise that we mean business! We’ve already sold some of our products in fact, both cost Lm4.99 and people can get them either from young Enterprise fairs, from our web-site or from our catalogues.

No meeting today though. We normally meet about three times a week and we have both general meetings (where all the team members are involved) and board meetings (where the directors of each respective department meet up in order to discuss specific areas and every director updates the other directors regarding his particular section’s progress). But we also use up a lot of our school lunch breaks for impromptu Touch Wood meetings. In fact I believe that we actually came up with the products during one such session in the school yard.

Friday: Had a particularly productive day today. I can’t believe I’m finally in Young Enterprise: I’ve always remembered my older cousins taking part and have loved the idea from when I was a kid. God knows how many Young Enterprise fairs I’ve been to in all these years and finally it’s my turn. I’m head of marketing. Why? Because I’ve always been interested in this side of the business.

An added bonus to being in Young Enterprise is also that it’s recognised in your CV as a qualification: this makes sense, as the Young Enterprise motto is learning by doing and believe me, they keep you to it.

Since I’ve been part of Touch Wood there’s never a dull moment in my life. Not that Young Enterprise is just about having fun, although there’s that as well. There is the responsibility and the commitment, which are both considerable. But the best part of it is the fact that you feel so grown-up, you really realise that there’s more to life than school and homework.

And you can never completely relax. If you don’t carry out your responsibilities it is the whole team that suffers, much like a domino effect.

Saturday: Young Enterprise fair at the Plaza. A fantastic day: busy, tiring but terribly exciting. Our products have gone down well with the public. We were much more prepared than for the San Anton School Fair a couple of weeks back. For that day, we had to establish a name and proto-type from practically nothing. But I’ve noticed that people work much harder when they’re under pressure. The San Anton fair went very well and we had seventy-five orders. Today it went just as well, but there’s still a lot of work to do.

Sunday: A bit of a quiet day, with my parents. Thought a bit about how I can market the products better. Bumped into Kristina, head of sales, in the afternoon. John, our IT specialist also called to tell us that the website is coming along just great. Have to start planning for the official launch now: after all, we want to make a splash on the market!