How it was done

I guess every course has a subject that students consider as the academic Hiroshima. Let's say for the Humanities courses such as Literature and Philosophy, they have their thesis papers and defense. For those taking Communications, they have this Big Production to do, such as a play or a film. And probably, for those taking a Physical education course, they have that final requirement of 5,000 push-ups or something.

I don't know...

But I do know, that for my course (Management Economics), it goes down to the final LS127 defense. To those who do not know, LS127 is a course on managing a social enterprise. In a nutshell, it's running a business where the poor contribute and earn from it.

Talking to your parents and unmarried uncles, you'd know how hard it is to run a business. Financials come into play, as well as, operations planning, marketing, investments and structure. Now, mix that up with the burden that students already have to deal with in regards to other subjects, then you'd probably think that I'm pretty much pooped right now from the work, right?

Wrong!
Capitalize the "W"
Wrong!!!

Why?

Take note, that our group had a highly successful business. We did not tweak any of our financials(WHICH EVERY GROUP DOES!!!!, BY THE WAY)

This is how our LS126 and 127 was done:
(Listen carefully disciples of the weak and lazy... this is for you)

1. Be simple and smart... create the easiest product to do and tell your teachers that there's a market for it. With that, they have no comment or negative criticism of your product. Marketing is all about the market.

When the lots were being drawn on the selection of poor communities, my LS group was fortunate enough to select the Gilead center. The Gilead center is a farm that produces calamansi fruits on a regular basis. From then on, the group knew that we'd be doing calamansi juice... no other awesome option came to mind. I know that some groups were able to turn tarps into umbrellas, or used clothes into designer bags... but my group had no intention whatsoever to stretch our minds to any other possibility. We had calamansi fruit and we were going with calamansi juice. All we needed to do next was to create some fake charts that give a presence of an inexistent market. Grade, set, match.

2. Pa-haba sa Papel

Font-size 12 should be font size 12.5
Double spaced should be 2.25
Instead of writing "fruits would be delivered to the distribution channels on a weekly basis", create a massive chart with a textbox containing the word "fruit" and a long and fat arrow from that pointing towards another textbox with the words "delivery channel". Enclose this figure in a giant circle saying "weekly basis". This trick would cover about a paragraph's worth of words.


3. Repeat papers

Alright, so your prof tells you to submit part 4 of your Business Plan, you should most definitely submit part 4!! Even the lazy man isn't stupid enough to miss a requirement. But what he can do is ease the pain of his work. Usually, professors give an inbetween period of three weeks for the submission of business plans. So three weeks after business plan part 3 is business plan part 4. In those three weeks, professors tend to be exposed to a lot of activities and the like. It's a memory jogging. Then at the end of those 3 weeks, they'd return previous passes and ask for the next one. So what we did was instead of submitting Business Plan part 4... we submitted business plan part 2, part 3 and part 4 in a combined output to make our papers look much longer than it actually was and more in-depth than what other groups had done. Since the previous pass had already been returned, it was difficult to see that it was a mere repetition. And with the number of groups and the number of pages to be read, the professor wouldn't care much about what business plan part we wrote about, but the general idea of the group.


4. Ovation Power

This is a very very old trick that came to us when we were second year. Ovation is a program that turns any normal powerpoint into a flash masterpiece. Instead of the usual boring slides, Ovation gives your presentation constant movement in the background and 3D actions. All you need to do is make a blank powerpoint, with nothing but the words and titles on your slides, upload it to Ovation and choose a template. In a matter of minutes, you'd have one of the best powerpoints in class that make you look like you actually put some effort in this report.

The effort done, on behalf of my group, was to meet 30 minutes before the bell rings, make the powerpoint then and there with all the believable bullshit that would come out of our heads, and use Ovation to put some class in our work.

Now we had a powerpoint.

5. Euromonitor for WACs

No matter what people say, you can do a group WAC in less than an hour. If you're that lazy, although we never did it ourselves, you can always copy from other groups. This is where friendship can be a plus.

6. For the Final defense's presentation of the product... just buy the packaging.

This was an accident. A real accident. An hour before our mock-LS126 defense on the Final Business Plan, we failed to produce our Calamansi Concentrate product. So instead of rushing the production, we headed over to the shopwise supermarket and purchased a bottle of C***** F***. The next step was to make the bottle believable. It had to look kinda amateur, but good enough for the panelists. So we diced a couple of mint leaves, threw it into the bottle (to make it look "organically dirty and man-made") and ripped the wrapper off the bottle. And there you have it, a delicious concoccion of a pirated drink.

7. Social enterprise turns sour.

We had a good relationship with the Gilead Center. Friendships, camraderie and love was all around our group and theirs. But when we presented the product to them, we knew that this was not the time and age to run a social enterprise. With all the requirements of senior year, sad to say it'd be too difficult to put every ounce of energy into this. Although we really wanted to, this was neither the right time and age for us.

And Gilead saw that. They knew that we loved them whole-heartedly, but didn't want to commit. Other projects were present out there and even though ours was feasible, it required to much effort from us, and that's why Gilead went into another direction. Which then became a blessing in disguise.

Instead of running a social enterprise, we just had to run a plain old enterprise. We could use our resources and use our capital and work within our own comforts without having to be hassled by communicating with a partner. In the end, we'd all get the same grade, no matter what. So at the end of the day, we got graded for selling shakes (something a little girl can do on her front lawn). We even had a higher return ratio than many other groups.

8. It's all in the presentation

Make sure your group is very charismatic and loveable. "Vividness" according to psychology is important in remembering things. In this case, the teacher will remember the report more than the long ass paper. So make sure that your reporters are pitch-perfect and funny. Like what was said in Gladiator... "Win the crowd".

THIS ARTICLE IS PURELY FICTION.
IT DID NOT ACTUALLY HAPPEN.



...or did it???