20A – Growing Your Social Capital

I really wanted to do well this assignment so I looked a lot for potential people to add to my social capital, I met three awesome influences who could potentially give great advice to get my company off the ground and to get successful on International foods in a giant domain.

Adrian Jackson, He works at the Omni Resorts where I am working at for the summer and is a IT guy that we had come in and work on our computers that we use to handle excel and a few other marketing spreadsheets. I was talking to him about website building and processes to make sure internet servers could handle traffic and he said that he is very adapt at creating websites and apps through getting a degree as a programmer with a minor in graphic design. He even knows how to maintain servers because of his job as an IT guy. He would be a great domain expert since I could bounce off questions on building my own website and how to create traffic. I talked to him a lot about my idea and even went through my elevator pitch to get him on board and he totally bought it when he realized that the US is a mixing pot and that tons of people would want to get goods from their home country.

Janelle Dennis, I work in the marketing branch at my work and luckily my boss is one of the coolest ladies with a ton of experience in chain stores and marketing said stores. She has been apart of marketing teams for Sams club and how to conduct customer research and build interest through the results into products. I contacted her early on in the course when I was first coming up with an idea of how I would make a business and asked her opinion on whether it would be manageable and she helped fine tune my ideas because of all of her experience at running other stores and even owning a few coffee shops. She just in return asks that I focus hard at work while I work on this idea. Including Mrs. Dennis will be important because she has boundless knowledge on the subject of how stores are run and building your own business.

Derick Thomas, I struggled a lot with finding a supplier who has connections overseas and could potentially get goods over for a cheap rate. So I went through asking Mrs. Dennis if she knew anybody like that and she talked about Derick because when she owned a coffee shop he could always send her coffee beans from other countries. I reached out to him over twitter DM giving him first my elevator pitch for my idea and asking him if that's something that him and his group could handle. Mr. Thomas was very big into finding out if I was serious about what I wanted to do but after talking to him for a few hours he finally agreed and he even has other suppliers who he could reach out to so I could have more options. I just had to agree to let him into my processes when I get started and use him for the first few months.

This experience of reaching out to people really got me out of my zone. I was used to giving off my ideas online and asking people questions in public but this was different because I had to give off my ideas and see if I could bring someone into my fold. This differed a lot from past networking because these people all had genuine experience in these fields the rest of my networking was with other UF students and a few News station managers that I had worked with. None had a ton of experience in their fields unlike these guys.