Product
The Shishagroup® will offer its customers a rich variety of superior product differentiated
by quality, price and design. This section is describing in detail the portfolio of product.
However the portfolio will be continuously modified and updated in order to respond to
clients will.
Product description
1. Product offered by Shishagroup® are split into 3 categories
1.1. Pipe
1.2. Tabaco
1.3. Charcoal
2. Pipe
! As a consequence that pipes are necessary equipment required to smoke shisha,
there are main point of product portfolio. Pipes are differentiated in three ways by size,
quality and number of users. The size is defined by the height of pipe, where small is 17”,
medium is 20” and the large one is 26”. Moreover each size of pipe is available in two
quality standards. First option called ‘Sheikh’ and the other one named ‘Sultan’. The first
one is Shishagroup® standard, a superior quality Egyptian pipe, and the second one is
superb luxury  proposition for the most demanding customers. On top of that, in case of
medium and large pipes, there is an option to to adjust the the number of hoses for a
certain number of smokers. If it comes to the medium pipe clients have a choice between
one or two smokers, however in the event of large pipe, there is also a third option
available, a four users pipe.
3. Tabaco
! Shishagroup® offer tabaco in five flavour categories: fruit, tropical fruit, mint, sweet,
spice and others. The fruit categories consist of standard flavours like apple, apricot and
banana, while section of tropical fruit contains some more extravagant choices like guava
and lychee. Mint section consist of traditional mint and mixes like mint with lemon. Sweet
section offer product like bubble gum, cola and honey, while spice and others provide
aniseed, cardamon or Pina Colada.
4. Charcoal
! Shishagroup® is highly concern about quality of its product therefore offers only
natural charcoal. The offer is segregated into three options on behalf of type. There are
three options, coco made of cocoanut , bamboo made of bamboo stem and a soft one
which has does not smell while burning.
Product source
For the beginning all products and supplies would be ordered from Shishashop and
Shisha Hookah. Those two are online shops registered in UK. However, with development
of Shishagroup®, all supply would be negotiated directly with manufacture.
Target Market
The main target of Shishagroup® are the students of the university of exeter and citizen
exeter city in age between 18 to 35 years old. Those is a group of about 30 thousand
people, which, in this case, is one fourth of entire population. Moreover smoking among
relatively young people 18-30 and especially students is popular. In consequence, from
Shishagroup® point of view those are potential and very  lucrative customers. However
Shishagroup® would like assure, that as law obeying, the service would be provided only
to the adults as shisha contains tabaco which sell regulated by British law.
Marketing strategy
With regards to the promotion and advertisement, our promotion campaign will consist of 4
main strategies
1.      Location itself
2.      Delivery cars
3.      Website
4.      Flyers
5.      University opening week
Location
Shishagroup® will have its location situated in the shopping center. The location itself
already serves as a good strategy. The design must be attractive so that people will come
in the shop and ask for information about our services.
The interior design must be a mix between modern, trendy and Middle Eastern patterns.
The focus will be put more on trendy. We will put aside 5000 pounds for the interior design
which includes furniture, flooring, painting, lighting and curtains.
Delivery cars.
Shishagroup® will drive around to deliver and rent out the shishas. Therefor good visibility
of advertisement on the car is essential as part of good promotion material. We will use car
lettering, displaying the name, the website and phone numbers on both doors of the cars.
The estimation for the vehicle lettering is 150 pounds/car.
Website
Shishagroup® shall use website to promote its services to the customers. The website
includes
About us
How to smoke a shisha
Price list (menu, options, rent)
FAQ (health issues)
Contact page
Furthermore, Shishagroup® shall use social network to attract the younger public and
university students. Shishagroup® shall create a facebook page where students and
customers can ask questions or put reviews. Twitter shall be used to communicate deals
and promotion.
The cost for the website design + registering the website will be 750 pounds.
Flyers, Posters
Because of the growing popularity amongst students, we shall hand out flyers on the
campus and make students deal. Currently there is no Shisha renting service in Exeter,
therefore the flyers can just be printed in black out white, simple style, A6 size. Flyers can
be made by ourselves and will cost 65 pounds at the copy shop  for printing them out.  We
will need around 5000 flyers.
Posters shall be hung on the various notice boards in the school. The cost of several
posters will be 20 pounds as well, A3 size.

University Opening week
During the opening week of the academic year (Freshers’ week), we Shishagroup® shall
put up a stand in the university and let students fill in their email in order to receive emails
from us and keep them up to date with our service. Every  student who gives out their
contact details will get a 10% reduction for a purchase of our service. At the same time,
flyers will be actively handed out to all visiting students.
Legal Background
The following are the legal issues of selling Shisha or Hookah, a tobacco based smoking
product in Exeter, UK.
We cannot sell our product to anyone below 18 years of age, as selling the product to an
underage person could result in a fine of £ 2500. The valid forms of ID acceptable are: –
Driving license, passport, citizens card and validate card. If we do sell and get caught
repentantly then we may lose our right to sell tobacco completely. Also our employees do
not have to be over 18 to sell tobacco/shisha, but we should employ people who are
above 18, as the council suggests this but it’s not a rule.
If we plan on selling any food items, then we need to register our business with the Exeter
City Council (at least 28 days before opening). We can register our business at the city
council office and it’s a free registration. And I suggest we should obtain a new premises
license if we want to play music, serve alcohol etc. between the hours of 11.00 PM at night
and 5.00 AM in the morning. The cost of this varies from establishment to establishment. If
we want to have seating on the pavement also, we have to apply to the Devon County
Council, and the annual fee is £ 200 with a renewal fee of £85.
Given the smoking laws of the country, a parliamentary report in October 2003, and the
Exeter City Council, 2007 said there are 5 levels of smoking rules that apply to restaurant
and pubs, which are: – No Smoking, Separate areas for smoking and non-smoking,
ventilated premises with separate areas, ventilated premises with smoking throughout and
smoking throughout. The establishment has to clearly display which level of smoking they
allow and also have a smoking policy clearly written and defined. There are various
penalties for offences. I personally feel we should have a ventilated premise with separate
areas, because if we make it smoking throughout, then it may stop  other people (nonsmokers)
from
coming,
which
will
affect
our
business.
Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) Tobacco Duty rates does not specify duty
on Shisha Tobacco, but it mentions a sub-section on ‘other smoking and chewing tobacco’
of which the duty is £ 91.81 per Kilogram.
Cohesion
Setting up an hypothetical business is relatively easy, as long as you have qualified people
in your team. But considering the high number of people in our team, it was definitely not.
You may have the same idea and the same desire to be successful, that does not mean
you have the same vision of how to run the business. Saying that, we all learned the
difficult process of making compromises. When you choose the partnership as the way of
doing business, you must be aware of who you are associate with. Your ability of working
together as a real team is closely linked to the success you would have.
This experience teached us to take into account other views than ours, to listen to each
others, and to fight for our ideas. We put in place some sort of “democratic plan” so
everyone has a word to say. Due to the high number of people in the group, we had to
proceed by vote to adopt the major points.
Research
You have to consider many things before starting a business, and this might take a while.
When planning to run a real business, you surely do not want to loose the money you’ve
put on the table, so a little of research has to be done before. We all did a customer and a
retail survey in order to identify a gap in Exeter’s shops. The aim was to find a business
opportunity, something people were missing in Exeter. As the results were not satisfying,
we then have learnt that sometimes you have to create your own opportunity.
The major difficulty when starting something new is that you don’t have any point of
comparison at all. You may feel less comfortable. The main thing we learned from this
experience is that you have to be prepared to any eventuality. Considering running a real
business, it is very difficult to imagine every  possible scenario, but if relevant researches
have been done before, it will be easier.
We wanted to cover every aspect that a real business could have. In order to evaluate the
relevance of our project, we had to ask ourselves the good questions :
– What are the characteristics of the demand ? And of the supply ?
– How is composed the regional market ?
– What are the law restrictions in this particular area ? ( sell of alcohol )
– Ask ourselves the question of a franchise.
Conclusion
We had to take into account every  aspect of an enterprise, the different sectors, analyze
the growing markets. We asked ourselves to which need the product would reply and
which target we wanted to reach. We also had to know our direct and indirect competitors
and what sort of strategy we would like to put in place, which investments had to be made.
Every  little aspect has to be considered when starting a real business. According to that
last point, we all understood the crucial importance of research.

SOLUTION

1.    What is Entrepreneurship about?

When we started to study this subject it was with the hope that we could learn all the nitty gritties of starting our very own business and passions in life. Since we have started Shisha Group as our project work we have done a lot of research on how to set up this business. When we had started the work we thought we knew what to do to make it a success and very well knew we can pull it off but then we were exposed to the world of entrepreneurship and into that confusion. For every research we did we found out new areas on which we had to put light on, just when we thought we had finished our promotion strategy we came to know about rules of promotional registration in UK and suddenly we had a whole lot of tobacco laws for products in Exeter to be taken care of, hence this subject would definitely not teach out everything but has taught has that hard work, dedication and patience are of a great virtue to an entrepreneur.

When we started the group work we realised that everyone in the group had an idea for every aspect of the business be it financial, promotional or with the legal aspects. It was here that we realised even managing people in a new business could be called entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship as we realised is very important as it increase standard of leaving in every country and also helps reduce poverty. Initially we started out by the text book definition of finding opportunities and did some research and tried to figure out what the city of Exeter required but got no unanimous direction hence we followed on the path that we will create n opportunity in this area. Coupled with planning, organisation and assumptions we hope to realise a small scale opportunity. We also found out that entrepreneurship is more about taking calculated risks in the market and try to fit our resources and ideas into the barren market from the point of view of an entrepreneur.

More over lately we have realised that starting anew business or reviewing an old one is about have a structured plan of carrying out the raids on market, learning from failed businesses, trying to see what they did wrong on their part and having a clear cut strategy on how to achieve every function of running a business and probably a never say die spirit.

2.    A Personal Perspective on Entrepreneurship:

We had read about the types of entrepreneurs

• The Achiever: Who work hard to achieve their goals.
• The Salesperson: Who are able to sell due to their caring nature.
• The Manager: A sort of reviewer of businesses.
• The Inventor: Who comes up with new ideas, products, services.

We fit ourselves to the Salesperson group as neither our idea/product is new nor want to manage ruined business. We just have an opportunity to give our neighbours and society what we love and what they are missing out on, as our basic funda is to share and this is what we want to strive on. The idea of running a renting service falls on the basis of this idea to make available our services on a permanent or temporary fashion and this is what our innovation is all about. Hence personal feeling is that entrepreneurs are not to be categorised as a certain type of personality, they have all the abilities but a few characteristics are more prominent.

Entrepreneurship is largely said to be a business in which the entrepreneur is the recipient of pure profit (Knight, 1997) and this is what he receives as an exchange for his new ideas, ways of working and all the hard work put in. It is also believed that an entrepreneur does not believes in risk, there is feeling of risk in the psychology of an entrepreneur (Mises & Kirzner), this could be either due to his supreme confidence of his new idea or in our case of finding an untapped market, whatever may be the environment he/she believe they have found a set of actions that are going to get them dividends. This is where the entire problem sets in and this is how there is financial instability. It has been seen that most of the bootstrapping for the projects is done through credit cards, hence since there are no more stakeholders the feeling of complete control might lead to a downfall, therefore arises the need of investors and not only financial but also through management backup.

There are a lot of angel investors present out there who only ask for a certain management control and ask for about 20-30% returns, but the only thing entrepreneurs require are investors who wouldn’t hang their boot when in a downfall and the management capabilities or experience of taking care of projects in dire straits through managerial techniques.

3.    Linkages between Experience and Entrepreneurial Challenges:

The basic problems we faced are with respect to capital access, site management, pricing, legal issues with selling tobacco and to manage our promotional campaigns which are very informal. Another issue we faced was the lack of any standard in the Hookah/Shisha selling and cafe industry as we had no standards as such which we could improve or rather follow and also the issues of pricing which are basically based on self experience.

The issue which small businesses like ours face are put down in a list below:

• Market:
  • As there is no clear competition customers would go by the resto bars and coffee cafe as our comparison, hence it would take time for the customers to commit to our products
  • The timing or entering market could be wrong for certain products as happens they might be just ahead of time and some else capitalizes our innovation later on.
  • The market size might be too small to the estimation.
• Business Modelling:
  • Scaling up an enterprise is one the most important issues entrepreneurs’ face, even in our case we have to find ways of innovation out business at regular intervals.
  • The cost of acquiring, upgrading and retaining a customer is very difficult for new business or start ups. Hence difficult to judge break even period.
• Management:
  • Since the experience is lacking, the formulation of a go to market strategy is mostly sound and need guidance managing and implementing one.
  • Hiring of personal is very important; to get good fit employees is more important than just hiring a personnel.
• Financal Issues:
  • Raising cash is a huge issue for entrepreneurs and hence usually they self do it. But for bigger investments it’s better to raise money in successive events. First do the basic’s for prototyping by own funds and then promote it to gain more funds over a period of time for specific activities than do it all at one a fall short of money.
  • It’s better to initially  work with as much lesser fund as possible and wait for the moment when investments need to be increase. The break-up of funds should be pre-planned under categories like equipment, staffing, site management, promotions etc.,
• Government and Politics:
  • Especially for products like our where we need to understand many policies and laws and get permission/registration for certain/all activities, it’s better for entrepreneurs like ours to hire a professional help so that it doesn’t lead to last minute glitches.
  • Government stability is very important and possesses problem if new laws are introduced and also if there are possibilities of sudden inflation (Skok).

4.    Critical Assessment of Our Planning Process:

It’s very important for us to get our planning perfect and research straight so that we can have a glitch free business and sustainable business. The issues with planning are:

• First of all we have to put on more research about the raw materials (from manufacturer souses) and from where we can obtain them to have a sustained and higher profitable business and plan a partnership with them.
• We have a planned go to market strategy with detailed stapes before hand so that we elude anything and also keep in check innovations milestones so that we don’t fizz out.
• As most of our promotional activities are around the Exeter university we should planned for schedule talks with authorities and university management.
• Most important of all take guidance for government run or other organisation with entrepreneurship planning and go to market strategies.

5.    Something to Know:

Whenever we talk about entrepreneurship we tend to find that in many places, it’s all about opportunities. We have always been told that entrepreneurs find that gap in the society i.e opportunity and go for it, but this theory has its own perils as pointed out by Acs et. al. It has always been that case that entrepreneurs create their own opportunity and not find it, the perfect example is Steve Jobs who professed the creation of something remarkable like the iPod.  Hence creating a whole new market for the world and this was possible only because he believed people don’t know what they want to use in future hence create something radical where as the old belief was: ask the people what they want? Hence something for everyone to know is that creating opportunities not wait trying to find them.

6.    Something Interesting:

Researchers have said that there are two generic issues which most entrepreneurial issues face:

• Incomplete understanding of the intricacies involved to run that business.
• Mismanagement of funds or shortage of capital at the required time.

But rightly as we found in during our project work one of the most underestimated reason for failure is the right fit between the entrepreneur and the chosen project (Bibby). Though all the entrepreneurs in the project are dedicated to make the venture a success but he/she must always enjoy doing that work else the scheme won’t work. In most of the cases the good fit is purely accidental, the owners like the products and get full engrossed in making it a success but there only a few who fall into the bracket. Over time it so happens that though the product is likes by the entrepreneurs they might not like the work they are doing, person working in sales might like to work for the operational part or it and so on and hence the collapse happens due to neglecting of responsibilities. It is very important for the owners to enjoy the work, even if people perceive you in having the ability to do a certain kind of work the basic question that you have to ask yourself is that are you enjoying it, even if for a split second you don’t then leave the managerial work and rub your hands in the ground for the products/services and the kind of work you would like to be doing even if it is menial and then enjoy the profits.

7.    References:

• Kruger, M E, 2004, Entrepreneurship Theory and Creativity, University of Pretoria, viewed 21^st May 2012, < http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-08242004-145802/unrestricted/02chapter2.pdf >.
• Wood, Stuart J., 2005, The Developement and Present State of the Thoery of Entrepreneurship in Product and Asset Markets by Knight, Hayek, Schumpeter, Mises, Kirzner, Shackle & Lachman, Loyola University, Austrian Scholars Conference, viewed 21^st May 2012, < http://mises.org/journals/scholar/wood.pdf >.
• Acs, Zoltan J., Audretsch, David B., Braunerhjelm Pontus & Carlsson Bo, 2005, The Knowledge Spillover Theory of Entrepreneurship, University of Baltimore, viewed 22^nd May 2012, viewed < http://www.indiana.edu/~idsspea/papers/ISSN%2005-11.pdf >.
• Bibby, Nicholas A., The Focus Program for Emerging Entrepreneurs, Emerging Entrepreneurs, viewed 22^nd May 2012, < http://emerging-entrepreneurs.com/entrepreneur-personality.php >.
• Why Startups Fail?, For Entrepreneurs, viewed 22^nd May 2012, < http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/business-models/why-startups-fail/ >.

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