20A – Growing Your Social Capital

1. The first person I interviewed is my friend Tucker. Throughout high school he would buy things off of Alibaba and resale them for a profit. He did this with these lights up Frisbee launcher things where he would buy a thousand at a time for around fifty cents a piece and then sell them to tourists and children on Clearwater beach for a couple of dollars. He would sell out every week and continued to do this on days he wasn’t busy. He even expanded this by making a Clearwater Beach Instagram page and following a ton of people who ended up following him back, and selling items on an online store he made such as beach towels and blankets, which he got for cheap on Alibaba and resold for higher prices.  

2. I am filling him in as the important supplier to my industry because I would likely be using Alibaba to buy my straws, because I found some for around a cent a piece on that website, and Tucker told me all the important information on how to shop on Alibaba and different tricks and secrets such as getting your items through customs when purchased this route. 

3. I found this person because he is one of my close friends from high school and since I am home from UF I asked if he wanted to hangout, and we talked about this.

4. He just helped me because we are close friends and he likes to help people he is friends with. He knows if he ever needed help with anything that I would be there for him.

5. Purchasing off of Alibaba is a lot different than buying off of Amazon. There is concerns with trade deals and customs when these are shipped from China, but Tucker told me ways to contact suppliers and customs to help.

1. The second person I interviewed was my older sister. I interviewed her because she works for a distributor as a sales rep. Her distributor sells items to smoke shops, but she told me the operations of the warehouse and sales reps approaching the business would be very similar.

2. She would cover the domain expert in my industry. This is because She works for a distributor and knows how distributors operate, and my company would be a distributor.

3. I found her because she is my older sister so I just walked up to her and told her to tell me how the distributor she works with operates and how I could apply that to my business idea.

4. The nature of exchange is that I am always helping her with things and she barely helps me, so I told her she owes it to me to help and she agreed. 

5. She would help because she said she is a sales rep so she could teach me how to approach business with my product. She also told me she could ask her boss to show me the warehouse and how it operates, but she also told me about how her distributor buys bulk quantities from manufacturers and then sells them as smaller quantities to smaller businesses. 

1. The third person I interviewed was my friend Matt’s dad who owns a restaurant. He owns his own pizza and Italian restaurant so he must buy things such as straws for it.

2. I am filling the expert on my market with him because he owns a restaurant and has to buy straws and supplies from distributor.

3. I found him because I have been friends with his son for over six years now and frequently eat at his restaurant throughout high school. I just called my friend and asked him to tell his father about this assignment and to call me when he was free, which he did.

4. He was eager to help me because he said he wouldn’t have been able to start his business without the help of friends and told me he would love to help me out as much as he can. He even told me he would love to buy straws from me one day.

5. He enhanced my ability because he owns a restaurant, so he knows the ins and outs of the business and since they are my clients, he helped me with many things such as best way to approach the sale. 

This experience helped shape how I would participate in future networking events because it helped me realize that people, I need to be successful are people to and to be more relaxed and personable when speaking with them. In the past I was so focused on my business idea that I forgot to be personable.