IntroductionMr Cory's Cookies is a start-up bakery founded by 13-year-old entrepreneur Cory Nieves and his single mother Lisa Howard in 2009. At the age of 6, Cory started his small business to raise money to buy his mother a car after she grew tired of taking public transportation. He started selling hot chocolate and lemonade on the streets of New Jersey, then moved to cookies. Not wanting her son to take on the burden of buying him a car, Lisa encouraged Cory to continue selling cookies to save for college. The duo then focused on perfecting their recipe with all organic ingredients and ventured into other cookie flavors such as Double Dark and Sugar. Mr. Cory's cookies are sold in pop-up stores at car dealerships and local businesses. Their cookies became so popular that they were featured on the Ellen Show and given a car to help the company. With this publicity and exposure on the show, there was a high demand for the all-natural cookie from the public as well as major companies such as Target, American Airline, QVC (Quality Value Convenience), Walmart, and Whole Foods . Regardless of their popularity, Mr. Cory's Cookies was unable to reach its full potential due to a lack of infrastructure and the fundamentals needed to run a business. Lisa's insecurity about her education missed many opportunities for progress. Additionally, his ignorance of contingency factors affecting businesses allowed him to sign a contract with a competitor without understanding the fine print.Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayMarcus Lemonis, the brainchild of the CSNBC series The Profit, gives the cookie duo a chance to team up with him to develop their business as an e-commerce business. This change in focus from a regular store is due to the cookie's 2-day shelf life as well as the licensing agreement Lisa signed with Clever Cookie because she was eager to release the product, it doesn't matter if it wasn't his product. She did no contingency planning and did not involve the right people. Marcus was concerned about founder Cory not knowing the fundamentals of running a business, namely knowing his sales numbers and the fact that the product was not available online. Marcus reviews individual and company goals and plans, but while he is impressed, none are company specific. He looked at their financial statements over a 4 year period and was impressed that they had records showing their profits and losses over the years. Lisa reveals to Marcus that she does not trust easily because she has been disappointed in the past, leading to pain for the company. Marcus offers Lisa and Cory a 100,000 deal for 40 percent of the company. The money goes to help with packaging design, rebuilding their website, product development, brochure creation and product launch. Marcus further helps Lisa find a loophole in her licensing agreement with co-packer Clever Cookies. The deal was made when Lisa was tired of waiting for Mr. Cory's cookies to hit the stores. Her desperation and lack of education had confined her to the contract. Lisa is introduced to other women small business owners as asupport, as well as an Amazon team to manage their renowned company's online arena. The episode ends with Marcus showing Lisa and Cory their new office and a complete new branding of the product. According to Lemonis, this will allow Lisa to focus on things that are easy to execute and allow Cory to be the face of the company while still having time for his studies. He explains to Lisa that she needs to have confidence in herself as a leader and tell her story to show other business owners that success is possible with the right resources. The purpose of this assignment was to apply what we learned in theory and compare it by analyzing Mr. Cory's work.Cookie company which represents a practical situation. It is a form of testing what we have learned from the lessons by applying it to the situation. This helps us examine a situation, identify positives and negatives, and make recommendations based on what we have learned. According to the literature, “objectives guide all management decisions and actions and constitute the criterion against which actual achievements are measured. Everything that members of the organization do should be oriented toward achieving goals. “I think goals would play an important role in planning the company's change in direction. A big part of any business plan is identifying your goals and detailing how you plan to achieve them. If you know where you want your business to go, you will be in a good position to know whether or not you have achieved your goal. In Cory and Lisa's case, although they set general goals, they did not have a plan for achieving them. This contributed to the frustration of not having an office, high demand for their products, and selling an organic product. When you set goals from the beginning and continually monitor your business against those goals, you can change course mid-year or when necessary. For example, in Cory and Lisa's case, there was no planning before getting into the business. They simply started selling hot chocolate and cookies and made do with the little they produced. They have not assessed their resources. There are so many elements that go along with selling an edible product from home. Some include special permits and separate utensils. The bottom line is that not having a goal is like building a house without a plan. Setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals ensures that you not only know what you are going to do, but also how you are going to do it. We can see how Lisa's use of a single focus in terms of supplying cookies to stores led her to sign a contract that took away, according to Lemonis, "all of her rights, all of her intellectual property, her recipe, its brand, its brand in all retail categories” for a minimal price just to have the cookie on the shelves, regardless of quality. Marcus saw a list of 10 goals written on a piece of paper in Cory's room. The goals listed had perhaps 2 of the six characteristics of well-written goals: well-written in terms of outcome, measurable and quantifiable, clear in timing, ambitious but achievable, written and communicated to everyone in the organization who need to know them. . Although they were written, none of them were clear on the timeline. They were also not written in terms of outcomes, as none of the objectives were related to each other. For example, one of the objectiveswas to have a store and kitchen, but it was not specified what this would lead to. Management by objectives would have been a more efficient and effective way of planning for Lisa. In Lisa's case, it's important for her to know that setting goals won't necessarily guarantee the success of her business. If she had taken the time to look at Mr. Cory's cookies from a broader perspective, it would have given her more confidence in what lies ahead and her ability to cope with it. Lisa and Cory created a popular product and the company's potential is what attracted Marcus Lemonis to invest. However, it was important for them to have at least product objectives. Some goals may include: Create 4 new cookie flavors in one year to generate increased sales on special dates such as Valentine's Day, Christmas, Easter, Mother's Day. Acquire 3 recurring customers for Mr Cory's cookies within 3 months by requesting referrals and launching a marketing campaign on social networks. This will enable business growth and increased revenue. Plan and execute 10 pop-up stores this year with 20+ customers per event and 80% or more satisfied or very satisfied responses on cookie taste. In an industry like this, it is necessary to have both long and short term goals. The goals of the business itself and the goals of everyone involved in running the business, from the owner down, all make a big difference when trying to get the most out of a solid business plan. Plans for small businesses like Mr Cory's Cookies need to be flexible. Directional plans would be a good choice because they are flexible and establish general guidelines. In each area, carefully crafted goals should give Lisa greater control over her work. Lisa should define one or two goals in each of the following categories: regular work goals, problem-solving goals, innovation goals, and development goals. Goals and development plans will help Lisa recognize the importance of learning new skills. There should be a long-term plan for continued growth as an employee and as a manager. Lisa and Cory should have short-term plans when they want to create new cookie flavors to improve sales, as mentioned in the previous question. Short term plans would be ideal in case it's not a popular flavor or they garner bad reviews, they can always change the flavor or tweak it to be better. Other short-term business class projects. Yes, their main sales are due to chocolate chip cookies, but you have to make choices. In order to compete in a changing market, they must have plans in place to revise their product and plans as necessary. Mr Cory's Cookies will need to use innovative approaches to make its business competitive in a rapidly changing domestic and international economic environment. Specific plans are clearly defined and leave no room for interpretation. They should have a plan for the next 6-12 months, as well as a 3-5 year plan that includes specific growth goals. If the plan does not include ways to manage business growth, then it is necessary to review and rewrite it. They should have clear plans on the new direction of the company. What do they expect from online commerce? One of Lisa's goals was to hire 70% single mothers, while Cory's goal wasto distribute the cookie nationally or globally. These are good goals but they can be more precise. They can plan for these challenges by continuing to listen to their customers' needs and wants. They also need to pay close attention to market developments and consider how their business fits into these changes. I think all of these types of plans are important because a business should always be goal oriented, have the future in mind, and be as efficient as possible. prepared as much as possible for any outcome or change. Having goals gives more meaning to daily tasks and clarifies the reasoning behind business decisions. The importance of these plans is essential to the allocation of resources and the achievement of objectives. Knowing where you want to go and how to get there is why plans are necessary. We can think of a plan as a way to solve problems. While your business is about you and what you love to do, it's all about your customers, what they expect from you, and how you can solve their problems effectively. According to the literature, contingency factors that affect planning include manager behavior. level of the organization, the degree of environmental uncertainty and the duration of future commitments. It doesn't matter whether you run an online store or a brick-and-mortar store, every owner faces certain small business challenges. The factors that affect planning depend on the process you plan to protect. According to Webster's Dictionary, contingency means "factors that may arise in the future, but the chances of which are beyond your control." Have a contingency plan that addresses the “what ifs” in the business. What if Marcus Lemonis decided not to invest? What would be Lisa's next step? As an e-commerce cookie company, an emergency factor could be internet outage. With Mr. Cory's cookies, we can also see that the level of manager in an organization is key. Cory and Lisa see their roles reversed. We can admit that Cory started the business but it is Lisa who makes all the decisions regarding the business. Managers at all levels must make decisions on behalf of a company. But what happens when the manager does not know or understand the impacts of the decisions made? Lisa's lack of training and education is an emergency factor. They had no idea where selling cookies on the streets of New Jersey would lead. There was no planning for the demand, especially for a commercial kitchen. Lack of resources Environmental uncertainty is the degree to which an organization lacks factual information or competent information regarding the organization's internal and external operating environment. It basically means the unknown in the organization and in the field of activity relevant to the operation of the business. Given Lisa's limited education, it was difficult for her to understand the importance of networking, listening and giving advice. The emergency factors that affect planning in terms of the length of future commitments for Mr Cory's Cookies would be their contract with Clever Cookie which they may need to fulfill even in an emergency. If you take all of these contingency factors into account when making a small business business decision, it's likely that some will carry too much risk, meaning that contingency factors can greatly affect planning. Ultimately, managers can plan effectively in the environment.