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Week 3 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 3 — What Does It Take to Open? A Meal-Prep Delivery Start-Up — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Business Free sample edition
Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 3 of the term — build a start-up list and funding plan, read the industry, and explain the plan to someone new to business.

This week you learned how an entrepreneur turns an idea into a plan: the SBA's traditional and lean startup formats, the five forces that read an industry, and a start-up list with a funding plan whose sources must add up to the needs. In this assignment you build one small start-up's list and funding plan, compute its loan's first-year interest, read its industry, and explain the plan to someone who has never studied business. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Business Case Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles.

The task

The case is illustrative, built for this course and not real data. A first-time founder plans a meal-prep delivery service that cooks healthy lunches in a rented kitchen and delivers them by cargo bike to offices nearby. Like the coffee cart this course follows, the service is a business: it aims to take in more money than it spends.

The founder's start-up list, line by line:

  • Kitchen equipment: 9,000 dollars.
  • A used cargo bike and insulated delivery bags: 3,500 dollars.
  • First ingredients and containers: 1,500 dollars.
  • Cash cushion: 5,000 dollars.

The founder will put in 13,000 dollars of savings and borrow the rest with an equipment loan at 8 percent a year.

Three facts about the service's industry: three restaurants near the offices already deliver lunch; grocery stores nearby sell ready-made salads and sandwiches; and one local farm supplies most of the vegetables the founder wants to use.

Work these two problems, showing every addition, subtraction, or multiplication:

  1. How many dollars are the service's start-up needs?
  2. How many dollars of interest does the loan cost in the first year?

Beside each answer, add a brief interpretation:

  • Problem 1: say what each line of the start-up list is for, explain why the cash cushion belongs on the list even though it buys nothing on opening day, and write the funding plan's check: the founder's money plus the loan equals the start-up needs.
  • Problem 2: show the loan amount and say which amount the interest is charged on, explain why the funding request is not a promise of profit, and name the force in the five forces that each of the three industry facts shows. Then say whether the farm fact would be a strength, a weakness, an opportunity, or a threat in the service's SWOT, with a reason.

Explain it to a non-expert

A relative who might lend the founder money asks you, "Does this plan mean the business will make money?" Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains what the start-up list and funding plan show, what the loan costs in its first year, and one limit, including that a funding plan is not a forecast of profit and that this case is illustrative. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible, and the message gives no legal or financial advice.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a two-person lawn-care crew. Model answer: "The plan lists everything the crew needs before its first job, a mower, a trimmer, and money for fuel in the first month, and it shows where each dollar comes from. It doesn't promise a profit; it shows the crew can open and pay its bills while customers sign up. The loan's yearly charge is a cost the crew owes whether the season is busy or slow. This is a simplified picture, and a real lender would also want to see the crew's expected jobs and costs."

Use that pattern for the meal-prep service, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your work. A reader should be able to rebuild every amount you report from the start-up list without guessing which lines you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

  • the two answers, each with every addition, subtraction, or multiplication shown and the interpretation the task names for that problem;
  • your message to the relative, explaining what the start-up list and funding plan show, what the loan costs in its first year, and one limit; and
  • the funding plan's check, listing the founder's savings and the loan beside the total start-up needs, so your loan amount can be checked.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled sketch of the two lists side by side with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the arithmetic, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a free spreadsheet to lay out the start-up list. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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