New Zealand Entrepreneurs Research | Business Studies

For our last 2 classes for Business Studies for term 2 which were on Thursday & Friday, we have been looking around different Entrepreneurs and how they are unique and different from us. We researched who they were, what made them popular, how did they get widely known, what barriers they overcame and what made them so different from us. We were given the task to research 2 New Zealand Entrepreneurs, I have written all my gathered information in a document, I chose to do Sam Morgan, founder of TradeMe & Phillip Mills, founder of Les Mills & PureAdvantage. Here is my work.

Sam Morgan

Born in 1975 at the age of 46, Wellington Sam Morgan, also known as the founder of Trade Me, now New Zealand's largest online auction site, which he later on in 2006 sold to Fairfax, an Australian media company for over $700 million. How he came around the idea of making such a site was when he was 23. In 1999 he was in a zone where was frustrated and had difficulties buying a heater for his chilly flat. He realised that websites online didn’t work for the kiwis, at this point of time where he realised he could offer New Zealand a better website. 

During the research he came up with the idea of online auctions for New Zealand, trademe is now a successful auction, property, cars, & jobs website. Stating the fact that Sam Morgan is unique in his way, he had the ability to take action, some people spend the majority of their time talking about it and not solving the situation. While on the other hand Sam Morgan went ahead and took the problem in his hands and fixed it, Morgan’s net worth presently sits around $290 million. (Morgan)

Bibliography

Celebrity Wiki. “Sam Morgan Entrepreneur.” Biography, Celebagewiki, no information found No info 2020, https://www.celebsagewiki.com/sam-morgan-entrepreneur. Accessed 2020.

Reference:

• nzCurriculum-Sam-Morgan

• Hi-tech | Sam-Morgan

• NBR/article-sam-morgan

Phillip Mills

Phillip Mills, born on the 13th of February 1995, age of 66, Auckland he is a former track and field athlete. Also a businessman in New Zealand, he is the founder, former chief executive & executive director of Les Mills national. The Les Mills fitness company has become internationally successful while still proudly owned and operated by New Zealand. He is also a founder of another business called PureAdvantage, which was founded in the year 2011. PureAdvantage is a registered charity led by many business leaders which are supported by a bunch of collective researchers & writers. Also supervised by the board of trustees and community leaders across New Zealand.

In 1979 Phillip took some leadership roles in the Les Mills fitness club which was founded by his parents, he continues to function in the Les Mills gym business within New Zealand. Early in the 1980s Mill then decided to develop an exercise-to-music choreographed set of exercises, meaning dance-related sets of exercises as well. Mills opened his first gym in 1968 and gave its name, Les Mills International which he named after his father, Les Mills.

Some backstory on how music and exercise came together in Phillip Mills business, he spent a year in a music business where he managed his brother-in-law’s rock band. Although he realised it was thrilling but somewhat unhealthy. During his loss of both of his brother-in-law’s who died young due to physical abuse that they put their body through. A year passed and that's when he found his passion for fitness and got back into the gym industry. Overall the business was going pretty decently but he wanted to make the most out of it, he talked about more excitement needing to be involved. He developed some workout music and launched them in an Auckland club and it became quite a successful and popular company now known globally. He owns 85 per cent of Les Mills NZ and 62-63 per cent of Les Mills International, which gives him a net worth of about $70 million. (Mills)

Bibliography

Mills, Phillip. “The Success of Failure.” Les Mills, Les Mills International, - - Unknown, https://www.lesmills.com/instructors/instructor-news/phillip-mills-on-failure/. Accessed No Info Information not found 2021.

 

Reference:

• Phillip Mills-Wiki

• nzherald-phillip-mills

• lesmills/phillip-mills-on-failure/

Land Yacht | Science

Last week and this week on science we have been working on a project on making Land Yachts, this project was related to our current topic in science, Forces & Motions. Our goal was to make the land yacht more aerodynamic and make it able to catch more wind to travel at a much further distance at such a speed. We were all put into groups, afterwards to enable the land yacht to do so travel at a far distance and faster speed we had to add things onto the land yachts.

Aim: Our goal to make the land yacht faster

Equipment:

• Land Yacht Base
• Cardboard
• Sticks(x2)
• Tape
• String
• Plastic Bag
• Leaf Blower

We were already given a base for our land yacht but the extra equipment we were given to use were cardboard, small bamboo sticks, tape, string, plastic bag & leaf blower. Our job, or my task was to make add ons because we needed to make it more aerodynamic and mentioned before to catch more wind to make the land yacht travel at a better radius and length. I decided to add a piece of cardboard on top to make the land yacht push through the wind much easily. To give the ability to the land yacht to capture more wind, we used 2 pieces of bamboo sticks(one short, one long). Then placing both bamboos in a cross looking position I then shortened the plastic bag and attached it above the land yacht. This will enable the yacht to catch more wind, that is what my hypothesis was though.

Afterwards, we did a single test to see how far it travels and how long it took for it to get to where it stopped. Using a formula we have learned about recently we took the distance and time and calculated what our speed was. Our land yacht travelled at 1 metres in 4 seconds, after the calculation our speed was 0.25m/s. Not the results we really hoped for but the experiment was enjoyable and learnt a lot along the way.

Conclusion:

So the conclusion to why our land yacht didn't go as fast is because of how the sail was setted up, it did catch wind but realising during the test was that the sail was not wide enough and if too much wind was caught it would usually turn the sail itself to the side and tilt the yacht over. The sails base wasn't stable enough to stay in one place which caused it to tilt and the plastic sail needed to be much more wider. There wasn't any testing done so we didn't know how it would have performed.  The best speed out our class was 0.656m/s.

My Teams Land Yacht