The students of my Business 101 class keep dazzling me.
The Creation of the Case Study Project “I’ve got a Golden Ticket to Bergen Community College-Homecoming 2022”:
I have been teaching “Introduction to Business 101” at Bergen Community College for several years now and in the era of COVID, it has been especially difficult. With businesses shutting down never to reopen getting students to understand that business must go on and pivot is a difficult thing to do. You have to learn to adapt and survive or else everything fails.
In my live classes, I open my consulting company, “Bergecco-Parc Consulting Inc.”, for business and the whole class bands together and we have one big project. In the era of COVID and online learning, I was lucky that I was able to teach one of the live classes on the Bergen Community College, Paramus Campus. It was such a pleasure welcoming students back to campus with live lectures and conversing with them.
What I discovered later on is that we were the only class on campus that night and it was pretty gloomy walking the halls all by myself late on a Friday evening. The upside of all of this is that we had the whole campus to stretch out in and later in the class I changed rooms to a more formal lecture room for the presentation. I thought this was more COVID safe for the students.
The Bergecco-Parc Consulting Inc. corporate logo of the six trees
In the past, I have created these projects under the Bergecco-Parc Consulting Inc. banner, the main consulting company, the Orion Malls banner, a Mall design company and the Buscomonzefi.com banner, my Tech Division. Each business does its best to be creative, forward thinking and have a thought producing presentations.
Professor Justin Watrel, CEO & Consultant Bergecco-Parc Consulting Inc.
My welcome to Bergecco-Parc Consulting Inc. from the CEO of the company:
While my other class worked on their case study project, “Market Street Candy & Confections”, a 100-year-old candy store concept, “I’ve got a Golden Ticket to Bergen Community College-Homecoming 2022”, a project promoting Bergen Community College to the Alumni got off to the ground running.
In a class that has to stay socially distanced and met only once a week it got difficult.
Our Logo from the novel “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by author Ronald Dahl.
“I’ve got a Golden Ticket to Bergen Community College”
Every semester it is the same thing with the students. Some take the project seriously and some think it is a chore and go back to looking at their cellphones the whole semester. As usual, those are the students whose work shows it and gets the lower grades.
When I put my executive team together this semester, I found a nice combination of students who really worked well together. How I choose my executives is the same way any CEO would, I get a copy of their resume which serves as my first paper for the class. I work with the students to be sure that their resume is ready for future job interviews and internships or transfers to another four-year school. This is where I can see where the students experience lies and what skills they can perform.
The second paper I have the students write is “What would I do Better?”, a two-page paper on a situation on a job or extra-curricular activity that went terribly wrong and how they might have fixed it. The paper always shows me how the student would handle adversity under pressure. It also shows me the student’s character. This is how I pick my executives plus I use my gut instinct on how they act in class. Almost 95% of the time, I am correct.
The students I chose for my Executive Team were all Bi or Tri-Lingual, all were pretty ambitious and I thought had a sense of creativity. One of my Executives went AWOL after the second class and one of his Team Members took over the VP roll. I could not have asked for a more prepared student of the role of Vice-President. This is when students can surprise you with their flexibility and creativity under pressure.
So, every week we had Board Meetings to check progress and see how each Team was performing and getting their work done. I always have my procrastinators but for the most part everything was handled on time and towards the last two weeks I saw the students ban together to get the work done. Still, I had a few students either go AWOL or just drop the class and that was it so there was some rearranging to do along the way. This is what happens in a real corporation, so it was just like real life.
The night of the presentation, it was nice to see the students all dressed up. All the women looked so professional in suits, skirts, slacks and dresses while most of the men were in either suit and tie or jacket and tie. I few I will have to teach how to iron a shirt or tie a tie correctly.
I could not have been prouder of my student executives on their presentation. They put together a wonderful presentation in promoting Bergen Community College to Alumni and students, promoting our Athletic program with student athletic and parent events with Alumni attendance and meals that would bring Alumni together in the “Bulldog” tradition. All throughout the presentation we kept the “Willy Wonka” theme in all of our events.
What really impressed me was the touching dedication to the late Gene Wilder, the star of the original 1971 film from the Executives to both him and his widow, Susan Wilder. I think that showed the heart of the project of how much this film means to people.
Congratulations everyone on this excellent project and Happy New Year!
*Please watch and read the different parts of the project to see its progress.
The Project:
“I’ve got a Golden Ticket to Bergen Community College-Homecoming 2022”
Don’t miss this interesting student dining experience from the Culinary students at Bergen Community College.
The Bergen Room for the Thanksgiving Dinner buffet.
Don’t miss the student run dining room, “The Bergen Room Bistro” at Bergen Community College for a four-course meal priced at $12.00. It’s a great dining experience.
One of the table set ups for our Team Project “Feasting at the Bergen Room: The Ultimate Dining Experience”.
Our class field trip to the Bergen Room
The Project: “Dining at the Bergen Room: The Ultimate Dining Experience”:
The Bergen Room Bistro is the student run dining room that is part of the Hotel Management Program. The dining room is open depending on the semester. The restaurant is serves both lunch and dinner depending on the semester. The restaurant is open on Tuesdays and Wednesdays during the school year.
The Hotel Management Program at Bergen Community College
For $10.00 you get a four course meal cooked and served by the students. You are served a soup or a salad to begin with freshly baked breads that are made by the Baking students.
The Hotel & Restaurant Students
You are next served an appetizer, a choice of two entrees, one a meat and the other a fish dish…
I had the strangest semester this quarter at Bergen Community College where I work. The semester started off normal and was the typical night class. I would get in about an hour and a half early and prepare for class. Then it was lecture, class participation and then quizzes and exams. I had just given my midterm exam and then we left for Spring Break. I knew the outside issues that were surrounding us but the problems of the COVID-19 seemed so far away.
Even so in the back of my mind I knew this was going to be a problem experiencing what I did at the New York Restaurant Show and at the Chinese New Year Parade in Chinatown in the same time frame. Even Groundhog’s Day and the Big Ten Championship seemed subdued. I guess I just waited for someone to finally pull the plug and did they EVER IN A BIG WAY!
Two weeks before we left for Break, I reopened the Bergecco-Parc Consulting Inc. concept for my Introduction to Business class and gave out the Team Project and went over the guidelines of the project. I have to say that the students seemed pretty excited about the prospect of running a company. My President and Senior Vice-President were raring to go and the next two classes, the last one being the night of the Midterm, we were able to meet and it gave the students time to meet up and get to know one another. I knew it would be a successful project.
The Bergecco-Parc Consulting Inc. logo
I had thought about this semester’s Team Project for the class while we were presenting the Paterson Project last semester and thought about what many students had told me about their experiences at the College. Most seemed alienated from the other students. Others who had attended bigger four year colleges in the past felt their was no cohesiveness to the school, no connection because it was a commuter school. Others told me that they did not know anyone at the school until they did their group project. The one thing was true was there was no school spirit.
This gave me the idea this semester to do something to focus on the students and their experience at the college. While my Marketing class created a project for tourism in Historical Bergen County, I had my Introduction to Business class create a Student Ambassador Program that would welcome students to the college starting with the student getting accepted in high school and then take them on the whole experience of welcoming them once they got to Bergen Community College.
I decided to expand the “Welcome Week” project I did two years ago (see ‘Day One Hundred and Twenty Seven’ in MywalkinManhattan.com) that welcomed students and alumni back to the college and create an ambassador program as another part of welcoming students to campus. The Welcome Week project gave the students an opportunity to be involved with the campus when they graduated but I wanted to see something when they first got the letter of acceptance. So I created a Team Project that would combine the whole experience.
The Welcome Week Project-“Follow the Yellow Brick Road back to Bergen Community College-Welcome Week 2019”:
My questions was ‘How do we engage students when they are accepted to the college and then when they get here?’ ‘How are we sure that they do not get lost in the crowd?’ Since it is a commuter campus, how do we keep them engaged once they start classes? This was the challenge for the students to tackle with this Team project. We used the last two classes of the semester to meet and get everyone acquainted and have the Teams start the project. It started very smoothly.
Here was the inspiration for the Ambassador Program:
Here was the welcome to the college from the “Welcome Week” Team!
While on Spring Break, I got a memo from the college while attending the Restaurant Show that the college was going to extend the Spring Break a week to see what the State of New Jersey was going to do to handle the COVID-19 situation.
So I just continued on with the first week of break, attending the Restaurant Show, going to Blondie’s on the West Side to the Alumni Night for the Big Ten Championships, attending a 90’s Tech retrospect at the Anthology Archives and going to the Members night at the Met Breuer. All of this while I felt that everyone I was with at these events with were looking over their shoulders wondering what would happen next (See Day One Hundred and Sixty-“On Leave from “MywalkinManhattan.com” in MywalkinManhattan.com).
I was planning on visiting my mother on Thursday of first week of break so after the Restaurant Show closed I got my car serviced, my haircut, my dry cleaning and banking done and finished my housework in anticipation of my upcoming trip. Still everything loomed in the distance. The next morning all hell broke loose and the borders were shut in the United States and the stock market went wild! The market was dropping like crazy.
So in between talking to my mother, my broker and other family members everything was cancelled and I stayed home and by March 13th, the whole country started the lock down. I could not go into the City and continue my walk of the Theater District or work in the Soup Kitchen as everything in the City immediately shut down. I just wondered how this would play out with the College. Even before the break many of my students had been asking questions about this that I could not answer.
While we were on break a lot of my students kept in touch with one another and we were working on the project during the second week of the break. I was only allowed to email students if they emailed me (they were still on their break) but I would CC everyone on my emails to keep the lines of communication open. It was only at the end of the second week that we knew we would not be going back to school and all the classes would go virtual. It was then I was emailing my students and going over what we needed to do to proceed with the project. This is when the project got interesting.
Some of the students had kept in touch over the break and had gotten the framework done for their sections and had some ideas of what they wanted to do. So we were better prepared than the other class I had who had one afternoon to get their game plan together. When we realized we would not be going back to class and everything would have to be virtual, it made the class even more interesting and a big challenge. Most of the students had a good handle on the work and many parts of the project had been started.
The project was broken down into sections. Bergecco-Parc Consulting Inc. (an acronym for Bergen Community College-Paramus Campus) is a hierarchy in company form. I set up my Executives and broke them down into different divisions. My President and Senior Vice-President ran the show. They would report to me and let me know how the project was progressing. They were in charge of putting the Power Point presentation together and finding our headquarters.
The slogan that the Team came up with for the project.
My Talent Division was in charge of setting up salaries, the benefits package and the office space design for a three month period that we would be working on the proposal for the client. Once the President and Senior Vice-President of Operations found the location for the offices, it would be the Talent Team’s responsibility to design and furnish the office. They would also set up a series of ‘perks’ for the office, things like snacks for the office, team building projects and employee relation items like Daycare and transportation reimbursement.
My Marketing Team was responsible for setting up the Corporate Website (based on the one that had been set up for the Paterson Project) and expand it to include all Bergecco-Parc Consulting Inc. projects from the past, shoot commercials welcoming students to campus and what it is like to attend Bergen Community College and set up the logos along with the Spirit Division and then find ways to ‘market the college’ to the incoming students. They were also in charge of designing the new “Ambassador” uniforms for the Student Ambassadors to wear when attending events.
My Spirit/Special Events Team was responsible for all the ‘spirit’ related projects. They were responsible for setting up our Spirit Welcome’s to incoming high school students and once they got to campus, organizing a series of events to get the students involved in the campus. They were also assigned to set up the special events to welcome parents and students to campus.
On the High School Level, the Spirit/Special Events Division was to create a “Spirit High School Welcome” that entailed the Student Ambassadors visiting each high school in the are where students had been accepted to Bergen Community College along with some students athletes and hold a “Meet & Greet” over a pizza lunch with the incoming students to welcome them to campus.
Here is the commercial that welcome’s new students to campus!
On the College Level, the Spirit/Special Events Division was to create a series of events for when the incoming students arrived as well as events that current students could attend called it the “College “Bulldog” Spirit Welcome” and this included:
*A formal Campus Tour that each student was to take when they arrived on campus. This way each student knew where things were located on campus and become acquainted with what services were available to them.
*A Parent’s of Athletes Reception and Pep Rally which was to be an evening exclusively catering to student athletes coming to Bergen Community College and their parents which included a light dinner and pep rally that included the cheerleaders, the dance team and other student athletes that was to be held the night of our rival Men’s Basketball game with Passaic Community College.
*A Parent/Student Barbecue which was to be held the weekend of the first home Men’s Soccer game that invited all incoming students and their parents plus the members of the Men’s and Women’s Soccer teams and their parents. The barbecue was to have an extensive menu of all sorts of fall favorites.
*A First Night at the College that was to be held the First Friday after the College resumed that included a night in the gym getting to know the clubs and organizations on campus. This also included snacks provided for the evening and then the evening ended with a concert for all the students.
The Spirit/Special Events Team was also responsible for designing a new School Mascot, Spirit Shirts for the the Men and Women’s Basketball Teams and create a School Fight Song. I know it would be a lot of work but it is fun to see the creativity of the students when put under pressure.
Here is the commercial that promotes the college when students come to campus!
It was even more pressure when we did not return to campus and the whole project had to be done by email and then Zoom meetings. I would not see my students again for the rest of the semester and because of school policy I could not speak to them over the phone. Until I learned what Zoom was and was allowed to have video conferences with them toward the end of the semester, I have never written so many emails before in my life. I swear I was on the computer everyday all day especially on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. I never left my home office the whole day.
It got even more confusing when a few of my students disappeared at the beginning of the semester, a few students got sick and then it was the disagreements and misunderstandings you have when emailing people. I had never worked so hard pulling a project off before. Communication was limited until the use of Zoom videoconferencing came into play. Even then that was toward the end of the project so everything was being done through long lengthy emails.
Then for about two weeks I heard nothing from the team as members of the Executive Team had not been in contact with me. We were at the height of the COVID-19 crisis and I was worried about my students. Some just stopped answering emails and I would find out later that some of them or their family members were sick. It was a trying time in the trenches.
Then I sent out an email about two and a half weeks before the presentation and everyone started to contact me. What floored me was how far the students had come along with the project with little assistance from me. Some of them took me ideas and just ran with them.
Some of them came up with their own version of my ideas which I liked. They created home and away shirts for the basketball games, set up spirit sections, came up with new ideas for food venues like having Boston Market take out meals for the ‘Parent’s of Athletes Reception’ and the Team’s creative ideas on a new school fight song. The Team even developed a new school mascot, “The Bulldog”.
The new Bulldog Mascot Costume
We ended up having both a WebEx meeting and a Zoom Meeting before the presentation on Friday, April 24th at 8:00pm. It was so nice to see everyone again. I had not seen my students since the Midterm exam and it was good to see that everyone was doing okay. Their lives like my own were turned upside down but we all had to make the best of it.
On the night of presentation was interesting. It was not the most pleasant weather and I was afraid that the computer would go down. We lucked out that everything went by smoothly and the presentation went by fine. What was nice was our Head of Athletics and our Head of Public Relations for the college were able to join us for the presentation.
Here is the new Bergecco-Parc Consulting Inc Website:
Here you can see the full Power Point Presentation and the Commercials.
I could not have been prouder of a group of students who under all the pressure of not being in class, people suffering from the illness. family situations at home, job issues and personal stress made the project work.
The students at Bergen Community College’s Business/Hotel Management School proved to me that they can compete with the best. I was happy to give a lot of “A’s” this semester!
Welcome to my consulting company, Bergecco-Parc Consulting Inc. which is part of my Business 101-Introduction to Business class at Bergen Community College. The students in my December 2019 class presented their project on marketing the City of Paterson, NJ to tourism.
The presentation was a huge success.
The Bergecco-Parc Consulting Inc. Logo for the City of Paterson, NJ.
The reason why I have not been posting so much on “MywalkinManhattan.com” over the last few months has been tenfold. Work around the house, work at the fire department, concentration on building my caregiver blog, “BergenCountyCaregiver.com”, which is taking off all over the world (now in 45 countries) and work. At the last minute in the beginning of the semester, my boss offered for me to teach “Introduction to Business 101” at Bergen Community College. I jumped at the chance to teach a new class.
As with my Communications classes the last two semesters, I ended the class with a big group project that included the whole class. To match what we were learning in class, which was the whole gamut of the Business world, I decided that this semester we would renovate and remarket a Mall. Since Paramus, New Jersey is the Center of Mall construction in the country and one of the busiest shopping areas in the United States of America, I decided that we should locate the mall here.
Patterned after the Paramus Park Mall on Route 17 North in Paramus, NJ, we created a similar Mall named the “Paramus Garden Mall” (combination of names of Paramus Park Mall and Garden State Plaza Mall) and renovate and update it with the new name, “The Shops at Paramus Gardens Mall”.
I broke the class up in teams and as usual made the students work with total strangers. To top that each team had to work with the other teams to achieve their grade. This way the whole class gets to know one another and learn to communicate with the rest of the class. Projects like these are interesting not just for the research that the students come up with but how the students react to one another. I am never disappointed when I read the emails that are CCed to me as the CEO of the project.
I made myself as the Professor, the CEO of Orion Malls Inc., a large chain of Middle Class and Luxury Malls throughout the Northeastern part of the United States. Orion Malls Inc. had just bought the dowdy “Paramus Garden Mall”, a middle class mall in suburban Paramus, NJ. The mall, while successful and a money maker, was due for a huge makeover. With Malls surrounding it renovating and updating and just getting bigger, the Mall was falling behind its counterparts in the town by way of traffic and the diversity of stores.
Orion Malls Inc. logo
So I challenged the management team of the Mall with ideas for the new concept, “The Shops at Paramus Gardens”. This required a new logo, new signage, ways of reaching out to the community, new uses for the now closed “Bon-Ton Department” space for entertainment, a new restaurant concept in the food court area, outreach to Community organizations, a new marketing concept, making the mall more eco-friendly and greener and the updates in concepts and merchandising in the Sears and Lord & Taylor stores that still anchored the mall. We needed to update the Juniors, Children’s and Gift Departments. As usual the students did not disappoint me.
The former “Paramus Garden Mall”
I started with my design team and wanted them to come up with a concept of adding more green landscaping to the mall with trees, gardens, fountains and paths. I wanted them to convert the ‘open court’ in the middle of the mall that currently has four trees and a fountain and turn it into a village square with gardens, trees and tables. I also wanted them to figure out a way to make the mall more ‘eco-friendly’.
Greenery in Malls
With my Food Court team, I wanted them to add new restaurants to the food court that reflected the changing demographics of Bergen County and New Jersey in general. Also I wanted them to find a way to make the food court more family friendly and ways of getting people from the surrounding office buildings to get out of the office and dine with us.
Adding Jollibee to the Food Court
The Community Service and Outreach Team was in charge of engaging in the surrounding communities and reaching out to local organizations about using the Mall for functions and charity events. I also wanted to see how we could utilize the Mall for functions for businesses within the Mall.
The Marketing & Advertising Team was in charge of reworking the old Mall logo from the 80’s and coming up with a whole new concept of shopping. We wanted to reach new markets with advertising campaigns and working with our Community Service team to present the Mall in a more ‘downtown’ aspect.
Our Entertainment Team was in charge of redesigning the former “Bon-Ton Department Store” space into a family friendly entertainment complex. I told them since they were presenting ideas to fill the space not to look at budgeting but look at what might attract families and business people coming off work. They had two floors of space and almost 180,00 square feet of space to fill.
Lastly, the last two anchor stores of the Mall needed an updating of merchandise and a refreshing of the stores so I challenged the Lord & Taylor and Sears stores to revamp their merchandise in the Juniors, Children’s and Gifts Departments to make the store more ‘family friendly’ and make it a shopping destination not just a place to shop. I also wanted them to work with the Community Outreach team to look at charity and special events that the stores could sponsor to promote the store and the Mall as well.
Attached below is the project and the ideas set forth by the teams. We also added the Power Point Presentation as well.
mywalkinmanhattan 