A light that lights up your handbag? Brilliant! How a degree turned a great idea into a business - Women's Agenda

A light that lights up your handbag? Brilliant! How a degree turned a great idea into a business

In a dark, deserted car park at 2am in the South African city of Durban, 48-year-old Marcia Mattushek rummaged through her handbag searching for her car keys.

Frustrated with no light or torch, the Charles Sturt University (CSU) student emptied her bag on the car bonnet to find the keys hidden among her belongings.

Driving home that night after a catch-up with old friends before returning to Brisbane where she’d lived since 2007, Marcia reflected on her annoyance and frustration in the car park.

How could she solve the challenge of women blindly hunting through their handbags?

It was from there that “Bagsablaze” was born – a light that can be attached to any handbag, that automatically switches on when you open the bag.

On the plane back to Australia the following day, Marcia fleshed out her handbag idea and researched how she could turn it into a business.

“I’ve always had lots of ideas but when I’ve looked into them they’d already exist,” she said. “With this one, I found it didn’t exist and I didn’t want to look back in 40 years and think if I’d done something about it I’d be a wealthy woman.”

At the time, Marcia was halfway through her Bachelor of Business (Management) with CSU and had been reading a lot about other people’s businesses, often wondering how she would do things differently if it was her own business.

“What studying does is it gives you the ability to know what to look for – your research capabilities improve and you think about things differently and a bit deeper,” she said.

Moving quickly on her idea, Marcia spoke to her husband, a patent attorney and an industrial designer about her idea. After assessing the costs, fine-tuning her idea and designing a prototype, she patented the light and her business was born. 

From then on, the way she viewed her Bachelor degree changed.

Originally when she returned to university at the age of 45, the plan was to choose subjects that would help advance her career in the not-for-profit sector.

But that plan quickly changed and, using her new business as a case study throughout the second half of her degree, Marcia chose subjects that would directly help her build her business.

“I did a gap analysis on the knowledge that I had and what I needed to know to get the business progressing,” she said.

“Project Management really helped me with the setting up of the whole development phase of the project and subjects such as change management and operations management will help me down the line for sure,” she said.

Financial Management for Small Business, which Marcia was studying when she had her business idea, was effectively the development of a business plan.

“It was fantastic because at the end of it I got the credit for University but also came out with a full business plan for my business, which is there to work on and will help if I need to go to the bank for a loan or other investment,” she said.

Within the business plan was also a marketing plan, which taught Marcia some of the essentials of modern-day marketing such as Facebook advertising, Google Adwords and the importance of contacting bloggers.

Marcia even found subjects such as statistics quite useful when it came to tasks such as calculating the costs of the product.

“As you can imagine an electrical product has a huge amount of tiny little components, many which I’d never heard of before,” explains Marcia. “So when you contact factories in China and give them a list of specifications and they come back with various unit costs, you’ve got to work out which one is viable. Subjects such as statistics helped me through this process.”

A University mentor explained to Marcia that it doesn’t matter how much you love your idea or your product, unless you love the figures it’s not worth it.

Thankful that she had the degree to help her through the startup phase of her business, Marcia recommends further education to any budding entrepreneur. Hands-on experience is embedded in most of CSU’s degrees and assessment tasks are designed to relate to workplace situations, so graduates are ready to apply what they’ve learnt to their business.

“Anything you learn from anywhere is never lost. Your personal development and the confidence that knowledge gives you is something that nobody can ever take away from you – so it’s worthwhile.”

Thinking about starting your own business? Check out CSU’s list of courses that could help you and your business

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