Venture Concept (24A) - Dishes Done Today

            The best idea this class had to offer is to look for unmet/under-met needs when coming up with a business idea. One easy way to identify such needs is by looking for things that annoy people. After all, annoyance and anger stem from the idea that things should be different than they are. That being said, who is most annoyed by the state of the world? Lazy and busy people have the most pileup of work than any other group. Lazy people surely have plenty of tasks (maybe even every task) that they’d rather outsource to other people for money. Busy people simply need help with all the extra work they are responsible for because there is only so much productivity a person can uphold. Luckily for us entrepreneurs, universities are filled to the brim with lazy and busy people. Households full of chores needed to be done are riddled throughout Gainesville. This is a market waiting for people to saturate it, and the opportunity will remain open for as long as people are willing to enter it.

            My business’s “innovation” isn’t innovation, but rather an epiphany. My business model stems from the fact that I have a ton of free time in my senior year and I am willing to do people chores. My willingness to work will surely come in handy for doing the chores that people don’t want to do. I am essentially offering my free time. My free time will be spent fulfilling other people’s tedious responsibilities. I will advertise that free time through social media. A large portion of my innovation stems from the marketing effort. I will have to spread my contact information throughout the university in order to make people aware of the convenience behind letting me do their chores for them. My services will be the same day, and since I am focusing on tedious manual labor type chores, will be completed in a hastily manner. I am getting paid for convenience and the outsourcing of responsibilities.

            The nexus of these two things meeting, the venture concept, focuses on a very select market segment. There are plenty of residencies in Gainesville who don’t have dishwashers. As such, I will offer a dishwashing service to that market segment. Of course, I’d like to take advantage of my willingness to complete almost any chore, and I’d like to take advantage of the entire market. However, focusing on just dishwashing services for people without dishwashers will allows me to focus on growing my marketing effort (i.e. social media and local advertising) to let people find out about my willingness to work and growing my reputation. It will be hard to get people to try my service, but with enough time, I’m sure people will realized just how convenient my services are. Currently there are no competitors in the market, but there are very clear vulnerabilities. If households and apartment complexes begin buying dish washers that will surely hurt my business model and require me to shift my focus on another chore. If there aren’t enough households without dish washer who are willing to try out the convenience of having me do their dishes for them. The price will be one of the most difficult aspects of starting this business, since I am essentially pricing the convenience factor. Being able to distribute my services in a timely matter is another pivotal part of the business, since I am aiming for convenience. Customer experience is the most important part of the business. Making the experience quick, easy, relatively cheap, and pleasant will surely allow my service to be rendered by the same customers multiple times, and more people will be willing to try my services. I would structure employees one of two ways depending on the feedback I am receiving from completing the service. If I am receiving too many requests and I can’t possible complete it, then I will have each employee do chores independently. If however, I see customers have a lot of chores they’d be willing to outsource, then I would have a team each with their own specialization.

            The business’s competitive advantage is me. I have a glowing personality that people love to be friends with. As such, when I go to people’s home they would want my company so much that they’d render my services multiple times. That’s why customer experience is so important, it is a little dependent on them liking me. My amiable personality will have them coming back for more. Once I have become established and am getting regular revenue, I will hire employees. Their roles, as I have described earlier, is dependent of consumer feedback I receive up to that point. This venture will essentially give me experience into starting my own business. In the next ten years, I hope to be building up my resume and knowledge capital to be a valuable asset to a company. This is all in the hopes that I work in a company that will teach me a lot and give me the skills I need to come up with my own very lucrative idea. I ultimately want to start my own business, so this will be me simply dipping my foot in the water.