29A – Venture Concept No. 2

Opportunity

My opportunity lies in the customer service industry, with retail and restaurant establishments. The opportunity is in the customer service and hospitality training of employees for businesses, as businesses struggle with training and keeping friendly employees. This opportunity has become more prevalent in the past several years as the pace of the world seems to have become faster and faster, and people have become more concerned with being fast than with being friendly. People just are not as friendly as they used to be, but people visiting retail stores and restaurants still expect great service. The typical customer of my business is other businesses. There is no specific demographic, just any business with the need of friendly employees. Currently most of the businesses that would be my customers are simply trying to train their employees themselves in house. This is something that I believe many of them are struggling with and would like to stop doing. I believe that the opportunity for this business is very large. There are many businesses that are struggling with customer service training, and I believe that they would be very interested in the business that I have proposed as a solution to their problems. I believe that the window of opportunity will be fairly short for me. I believe that when I start my business, I will need to grow and succeed quickly if I am going to make it. 

Innovation

My service is an outside team of professionals that comes into businesses and trains employees in customer service and hospitality. My business’ reason for being is to train up the next group of customer service and hospitality professionals. We will go into businesses and train their employees exclusively in customer service. We will work one on one with employees and actively coach them in how to treat customers not just as customers, but as guests. We will also offer classes for businesses to send groups of employees to learn more about customer service. We will charge our one on one services at about $50 per hour per trainer. For classes, we will charge $100 per person, with a discounted rate of $75 per person for groups of 20 or more people. The classes will be about 4 hours in length and will have a maximum capacity of 75 people.

Venture Concept

My business would solve the needs of other businesses by assisting them in improving their customer service. Businesses would choose to come and use our service as an alternative to wasting their own labor and time trying to train on customer service. Since we are professionals in this area, we would be the ideal choice, in comparison to wasting their own employees time in training. There are few other companies that offer this type of service, so competitors would likely be few. We would capitalize on our experience in the industry to try and outweigh any competition. We would likely employ about 15 trainers and have a home office where they can organize their materials. We would also have space in our office for classes to take place. The one on one training would take place on site in the businesses who hire us.

I believe the most important resource is the experience as well as the financial stability as I enter into the industry. 

Next I would like to offer training services based on food safety for our restaurant customers. 

In 5 years I would like to see my business thriving, with up to 50 employed trainers, and with a strong reputation in this field in my geographic area. In ten years I want to be pursuing new businesses, possibly a coffee shop, and flipping real estate on the side. With the experience I gain through this venture, I can have better knowledge to start future businesses and make future investments. I believe that I can pursue my passion through this passion and make my vision a reality.

I received some great feedback. Most of the feedback was positive, and constructive. Throughout the process I was reminded how much experience I have and how great my idea was. This helped boost my confidence going into this process.

I mainly changed my prices, I believe that I was rather low on those, so I would now plan to charge more for my services. I also now believe that in this market I have a smaller window of time to get my business going.