29A – Venture Concept No. 2

1)
Opportunity: 
Roughly 70-80% of business fail within a year, for any number of reasons. One of the reasons businesses fail is because owners have lack business experience. This creates an opportunity for business coaching. In other words, people with successful experience can help people that are new to the field. I believe the opportunity exists because small business with very few employees will likely come across areas in which they have no expertise in and instead of hiring a full-time employee to handle it, they can hire a coach to help them for a short period of time. This market is not limited by geographically or demographically because there are businesses be created all over the country. I also believe that creates the window of opportunity to be very wide.

Innovation:

The service I am offering is business coaching, this will help struggling businesses or first time business owners with little to no experience connect with more knowledgeable and experienced professionals in their field. They will help improve the business in areas such as marketing, strategic planning, logistics, goal setting, and etc. What separates my business coaching idea from current business coaching businesses is that I want to create and app or a site that will have a wide range of coaches with experience or expertise in all different kinds of fields. This will allow my consumers to pick someone who will better suit his or her needs. Currently most business coaching businesses have one or two people offering their services and there limited to what their expertise is. While my service will allow for more experienced coaches in different field from restaurants to retail etc. I plan on making money by charging a small fee between 10-15% for every coach that uses my service to gain a client.

Venture Concept:

I believe that customers will switch to my service because my service offers more variety and my customers can find someone who fits their needs more.

My competitors are other business coaching companies in the area. Their possible weaknesses are that there limited to their location as well as they can only take on a limited amount of customers depending on how large their workforce is, which is usually small from what I have researched.

I believe that location plays a big part in my business plan because, I want to be able to find coaches who have expertise in their local area and one of my challenges I believe is finding coaches with enough experience and knowledge to fit my criteria. I believe customer support will be a very important need in my business plan because if there are any problems with any of my business coaches, that I want there to be a place or system that my customers can go to file complaints.

I plan on my business primarily being online and I would oversee everything except for the business coaching itself. I plan on looking to recruit potential coaches who would come and use my service as a way to connect with a client base.

The three minor elements:

I plan on my secret sauce being the customer service my company provides. Most business coaching companies are very small, 1-2 people max or they are independent contractors. There is no way to know how good or bad they are at their job and they don't have anybody over their head making sure they are putting their best effort in helping you. My service will vet any of the coaches you hire through my business as well as make sure they are constantly working to improve your business and if their is anything you don't like about your coach will have customer service personnel you can call to help and fix any problems you might have.

The next opportunity for my venture is too add consulting services to maybe large companies or more successful ones. I believe this is a lucrative market because larger companies are likely to outsource a lot of their work and they will need consultants and my service could potentially link the up with potential consultants.

I would like to grow this venture to more cities across the country and hopefully in five years be able to achieve my goal and have my business in cities all across the country. As an entrepreneur I would hope to have started even more ventures that I can grow.

2) 
In my first venture concept the feedback I received helped me realize a few problems I had. One in particular was finding business coach's that would use my platform instead of being independent contractors or owning their own business. I also agreed with the feedback that I should change what I considered my "secret sauce".
In the "What's Next" exercise I realized that providing consulting services in an addition to the business coaching services could be a profitable addition. From the feedback I received on that assignment they agreed with me.

3)
I changed my secret sauce from having a wide variety of business coaches to focusing mainly on customer service.