29A- Venture Concept No. 2

My onsite scooter repair service, Riley's Scooter Repair, is a great opportunity for the Gainesville market and the University of Florida because there is a large number of consumers who need the repair because the own scooters and also because the students have demanding schedules and desire convenient solutions. There is an increasing number of students who are purchasing scooters. There also is an increasing number of students at the University of Florida, which could lead to greater scooter sales overall. Having a scooter is a convenient transportation solution. It is inexpensive (relatively), easy to operate, and allows a student to park in more areas on campus than a car would. This demand for my service arises from the fact that because these consumers have purchased a convenient product, they probably also want a convenient solution to their problem (when their scooter needs to be repaired). My market can be defined as the University of Florida campus. If this service was to succeed here, it could be replicated in other college towns. The customers would be college students who own a scooter. These people are typically 18-24 years of age. These customers are typically fast-paced and are always looking for innovative new products and services. These customers are typically reliant upon their parents for some financial support and make purchasing decisions with this in mind. The window of opportunity for this service will probably be open until students are no longer purchasing scooters that need repair. This service is innovative because there is not currently an onsite scooter repair service that has a strong market share in Gainesville yet. This service provides an innovative solution to repairing scooters by doing them onsite, so that the customer doesn't have to worry about time their scooter spends in the shop or having to transport it to the shop. This service would cost the customer whatever the cost of parts is plus a $15 per hour charge for labor. There are already many scooter repair services in Gainesville. Some of them have a much stronger hold on the market than others do. There is demand for scooter repair in general, so by providing a service that stands out to customers as more convenient than the competitors is what will bring in demand. The competitors are well established but do not provide the convenience this business would offer. They typically have the customer bring in the scooter or charge a fee for transporting it. The scooter then sits in an office for an extended period of time. If my business can provide the same quality of service as the typical repair shop, I think that customers will gladly switch to my service. Customer service and price will be the most important factors to my customers. My business would need to start small, with few employees before I could expand. This startup doesn't require too many employees at first. My most important resource is the convenience. This convenience is the difference between my service and other services. My next business venture would be to offer a sort of membership to customers. This would make it so that customers could have their scooters checked up on, washed, maintenanced, etc on a recurring basis, onsite. Assuming this business was to succeed, I'd be most concerned with increasing market share in my current market and then extending to other college campuses. This way I could increase my revenues and acquire enough capital to continue creating startups or manage this money better. I think that I may have underestimated the start up costs for this business. I will need to purchase many vans and hire skilled mechanics in order to keep up with demand. I also will need to get the repairs done quickly so that customers don't decide to go somewhere else for service. This may be difficult.

My feedback was positive for the idea. They liked how I differentiated my product and said that I could find customers. I personally found that I will need a lot of start up capital and will also need to be very efficient to keep customers pleased. My workers will also need to be very skilled in order to address the range of problems that may arise in the field. It may be difficult to satisfy customers if we cannot do the repair onsite as promised.

Based on the feedback, I couldn't change much. I just have to prepare for when these problems arise and find a way to still provide customer service by offering discounts if things go wrong or take preventative action.