Venture Concept No.1

Venture Concept No. 1

Mom-Mobile

Venture Concept No.1

VENTURE CONCEPT NO.1

Opportunity:

I have identified an opportunity, a need, for parents in the sporting community.

• The need is to get the children of busy parents to the sports events that they need to attend.
• Parents are busier these days with the rising cost of living and the economy. They must work longer hours, they have more demanding jobs, they have more children. These parents have demands that need to be met and not enough time to meet them.
• This market is targeted for families ranging in ages that are located in cities and towns where there are numerous sporting activities outside of school, city sporting leagues for example.
• Customers are currently satisfying this need by using friends to take their children to these practices and by taking off of work, if they can.
• This is an ongoing opportunity. My personal opinion is that if more parents were willing, this would be a huge opportunity for business growth, however in today’s society parents are justifiably skeptical of these types of services. This would be more of an opportunity for older children, middle school age up to the age of being able to drive themselves. There will always be children who are involved in sports.

Innovation:

The service that I am offering is a transportation service designed to meet the needs of the children and the parents.  My plan is as follows:

• We would have a website that allows the parent(s) or guardian(s) to schedule transportation for their child(ren), either on a one time basis or a recurring basis. You would be able to schedule a simple pick up and drop off to practice or the parent would be able to schedule a pickup and drop off to and from practice. This website would also include the additional feature of purchasing a drink, snack or drink/snack combo for the child(ren). The drink price would be $1 for water, $2 for Gatorade, $1-2 for the snack, depending on what they chose, and the combo would likely start out at $3-4.
• My drivers will be clean cut, female college students that have been through a thorough screening including driving test, drug screen and level II background check. All drivers will be required to wear a uniform shirt so that they will be easily identified by both parents and children as employees of this company. The employees, I feel, would be the greatest resource to the company.  
• I would start off with a small fleet of vehicles that I would strategically use car wraps on for advertising and identification.  
• We will go to great lengths to provide a safe service. We will have a mobile application to accompany our website. We would have an alert system in place through this app to notify the customer, aka the parent, of when their child was picked up from the designated location and dropped off at the designated location. We are looking into the addition of webcams in the vehicles so that the parent may log on and see that their child is safely in the vehicle that they are supposed to be in.
• The price for this complete service is undetermined at this time.  There will be options to purchase individual rides, a set of rides, i.e. to and from practice, or you can sign up monthly if a parent knows that they will need this service on certain days of the week through the month. I do have the plan to offer discounted rates for those that sign up for a longer time frame of transportation, for example a month of service or a season.  

Venture concept:

The Mom-Mobile Service is an innovative way to get your child to and from sports practices and games when the parent(s) cannot get them there.  It is not uncommon for parents to struggle with getting their child to practices and/or games on time. By using this service, the parent’s time is relieved of the rushed and stressful feeling of getting their child or children to the sports facility. They also can benefit from a structured schedule while being assured that their children are safe with the implemented safety features.  With little professional competition in the Gainesville area market, the only other alternative is to have friends or family members transport your child to these events. Having spoken to some parents that take advantage of that opportunity, it is not always ideal and can leave them with a feeling of burdening the transporting parent or relative.

The competitors in this market are two small companies that provide transportation for children. One such company has been in business since the mid 1990’s, however not many people know of their existence. Neither of these companies have strong marketing campaigns, this is a weakness for their business. With my vehicles wrapped with my logo and catchy slogan “Let me be part of your village,” it will catch people’s attention and create traffic to my website.       

With Mom-Mobile, the customer is our top priority. We would strive to give parents peace of mind with someone whom both the parent and the child can be comfortable with. We would like our driver to be viewed as an extension of the family. Our prices would be competitive with the other companies, but affordable enough for most to take advantage of.

With employing college age females as drivers, I anticipate incorporating services such as scheduled babysitting and tutoring. Living in Gainesville, a college town, the possible employee pool is in abundance.

In my current 5 year plan, I will have successfully introduced these additional services and would have started a franchise. This is a need, not only in Gainesville, but in cities and towns across the nation.