Idea Napkin No. 2

1) You. Who you are. What your talents are. What your skills and experiences are. Also: what are your aspirations? Specifically regarding your business concept, how do you see this business (if you were to start it) playing a role in your life?

1) I am a very analytical person.  I enjoy working with numbers, which may seem odd, but I truly do.  I’m good at finding patterns in a set of numbers, while taking into account external factors that might contribute to the numbers, being that certain pattern before indicating any causality between the two.  I like to plan things always, whether it is the day of, the next week, or the semester.  I therefore love set schedules that do not have moving parts and are very simple.  Other than analytical types of problems, I am very athletic.  You could say that is a talent but it allows me to exercise and workout, which was originally my central theme following my original entrepreneurial idea.  This assignment made me focus on my aspirations.  It made me start to think about, what do I tell people when they ask me what I want to do and what my end game is with my accounting degree.  I always have responded saying that I aspire to start my own wealth management group.  Traditionally people think of wealth management groups as greedy hedge funds managers making a lot of money, but I would divide my wealth management group into segments or departments to be able to target different segments of customers.  Once started I see this playing a role in my life because I could be able to utilize my analytical abilities to help the more and less fortunate.  I see myself being able to live and sell my company on a day to day basis.  If I can make you more money than you can yourself, therefore making me more money, why not?  It may seem greedy or whatever but there are a large number of people who want more money or want even more money on top of the money they already have.   To add to all of this I was talking to a coworker of mine, a line cook, and he was like, Landini “You should definitely come up with something about giving advice to people bro you’d be great at it.”  Then I briefly told him about the idea that I’ve always have had that I have communicated throughout the assignments in this class.  That validation was nice to see and help me realize that this goal of mine is possible.

2) What are you offering to customers? Describe the product or service (in other words, how you'll solve customers' unmet needs). 

Individuals all have the money but truly don’t understand the concept of growing one’s money.  More than 50% on America lives paycheck to paycheck.  If I can coach, teach, and help individuals not live paycheck to paycheck the economy and system will be better off as a hole.  They can start to not worry about money to meet all their needs for their bills they have. I would do this through developing plans that individuals must follow.  Based on your needs it be an individual plan that would then be linked to their debit card accounts with us to where the category spending is set to certain limits and unless there is an emergency then the set limit per month cannot be gone over.  Yes that may limit the power of an individual, but I think it can help them create healthy money habits to eventually stop and just budget themselves but still have an account with us.

3) Who are you offering it to? Describe, in as much detail as possible, the demographic and psychographic characteristics of your customers. Think especially of this question: what do your customers all have in common?

The customers would be a wide range of customers.  I would be able to offer products and funds – similar to a hedge fund – that higher income individuals can put their money into to earn a greater return.  These customers would be making above $250,000.  Then I would also be servicing other customers, through a separate division, targeting lower income families.  under $50,000.  These customers would be targeted to give advice and guidance to help them save more, earn more money, retire sooner, or even go on that next family vacation sooner than expected.  

4) Why do they care? Your solution is only valuable insofar as customers believe its valuable to them. Here, explain why customers will actually pay you money to use your product or service. 

They care because I care.  That may seem vague or not strong enough but that is how people tend to listen to me.  I have a big heart and I do want the best for people.  Trust is something built over time, but it is something I can sell.  With the trust I can then sell them the possibilities that can be achieved or the hardships that can be forgone by helping all of these individuals manage their money better, either through advice (consultation), or management of the money itself by my firm. 

5) What are your core competencies? What sets you apart from everyone else? Also: what do you have that nobody else has? 

What sets us apart is that we would service the low income individual.  Many wealth management companies have high minimums that low income individuals are absolutely not able to achieve.  The income inequality gap is widening with more individuals at the low income end of the spectrum.  My firm would address the needs of those people which far outnumber the high income individuals. 

In addition to these five elements, please spend a paragraph evaluating whether you believe these elements fit together or whether there are aspects of your business concept that are weaker / out-of-joint with the others. 

I believe these five elements fit together better now than the first time around  I switched up my original idea during the  first go around on this assignment and based on the feedback I am really happy I did. The feedback from students truly affirmed that the elements work together and that targeting the different invidiuals on the income scale brings a different edge to my idea.  I think outside of the idea I worry about how can we balance control over someone’s assets to help them where they do not think they have lost control and they still trust as a company to help them at the end of the day is what it will come down to in my opinion.    

For the "feedback memo" -- please summarize five main points that you took away from the feedback you received. Also, please describe how you incorporated the feedback into this idea napkin. 

Feedback Memo

The feedback I received was fantastic.  I was honestly hoping that it would be a little more filled with constructive criticism.  I just wish that because I want to hear the other spectrum from others and see just my opinion through their eyes.  Overall, I took away a few main ideas from the feedback I received.  I realized that it was very interesting and powerful, and slightly different that I would use my expertise to build a service instead of a product to help people with money, and this is why I kept a lot of ideas surrounding the service components of my idea from Idea Napkin #1.  Also I found that helping people was also key to my future success of my idea as a service which is why I decided to segment my business.  This leads into my next thing I learned is that the individuals whom commented on my post really agreed with the segmentation of my business as a service to address many income levels with the associative needs at those income levels as well.  Due to the lack of constructive criticism I have decided to self-evaluate my response.  As I self-evaluated myself I decided to add a few elements to the ‘What are you offering customers’ section.  I decided to go more in depth on how I would address the specific money managing problem at heart and not just what I might be able to provide as I originally was addressing in my first Idea Napkin exercise. Overall, I did not change too much from my first Idea Napkin exercise, but I believed I added a few integral parts that address weaknesses I had previously.  

With this post, you need to include the phrase "Idea Napkin No. 2" in the title. Once you have published this post, be sure to Share the post URL and make the appropriate Declaration.