Persona Pain-Gain Map for the Laudry Cafe

Business Plan Overview
 
Our team business plan target focus group encompasses the ambitious young professional, to the over-scheduled university student or urban dwelling adult, The Laundry Cafe and Lounge offers an escape from the norm by providing a state-of the art laundry service with a twist. Have your laundry attended to by our experienced professional or access our self-service machines while enjoying our many amenities on any of the floors within our establishment; be it a hot coffee, latte and healthy snack while using our free wifi to complete some work in our comfortable cafe lounge on the first floor or relax and socialize with a beer or wine while listening to local musicians on our open mic in the lounge located on the second floor club level, all while the dreaded task of laundry is completed under the same roof. Beepers are provided so you don't miss "switching over" and can stay on schedule! Laundry is never-ending, so why not make the most of this dreaded but necessary chore and come hang out at The Laundry Cafe and Lounge.
 
What Does a Bad Day Look Like?
 
A bad day is someone who has had a hectic day or week which could include extended hours in the office, long study hours preparing for final exams (or in our case business plans), or having other commitments which have put the priority of the dreaded Laundry chore out. 
 
What is Their Fear?

Their fear of procrastinating the Laundry duty as far out as possible and await the very boring and tedious chore of laundry. Laundry chores are long and tend to present a void in being able to enjoy amenities and socializing with other young professionals and students.
 
What Keeps Her up at Night?
 
In the back of her mind is the need to do laundry as she has her favorite cloths, wok attire, and the need for clean towels. She continues to procrastinate the laundry chore unit she not longer can. The thought of sitting at a run down laundry mat doing laundry in boredom is something she does not look forward to.
 
What is He Responsible For?
 
He young professional or student is responsible for being presentable to a certain standard in order to achieve personal goals or holding on the values. Examples of such is a young professional who is career driven and needs to have an attire which provides a presentation and shows confidence in which to win the acceptance of peers/customers or senior management. It about dress for success. On the college student, being well dressed and having proper hygiene is a responsibility in order to hold up a social status value.

 

What Obstacles Stand in Her Way

 
Laundry is a chore of no enjoyment and she can find many other things to enjoy. Social activities such as cocktail hour, socializing with friends, watching the the big sports game with a crowd of people tend to take priorities over the mundane chore of laundry.
 
What Does This Person Want to Aspire to?
This person aspires to socialize and enjoy the younger years of a college student or young professional and not be held back or bothered with certain responsibilities or chores. This person enjoys the socializing with friends and being able to stay connected to the information superhighway.

How Does This Person Measure Success? 

For a college student or young professional, success can be viewed as enjoying life and seizing the day. This can be a social status, networking one-self, or taking in new experiences or scenes. Being able to enjoy these years and expand your social circle and experiences can be viewed as success.

What Can We Offer This Person?

A place which takes the chore out of laundry and provide the college student or young professional a place to relax and social with others. This accomplished by having a cafe and bar that has an atmosphere that promotes socializing with others. With a live music, it also allows entertainment and ability to listen to up and coming artists. 

The Value of A3 Reporting

Business ideas alike face many challenges in introdcuing a successful product, service, or process change to an organization, company, or even to the world. It focuses very aggressivly on solutions for these challenges as they appear and tend to ignore the business model and whether it contiunes to be viable. In order to fully understand a problem, The A3 reporting process developed within Toyota provides a problem solving tool which allows a scientific apporach to root cause analysis and debunk any assumptions that are made. A stronger aspect of the tool is it also provides a learning mechanism for personel throughout an organization, company, and start up to understand the value in executing such problem solving initiative in order to achieve higher successful rates. This learning experience promotes a culture of engaged thinkers throughout every level to identify opportunities for innovative ideas to become visable and supported.

The A3 tool encompasses 7 areas in order to implemetn such root cause analysis to a problem and encourage people to work together.

1. Problem or Issue – What is the problem that is causing problems.
2. Background – What is the current coniditions and business problem.
3. Goal – What is the desired outcome.
4. Root Cause Analysis – Analyze the current situation and what are the underlying causes.
5. Countermeasures – How will you reach goal state. What are the proposals.
6. Plan – Define an action plan with the counter measures to achieve the goal.
7. Followup – Execute follow up plan to verify results are inline and no negative reactions.

 The value of such a tool is evident in organizations, small and large. There is always room for improvement and great problems that require great solutions.

Quoting from Jeffrey Liker (The Toyota Way) “The right process will produce the right results.”

 I feel this is key in addressing problems. Without understanding the full scope of the problem (root cause), the effectiveness of the solution cannot be understood. This is no different to and engineering problem which RCA is the standard approach to problem solving to understand the exposure to a given problem and whether there is still risk with introducing a solution.


 Does the A3 reporting tool also provide significant value to Entrepreneurs and align to the Lean Startup? I believe it does with the focus of root cause analysis. The key to lean startup is based on the ability to "pivot" to such problem resolution and determine the appropriate decision (persevere or perish). There are many problem solving techniques, but the A3 reporting tool focuses on identifying the root cause of the problem. Without the root cause of the problem at hand, it is difficult to understand how effective the solution can become (if at all, perception versus reality). With the ability to drive down to the root cause of such problems, it will present the entrepreneur the unbiased data required to make educated decisions versus emotional.

7 Sources of Innovation

7 sources of innovation

In defining what innovation truly encapsulates, Wikipedia provides the definition of “the development of new customer value through solutions that meet new needs, unarticulated needs, or old customer and market needs in new ways”. I feel the key word in this definition is “VALUE”. Without value, there is no true innovation. The term value encompasses many of things in which Peter Drucker defines in his book as sources of innovation. Drucker highlights 7 sources of innovation which include:

Unexpected – accidental discovery/event or unforeseen result.

Incongruity – Perceived versus Reality

Process need – Task focused necessity

Changes in industry or market structure – change in industry.

Demographics – population/people change needs.

Changes in perception, mood, and meaning – cultural/economic influences to create opportunity.

New knowledge – scientific and nonscientific discoveries/inventions.

Much of these sources of innovation does overlap and influence others to some certain degree. As an entrepreneur individual, it is critical to take into consideration each of these sources of innovation when getting the “big idea”. With the rapid pace of technology and world economic growth, industries and markets are created or changed swiftly and head the opportunity for innovation. An example of such is the social media industry which touched on many of the sources of innovation. Providing a new way of communicating with people in which to stay connected to hundred of friends and family, almost at any time and instantly. I remember as a child mailing letters and pictures to my grandmother in Portugal as phoning was expensive and you could only hear a voice. Today, I Skype with family members and share photos to stay in touch. With the entrepreneur, innovation continues to grow and move at faster paces to allow such new industries to be created and add value to the people of the world.

 Innovation versus Invention

Sometimes people discuss innovation and invention in the same sentence and relate them as there is dependence for innovation from invention.  The definition of invention can be thought of as “the creation of a product or introduction of a process for the first time”. This does not mean in any way that an invention is innovative (does not provide value). It may become innovative, but it may require tweaks, incremental changes, a business model in order to provide any value. There are many examples of differentiating innovation with invention with Steve Jobs being the most noted person. He did not invent the graphical user interface for computers (Zerox), nor did he invent the digital music player. He understood the value of each and created a business model which provided tremendous value to people around the world. As an entrepreneur individual, you must understand the difference between invention (your big idea) and innovation (value), to which the 7 sources of innovation by Peter Drucker should be applied in each way.

Google SWOT Analysis

Leveraging the course material and readings, my SWOT analysis of Google is focused on the market segment of cloud computing, specifically with infastrucutre services and big data analytics. My thought process for this is to focus on more of the less known markets which Google now competes in with significant market opportunity (cloud projected to become a $240b industry by 2020).

Infrastructure as a Service is based on the technology of provisioning virtual server, storage, and networks to support business computing needs. Currently, Amazon is the market leader with over 75% market share. Other strong competitors who are vying for market share is Rackspace and Verizon today. Google initial entry to the IaaS market segment is promising with its competitive pricing and its support of short term intensive processing needs, but need to add features to compete with Amazon. The strength of Google in order to complete with Amazon is based on their resources and the understanding to drive an IaaS solution. The market challenge is to address security concerns and non-disruptive availability to avoid any downtime.

Data Analytics is a technology based on analyzing/processing extremely large amounts datasets and try to identify patterns and trends. it poses significant opportunities to financial institutions and health care providers to make sense of all the data collected. It is fore casted to become a $15b industry by 2015 which is has the potential for significant revenue. The data Analytics market segment is still continuing to mature and it's pricing strategy continues to be challenging due to the various implementation (hardware, cloud solutions).

Looking at the market segment and Google's opportunity, it's threat from Amazon is a concern as it's current share is over 75%. The IaaS market segment will continue to mature as standards and customer needs change which will provide an opportunity for Google to become a dominating player in this rapidilly expanding market.