Page 83 - Business Plans that Work A Guide for Small Business

74 • Business Plans that Work

One criticism of the Our business competes locally on five key factors, the
five key success factors laid combination of which is unique to Lazybones:
out here is that they are
suited to what Lazybones
does and don’t include 1. High quality control: Anyone can do laundry. Washing,
all the factors that would
influence a customer’s drying, folding, and delivering large quantities of laundry
decision, such as price.
Thus this analysis is biased. to a high level of quality is much more challenging than
If Lazybones includes the most people think, especially on a fixed budget. Many
key components of the
competitor models they would-be competitors have gone out of business in
can rectify this problem. a year or less, after learning this lesson the hard way.
Lazybones has invested years of effort and nearly a
quarter of a million dollars developing custom systems
that allow us to efficiently process thousands of pounds
of laundry each week to the high standards demanded
by our customers.
2. We do the work ourselves: Some potential national competitors (like
DormAid or the now defunct EZ Student Services) have beautiful marketing
and Web presence, but they are farming out the actual laundry work (often
to local students). As such they have little to no quality control to back
it up. Unlike retail, the laundry business is dependent on ongoing weekly
relationships. Marketing is key to bringing customers

Appears to be
another key success factor
that Lazybones doesn’t
compare themselves
against competitors on.
Lazybones might note key
quality assurance compo-
nents in their system or
even present customer
satisfaction data from their
15 years of operations.

in, but long-term success depends on high retention
rates and local recommendations to out-of-state parents.
This suggests that 3. We focus on college students: We remain laser-focused
price may not be as impor- on a very specific, lucrative market. College students
tant to these customers,
although this is an assump- and their families are substantially wealthier than other
tion that needs testing.