Page 92 - Business Plans that Work A Guide for Small Business

Company and Product Description: Selling Your Vision • 83

Exhibit 3.1 Lazybones Colorado Laundry Floor

Lazybones offers dry cleaning too, charging by the item and subcontracting to a
local dry cleaner.
Summer and semester abroad storage services are provided as well. Lazybones
personnel come to the student’s dorm room or apartment during a two-hour
scheduled window. Any items to be stored are picked up and transported into
storage for the summer. Items are packed and shipped as well upon request.
Come fall, all items are returned during a prescheduled two-hour window.
Notice how the
plan provides a nuanced
Customer Service perspective of its customers.
While students are the users,
Although Lazybones end users are college students, services parents typically pay for the
service. This understand-
are paid for predominantly by parents. ing will drive the marketing
Out-of-state parents routinely set up and oversee their strategy. Much of the effort
will be geared toward the
child’s service arrangements and often hold us responsible parent (which we will see in
for their child’s unreliability. This creates unique customer the next section of the plan).
service demands. In addition, the stressful start and end of the
school years make for extreme—super seasonal—demands on the
system; average call volumes of 30–40 calls per location during
normal weeks skyrocket to over 500 per day during the busy
seasons. Lazybones uses a centralized database to keep all
Since Lazybones is an
information related to laundry and storage and uses a call existing business, this plan
center to provide its phone support. Additional hourly help is focuses on growth. While
many of you reading this
added during these peak times at the call center. book will present a strategy
to enter the market, the La-
zybones strategy focuses on
how to grow its presence in
3.2 Franchise Product Proposition the market. In a new venture,
your job is to compress the
learning as best as possible
Lazybones’s 15–20 percent net profit margins are one of its through the use of networks,
many attractive qualities. Its carefully designed and developed research, and customer
systems mitigate risks associated with the extreme seasonality understanding that we
described earlier.