Business Plan

Business Idea

In our recent meetings we have covered many points on our business plan.

We made mind maps of our ideas and drawing which helped bring our ideas together.

Our business plan is a service which would benefit a post consumer. This service is a skill based workshop on a bus. We offer skills such as knitting, sewing/mending, bike repair and many more. The idea behind this is for 3 main reasons,

1)The bus could travel to you so it would be more environmentally friendly than 20 cars coming to us.

2)People will benefit from learning new skills such a knitting so they could make their own garments, saving them from buyingnew ones. Bike repair would keep a post consumers bike up in good health so public transport can be avoided.

3)Bringing the community together and the ideaof knowing your neighbours. Also learning the skills which were once used often and now forgotten. (bringing back the past)

Market research

For market research we looked at local Dundee skills workshops held at the recycle center. (d-air) The offered workshops on Soil, Sew, and Cycle which we thought would benifit a post consumer. We looked at the way which they worked such as time organisations etc. We also did some interviews at local schools where we came up with some skills which we thought would benefit a post consumer. We interviewed o2 on their recentGuru roadshow which was held ona bus which went around different cities in UK. They were helpful in giving us an insight to how people react to a mobile service. They also gave us interesting points to consider such as safety, advertisement, target market, positioning (place the bus was parked).

Guru Roadshow

Local Dundee Skills workshop

Visual Identity/Advertisment

The idea around our logo is that it is in a shape of a wheel (our mobile bus) and is made up of people which relates to community. The primary colours are to show the primary skills in which we offer. The advertisement is posters of where we are going to be and on what dates. These posters will be stuck on local shop windows and on bus stops etc. The bus itself will be an advertisement as it will have our logo all over it and people in towns will recognise the bus. This will be where word of mouth comes in as it become more popular around the city. We also have a website which will allow people to go on to check up times and sign up for a workshop which they are interested in. It will also allow people to read up on recent workshops which have been taken place. We also offer a mobile phone app which will save paper to advertisement and will give people a quick and easy way to access our service.

This is our logo

Our bus

We looked at getting a second hand double decker bus and transforming it into a bus offering a lot of space for skills workshops. There are shelter bits which come out the side of the bus if there was an outdoor workshop such as bike repair. We thought of the safety issues which we would have in such a small space and how many people the bus could accommodate. The bus has two levels which workshops could be happening. We have a small storage space upstairs and a long table which people could work on. The interior of the bus wont look like a traditional bus as it would be modern and changed to suit our service.

Finance

There were many things which we had to consider for the mobile bus. We have been looking at getting grants and loans which will start us off for equipment advertisement and buying the bus. Also we would need petrol etc for the bus itself. We looked at ways in which we could save money such voluntary work from local people and getting equipment from recycle center. This would all count towards saving money. We figured we would lose money for the first 2 years but on the 3 rd year we would start making money. We would make money from people paying fees for each workshop, when our name goes abut we were hoping that other cities would be interested and schools would want to rent us out to teach children on a certain skill. after speaking to a school head teacher they said they would be interested so the concept would be very successful if it takes off.