Business Incubator Series: Ross Sanders, Bizdom U – Detroit, Michigan and Cleveland, Ohio (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi

Irina: Could you describe an ideal company that would benefit from your program?

Ross: Most people that we bring into our program do not have established businesses. They are people who are seeking out ideas.

I can give you an example. There was a woman [Judy Davids] who had a lot of different ideas. She didn’t know which one to settle on, so we brought her into the program.

We went through several brainstorming exercises to flesh out her ideas and add new ideas to existing list, and she landed on one. We worked around with that idea and once we got fired up, we did a market and financial feasibility study, trying to figure out what are the economics of one unit are, and how she was going to make money.

Once we were done with that, we did a sales and marketing plan. We figured out what the sale process was, what the target market was, and how they were going to get to that target market. Then, we set goals. If you want to get to that target market, then you are going to have to set numerical goals for these different metrics in order to get to that market.

We developed a sales and marketing plan and after that we worked with her on developing financials associated with the business and the business plan, the income statement, cash flow, all those different tools.

Then, we developed a pitch and she went and pitched to our committee to get the seed funding. She got funding and launched the business. She has been working on it for not quite a year.

This is just an example of someone who has an idea but they need and want to flesh it out more, they needed a lot of work on the idea.

Irina: And what was her idea?

Ross: I don’t know how best to describe it. I am just going to give you an example. So, it used to be years ago, if I wanted to know what is going on in my family, I will call my mom and my mom would keep in touch with my sisters and all my relatives, nieces and nephews, and would know all these information, what is going on. She would always call them and get this information.

Well, now everybody in my family is communicating on Facebook. My son is communicating on Facebook with his cousins, everyone is communicating on Facebook.

So, what her idea is, it is basically a paper Facebook. It is called a PostEgram, you can buy a subscription. So, I bought a subscription for my mom for this PostEgram.

I call it Carolyn’s Corner because that is her name, Carolyn. So, I bought it, I set it up and what it does is it downloads all the information we share on the Facebook.

It downloads pictures and all the different content that is there from not only my family, but my sisters’ family, my nieces and cousins, like a nice little newsletter, and then it prints out a hard copy and they snail mail it to her.

So, she gets a nice newsletter in the mail now, six or seven pages, and it has pictures of our kids, my sisters’ kids and my sister’s family and all the stuff that we are sharing on Facebook.

Now she is in the loop on that stuff where she wasn’t before because she doesn’t use computers, she doesn’t even use e-mail. So, it is a nice little way for her to be looped into that conversation without having to go on the computer.

So, for five bucks a month, she will get this nice little newsletter. I can get a weekly subscription. There is a lot of different things we can do with that. Again, that is a model that we call leverage. We can grow that from here in Detroit and we can service people throughout the country.

This business has been in existence a little less than a year and she has found a couple of other applications for it, for example, military personnel. A lot of folks overseas in a military don’t have access to computers for a variety of reasons, and they are all on Facebook.

So, when they go over to the military, they are kind of left out of that loop. She has been working on sponsorships where companies will pay for these PostEgrams, and military personnel can keep in touch with their loved ones.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Business Incubator Series: Ross Sanders, Bizdom U - Detroit, Michigan and Cleveland, Ohio
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10