25A – What’s Next?

Existing Market

Upon interviewing 3 people in my existing market, they all thought the environmentally friendly / Eco-friendly products was an awesome idea.  One of the people told me to start a whole different business which would help propel this business into a better idea but do less of the manual labor, which I thought was a great idea since he is a business owner himself and knows the ins and outs of one.  In terms of growing for the market, I given an idea to also put flyers on peoples doors.  These flyers aren't too hard or expensive to make and she actually knows someone who owns a print shop that could possibly do it for a discounted price.  The flyers would be the ones that would get put in peoples mailboxes or put on the door handles of apartments and town homes. My last piece of advice was to also create free ads on Craigslist.  Many people go on Craigslist to look for services and why not advertise here as well?  I will take all of these into account and definitely move forward with these as I think they are all phenomenal pieces of advice and good strategies.

New Market

I interviewed two people who also aren't in my market.  One of whom washes his car every single weekend like clockwork at 7am.  He has 4 cars in total and barely ever lets anyone drive his cars beside him.  To be honest he has been married for about 7 years and I've only seen his wife drive his car once to get food.  I didn't get much positive feedback but to go knock door to door and ask if people would like a car wash.  I don't really want to do this but imagine if it comes down to it, I will have to. However, he did then state that it could be a possibility to enter the market of B2B since people sometimes are difficult to get as customers, I could go to a car dealership and ask to wash their cars on the lot on a regular basis for a fixed price.  Many of these cars aren't driven unless by test drives so they really don't get too dirty.  This would mean the cars could be easier and quicker to wash.  The next person I spoke to also didn't believe in paying 50 dollars for such service and she is happy with just spraying the car with water to take any dirt off of it.  She did have a good idea of going to businesses and offering some sort of package deal to businesses and maybe even at a discounted price and have all employees of a company at the same location get car washes for lower prices, so long as their is a minimum quantity scheduled for that date.  Think of it as when ordering things in bulk.  If you order one calculator for example, it may cost $20 each.  If you order 50 calculators though, you can get wholesale prices and have them come out to $10 each.  The same idea applies and I think both of the above are great ideas to think about.  This market would also be B2B as I would work with a company to get a contract per month and they would supply it for their employees.  Even though it would be tough to convince a company to do this, I think it would have to be a company that offers company cars to it's employees and therefor would want the cars to be clean on the road.