19A - Idea Napkin No. 2

1) You. My name is Ava Daly, I am a 2nd year business Management major with a minor in Entrepreneurship. One of my passions is helping others. I have experience planning fundraising events, leading people, and organizing and running meetings. When I was in high school I planned an event to raise money for Marjory Stoneman Douglas and we raised 10,000 dollars. I want to have a profession that is rewarding and centered around helping others, so that's why my business idea is focused around helping students with mental health issues. 

2) What are you offering to customers?  My service serves the unmet need of resources for college students. Adjusting to college life can be difficult for many students and I personally believe there is a lack of resources and support for students who are on their own for the first time. Therefore, my company/nonprofit organization would focus on providing the support necessary for students. More specifically, the organization would have a range of services from one on one appointments with psychologists, group therapy, stress/time management classes. The setback I faced based on my interviews was if we would have sufficient funds to make this organization successful since salaries for psychologists could be expensive. 

3) Who are you offering it to? The customers would all be students usually from ages 17-23. I do not want the focus to just be toward students with mental health issues, but for any struggling student that is going through a difficult time. Therefore, the customer base would all be students. Since everyone going to college has never been on their own before and away from family, I believe they all have similar struggles in college that can be addressed in a positive way.

4) Why do they care? Customers would pay money for my service because mental health is very important to people. Many people I know are struggling with internal issues and they do not know who to turn to for help. College is supposed to be a positive experience so with mental health issue rates increasing I believe students would want this service.  

5) What are your core competencies? There are not many resources for students in Gainesville so we would not have much competition. The one resource we have is Gatorwell, which is very hard to make an appointment with and they would not have as many services as my company would have to offer. What makes us stand out is that we would have many different services for students that no other company would offer. 

I believe that my idea is a practical one that could help a lot of people. However, it might be difficult to make enough profit to keep up with the expenses of the company. Since psychiatrists often receive a high salary, in order to have many psychiatrists on staff could be very expensive to maintain. Moreover, college students on a budget may not want to pay for an extra service when they can receive free help from GatorWell. Therefore, the logistics of the company may be difficult to predict, however if we market the company well enough we may be able to get a high enough customer base to keep the company profitable. Also, since there would not be that much competition in this area, the elements could fit together well and be a success. 

Feedback memo:

The two main points that I took from my feedback was that a potential setback would be getting over the financial issues from the students side. Many students are on a budget and may not want to pay for the higher quality service and just go to GatorWell. Another point that was made was that a service like this is needed in our area because of the lack of resources we have for this type of issue. I implemented my feedback into the evaluation of my service in the logistics of the service fitting together.