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At first going from having infinite free time and then back to
full-time College was a bit of an adjustment; I was suddenly having
to keep to a daily schedule again and perform tasks other than the
ones I chose at the spur of any moment. But only within a few weeks
my mind lit up with other things to think about and cognitively
toy-with during my days. One semester, I had a 'business' class as
well as a 'marketing' class. Marketing class was more interesting as
it gave me insight as to what physically formed, versus what the
intentions were for, various types of advertisements.
Yet one day in 'business' class I perked up when the teacher
proffered what he felt was obvious to him, that someone could buy the
vacant two story national bus building downtown and turn it into a
drive through grocery store. The 'Trailways' bus line was the
competitor to the more dominant national bus line in the country.
But times were hard for it and they eventually had to close their
branch in our town by the nineteen eighties. Their building,
designed to have the buses pull through the lower story while the
passengers would wait on the upper floor, had been empty ever since.
Our business teacher envisioned people driving into the bottom floor
and giving their grocery lists at the pull in. It would be sent to
employees upstairs with the stock and they'd bag it for them and send
it down to the drive through exit, where the customers would have
already paid, and the groceries would be placed in the car. It
was the grocery store equivalent of a fast food place. While
other students in the room murmured various notes of surprise or
acceptance, given my years in the grocery field I knew it would never
work. First off the top floor of the building wasn't large enough
to hold the variety of food stuffs that customers would expect.
Second, running through all that stock to pick out the items people
wanted would take far more time than picking a burger out of a bin.
And while it was annoying enough when your fast food order arrived
and had one or more wrong items in it, could you imagine families
paying fifty to seventy-five dollars for a grocery order and have
bags placed into their car with them assuming it'd be correct on
faith and just drive off? For something like this to work, there
would need to be strict verification of the orders, when given and
once delivered. But including this additional verification time would leave customer cars sitting in the lower level for up
to half an hour. Why would customers find this more desirable than
picking the items they wanted off the shelf and seeing for themselves
what they were getting as they checked out?
Not liking the business teacher's idea struck me as writing for a
television show struck me. If I watched an episode I didn't like,
my mind would go to work on figuring out how to do it better. In
the case of this drive through grocery store idea, I couldn't help
myself but to dwell on it and work up a viable alternative. By the
end of the week I had the better idea in mind and it was just sitting
there waiting to be delivered when the business teacher assigned us
our final project 'to create a detailed business plan for a business
of our choosing', and the marketing teacher's Final was 'to create a
marketing plan for an imagined business of our choosing'.
Needless to say I was primed and ready!
Creating the business plan was the hardest of the two whereas given
my previous years of writing, desktop publishing, knowing artists,
and even failing to produce an audio drama on tape, I was quickly
done with the marketing campaign and example advertisement
scripts. In the case of the marketing material, some of it was
television commercial scripts and while I couldn't film the actual
ad, I knew I could make the soundtrack for it using my audio
equipment and multi-voice talent. So for the visuals I approached
Suzi, the founder of our defunct writer's group and asked if she
could help me out. Before coming to our town and forming the
writer's group, she had lived in a rural part of Colorado and formed
an artist's group there to help feed her own drawing and painting
interests. I knew what I needed the various pictures to show for
the television commercial storyboard and asked her if she would be
willing to draw them up for me. As I had hoped, since it tickled an
area of her creative talents that she hadn't used in years, she was
happy to do the minimalist artwork I wanted.
While she worked on that, I then focused on the business plan and
tapped into my long time friend Jeff for insights. As he had
grown-up watching his father create and run a dry cleaning chain, he
had a broad knowledge of what businesses would need to get off the
ground as well as technical names for the various types of equipment
I'd need. Discussing my 'alternative' grocery store concept with
him over the course of a few hours he helped me nail down the broad
details I'd need to keep in mind and budget for. Then it was time to
start calling the various companies who would be involved in such a
business and crunch the numbers. In the case of building costs, I
contacted a construction company touting their recent work on a
grocery store building they were nearing completion on. The secret
was not to ask how much that project had cost, but how
much a project like that would
cost; thus client confidentiality was maintained as they gave me the
rounded off, but closely accurate figure. I then called the utility
company and did the same thing for the utility costs of such a place,
giving two different existing businesses I felt would be on par in
their energy usage. While she couldn't have told me the figures for
either business without breaking confidentiality, since I had given
her two businesses to look at, she could give me the average of the
two which was close enough for my plan's estimate.
There would be a need for large refrigerated rooms, one each for
chilled items & frozen items. I could estimate the size of the
rooms based on my own knowledge of the percentage of a store
dedicated to those items. I then contacted an industrial
refrigeration company in Denver and asked them for an installation
estimate which would include specialized insulating concrete floors,
the insulated metal sheathed housings and the specialized piping and
compressors for those rooms. I was so detailed when giving this
information to the company representative on the phone that he
assumed I was doing this for real and said he'd draw up a detailed
estimate for me and call back with the figures at the end of the
week. Given the level of work he was going to do, I decided not
to correct him and tell him I was only doing a project for College.
Touching base again with Jeff I figured the number of initial
employees I'd need to start the company and he provided the
associated costs beyond an hourly wage for each. He also helped me
fill in the broad strokes and costs associated with an online
ordering system for the business and I had all of the information
I needed.
I created the business plan with at least a two year financing window
for it to become established and start breaking even. Adding the
figures from the industrial refrigeration company when they called
back, I was done with my full detailed business plan for my delivery
or pickup grocery store business. People could place
their order online, or if desired with a live person over the phone,
and it would be assembled overnight and then they could pick it up at
their leisure the following day or it could be delivered to their
home at a specific hour. Given the overnight assembly of the order,
this provided plenty of time for the customer to confirm what they
wanted with their order ahead of time, then a group of employees to
roam the warehouse and collect the items needed for the order, and
finally a string of people to validate that the order had been
properly filled with all of the items desired. Based on a
nineteen ninety business understanding I didn't include the
mechanical automation that would now be naturally incorporated into
the business if pursued today.
Picking up the artwork from Suzi a day before hand, I arrived at the
College with my audio soundtrack tape in hand and waited for many of
the other students to present their work first in marketing class. I
found I had little competition to worry about. I quickly
described the business I had created my ad for and when I played the
tape and displayed the story board pictures in sequence on the
overhead projector as the tape ran, I knew I was doing well. The
wide-eyed silence of the other students was all I needed and I soaked
it up. I got top marks from the teacher. For business class I came
in and while the other students placed their handful of pages long
business proposals on the teacher's desk for him to review by the end
of the week, I plopped my folder on his desk with my business plan
and, just for fun, included the advertising story board
drawings and soundtrack tape as well.
Having grown up with little positive feedback from parents or
teachers as a child, I had learned to live without it. In order to
survive I developed my own sense of when I was doing well or not and
for anyone's feedback to have any impact on me they had to provide
the facts to show how their opinions were grounded. Without that
grounding, others' opinions were gravely disadvantaged in my eyes
when compared to my own self-judgment. This has left some people
baffled when I would curse myself for not having something done to
perfection while they thought it was 'good enough', but this would
also lead me to unshakably know when I had done a good job,
regardless of what some other people might think.
This built in sense of self appraisal & judgment Daina found to
be my biggest drawback. But assessing & judging it for myself,
I've found it to be my greatest strength.
Why do I feel the need to explain it's not ego based...?
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