29A - Venture Concept No. 2

29A - Venture Concept No. 2

1)

Paradiso

Opportunity:  

• Key West is known for its amazing beaches and beautiful sunsets. It is a thriving tourist hot spot, and an expensive place to live. To comfortably live in Key West, you'd have to make around 70,000 a year to afford a one bedroom studio apartment. As such, around 5% of the population is homeless.
• Homelessness is described as: Sleeping in a place not meant for human inhabitants, or staying in a homeless shelter. According to endhomelessness.org, around 553,742 people in the United States are considered homeless. Most states actually decreased in number of homeless people since 2016, however California is up almost 14% in homeless population. 
• The forces behind this opportunity are high rent costs, low paying jobs, unemployment, mental health, and many other problems. 
• This market is defined all over the world. People are homeless and/or have insufficient living spaces all over the world. This market is more defined in high cost living places in the United States like big cities or Key West. 
• The need is for people to no longer be homeless, and to be helped back on their feet so they can contribute to society. 
• The need is being taken care of by many organizations that get funding from the state or by donations from individuals to fight homeless by providing amenities to those in need. 
• The opportunity is massive! Considered one of the world's most prevalent problems, homelessness is in need of being taken care of.
• The "window of opportunity" will be open for a very long time. I'm not quite sure if homelessness will ever ultimately be solved, but it's nice to imagine.

Innovation: 

• My innovation is a neighborhood of small houses for homeless people to live in, as a means of turning their lives around. What makes this different than a homeless shelter is that there are individual one person houses, rather than a large building. This will give a sense of ownership and responsibility to the people staying in the neighborhood. 
• Essentially what I am selling is an opportunity. This project will be funded by the state, or by donations. As such, the homeless people in the neighborhood will have an incentive to work whilst having amenities. This project sells the chance of turning one's life around for the better, while not having to worry about finding a place to stay. 
• The project will cost around $1.5 Million to fund, considering the costs for Real Estate, Materials, Construction, Plumbing, etc, in Key West. 

Venture Concept:

• People will help fund this project if they want to help contribute to getting rid of homelessness. It might be hard to convince people to donate, but it will be as hard for any charity fund. 
• My competitors would be other charities in the area, as well as other topics on the political agenda that will receive funding by the state before my project would. 
• The style of the neighborhood will be a selling point. The dainty, individual houses will give the homeless people a sense of ownership and responsibility that a normal homeless shelter does not provide. When developing and running, we will try to be as cost efficient as possible, since this business is purely run from state funding or donations. 
• A "business" would be organized in such a way that multiple of these neighborhoods exist across the nation, and one firm acts to make sure funding goes where it needs to. Also, a service where homeless people are helped to be ready to work, and to find work, could exist. As well as staff that would help maintain the neighborhoods. For employees you'd have: Accountants, Neighborhood Managers, Social Workers, and other low skill labor employees. 

The Three Minor Elements:

• My unfair advantage would be my intellectual property of Key West, UF, and the field this firm will be in. The connections I have and most of my business model showed few weaknesses when tested with the VRIN analysis. 
• What's next for my firm is to show the world how important equality of opportunity is rather than equality of outcome through my homeless neighborhoods. Giving these citizens another chance is a priceless service and a sometimes life-changing one.
• What's next for me in 5 years is I would have multiple neighborhoods throughout Florida, as this has become a widespread solution to slowly trickling down the homeless % of the state. In the long run, I would branch out to other types of businesses to build my wealth and probably eventually step down from the homeless shelter firm. 

2)

Unfortunately, I did not receive any student comments on my Venture Concept No. 1 post. As such, I will use the what's next post to determine my next move. The posts mainly discussed how it's crazy to see new ideas with the business this late into the semester. This further proves just how adaptable and expansive business really is. When you look at entrepreneurs like Elon Musk or Bill Gates, they constantly expand and grow their companies and networks. The new idea for my firm, Paradiso, was to include training service animals with what the homeless people there would do. The students who commented thought that this idea would add to the business and should be acted upon.

3)

What I would change to my venture concept would be to include training service dogs as part of the responsibility for the residents. Adding this program would give the resident a sense of responsibility and companionship with having a pet. This would be very expensive to add to the cost of the project. But it would be a great touch to the firm.

4)