Venture Concept No.2

Opportunity:

            There is an undeniable need for an expansion of parking in certain areas in Gainesville, Fl. Having lived here for the past three and a half years and have personally went through the struggles of street parking, I can confidently say that there is an opportunity that can be take advantage of. The issue of not having enough parking can easily be solved, the solution is to put parking lots in areas that are over populated. Almost half of the population of Gainesville are students, and most students tend to live near campus. The problem is when students sign a lease for an apartment they are only given one parking spot. Therefore, if four students sign a lease together then three people have to resort to street parking. Furthermore, Gainesville is not the only college town that has this issue. Further research would prove that other college towns are in need of parking lots as well. Currently there is only one other option, and that is street parking. Street parking has many flaws, the biggest is that the zones are over populated with cars and therefore finding a spot is very stressful. Lastly, I would classify this opportunity as safe and not a “game changer.” This is a relatively safe investment that would have minimal startup costs, excluding the land that would need to be purchased. However, the real-estate market is in good shape and therefore would deem purchasing land around the UF campus is safe.

Innovation:

            Are prototypical customer, being those who get left out from there parking spot at their apartment complex and wishes to have a consistent parking spot that’s not too far from there place. I understand that there are many people that would not want to purchase this service, however there will be enough to fill the lot. For those who wish to lease out a spot, we will have school year leases. Within this agreement is a set price of 39.99 a month for 10 months, I would plan on having 100 spots available to lease out (and a 2-month lease for summer). Furthermore, there will be an extra 25 spots that would be left over. The left-over sports will server 2 purposes, first we will have available daily/nightly parking for a price $10 a day/night. The purpose of these spots is to offer a parking spot for anyone who cannot leave their car on the street for any purpose. The other purpose is for tailgating, because the parking lot will be very close to the stadium we will lease out 25 spots for those who wish to tailgate for the football games. The agreement will be 500$ per spot for the entire season, with parking for Friday night- Monday morning.

            Hopefully I would be able to lease out every spot for school year parking and for tailgating. If so, I could expect a revenue of $39,999 from school year leases and $12,500 from tailgating, plus any extra throughout the year from miscellaneous parking. A grand total of $52,499 give or take. While this number is not huge it is very promising. This investment will take off slow, however when all expenses get paid off I will be able to bring in $50 k each year, and I won’t have to get off my couch.

Venture Concept:

            My venture concept is straight up, if you are sick of dealing with street parking I can offer to relieve that stress. The issue being that street parking is very inconsistent, you can never rely on it, you have to parallel park, and not everyone knows how to, oh yea, and it’s over crowded.  I believe that customers would switch over to my service because they don’t want to deal with the stress. When I had to look for street parking on a Wednesday night and I really needed to study it got me angry. My service won’t be for everyone but I do believe that students will like the fact of having your own parking spot. I also believe that the price point is fair. At 39.99 a month I believe that people will be willing to pay for the service, I also believe by not including summer people are more likely to sign. My biggest weakness would be if I was completely wrong and there is no demand for this service. If that was the case I wouldn’t lose that much capital because the land value in the area near UF is strong. Lastly, this would business would be a sole proprietorship, and would only be run by me. I wouldn’t need a manager and would not have any yearly costs other than tax.

1.     I believe that there won’t be any secret to duplicate this opportunity in another market, however in Gainesville when the lot goes up it would be hard for another competitor to swoop in. The reason would be the location of the land. In order of this opportunity to work, location has to be prime. Having a location that is near all the major off campus housing will entail my success.

2.     The next step would be to find other markets throughout the country that have the same issue as Gainesville. I would have to travel to college towns such as Tallahassee or Athens GA. Once I identify a suitable market I would do the exact same thing I did in Gainesville.

3.     If this venture worked, five years down the road I will be working. There is no way that this could be my full-time job. I would view this business as a nice cushion of money that comes in every year. In ten years, I plan on have taken over my father’s construction business and as an entrepreneur I would hope to have discovered other markets throughout the country.

Reflection:

After reading through the comments I could not figure out a way to change my original posts. It seems that most people believe that the prices are fair and the business model is good. I do agree that in order for me to go through this I must keep into consideration to details and factor is bad scenarios to be on the safe side.  All in all, I was happy with the responses I got from my peers and made little changes to my original post.