Idea Napkin No. 2

You: My name is Katie Beth and I am a Business Administration major. I am very thorough, organized, and caring. I also work well with elderly people, which is a necessary skill for this field. I have experience in this field because I have seen firsthand how my grandmother’s daily needs have changed as she has gotten older over the years. While she still lives on her own and fiercely defends her independence, she now needs help with small errands or tasks around her house, which I often help her with. While my family and I are lucky that we are able to drop everything to go and help her, her needs disrupt our schedules multiple times a week. Starting this business would make a positive impact in the lives of both seniors and their families, creating a livelihood for myself where I could see that I was making a meaningful difference.

What are you offering to customers: The service I’m proposing would provide seniors with individualized assistance and companionship, based on the senior’s needs. For a base price of $25 an hour, an assistant would help seniors with everyday tasks like driving, running errands, medical appointments, cooking, and cleaning. The assistant can also help manage personal calendars and coordinate household maintenance. Each senior would be matched up with one assistant to help foster a close relationship between the assistant and the senior. This one on one relationship will allow services to be tailored to individual needs and will also provide the seniors with companionship, which improves their quality of life and decreases loneliness and social isolation. By helping the seniors with mundane tasks, this service helps them maintain their independence while lessening the burden placed on the senior’s family and friends.

Who are you offering it to: The service’s primary customer market would be middle-aged adults who are trying to balance their own families and careers with helping to care for their aging parents. These adult children want to ensure that their parents don’t have any unmet day-to-day needs, but lack the time or energy to help their elderly parents themselves. A prototypical customer would be family-oriented, well-educated (at least a Bachelor’s degree), have disposable income, and would struggle to maintain a healthy work-life balance. While this is the primary market, the service can be hired by anyone to assist an individual over the age of 65.

Why do they care: Adults with elderly parents will pay to use this service because it will help ensure that their parents are having all of their needs met, including the need for companionship. Seniors who live alone often suffer from loneliness and social isolation, which has been linked to a bevy of negative physical and emotional effects, like high blood pressure, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease. By having a third party meet the senior’s daily needs, customers will find it easier to balance the needs of their own immediate families and careers. This will allow the time spent with their elderly loved ones to consist of true quality time.

What are your core competencies: I think my firsthand knowledge and experience help set me apart from others in this field. My experiences helping my grandmother have shown me both the needs of the seniors and the struggle of their families as the families try to meet those needs. Understanding both sides of this struggle is crucial to the success of this service because the people buying the service (the adults with elderly family members) are not the people who the service is directly helping (the seniors). This means that the service has to equally consider and understand the needs of both groups to be successful. I think that few others have experience on both sides of this issue, which helps set me apart.

I think that these elements fit together, even though they may seem somewhat disjointed at first glance. While it may seem simpler to market this service directly to seniors since they are the ones who need assistance, they often do not see themselves as needing this service since they are having this need met by their loved ones. The families are often the ones who struggle with balancing the needs of their families, careers, and relatives, and they therefore have the unmet need, not the seniors themselves. Also, the families of the seniors may have a better ability to pay for a service like this since they are still working, rather than trying to rely on fixed incomes like many seniors.

Feedback Memo: I am still awaiting feedback on my first idea napkin. That being said, I noticed that I underemphasized the value of companionship and that I had an overly broad and vague customer definition in my first idea napkin. Companionship is a crucial element of this service, and I barely mentioned it in the paragraph where I defined what the service was. I have added more details on the companionship aspect of the service in the “What are you offering to customers” paragraph in my second idea napkin. I have also updated my customer definition in “Who are you offering it to” to include more details about a prototypical customer for this service, including their values and education level. Further expanding on the demographics and psychographics of my prototypical customer helps me better define my potential market in this idea napkin.