When I was little, I started up my first “business” with fellow classmate, Sara Shams. We called ourselves The K&S Homeworkers and went to work creating a menu of our services and prices. The problem with our strategy however, was that every decision we made was based on being profitable without ever considering what the customer required. Sure, we offered fridge cleaning because our moms never seemed to have time to do it themselves, but we based the prices on how much that new toy we wanted cost, and not on how much we thought our customers valued the service. We did nothing to track what types of services were needed and simply jumped from services that made sense, like vacuuming the living room, to selling powdered Gatorade on an upside down recycling bin (I couldn’t make this stuff up!) Our customer base (our parents) saw through our attempts and knew that what we had to offer was not valuable to them. Eventually we lost all control over our pricing and their buyer power drove us out of business. Perhaps we should have also taken into account that a mother can easily insist that the work be done for free.
K&S Homeworkers resurfaced in various forms throughout the years, but without a clearly defined business strategy or a way to manage what our customers were looking for, it never lasted long.
I stumbled upon this youtube gem, and instantly connected with the experience. Sure, the video is a little far fetched, but the CRM system that it’s advertising makes sense as a marketing solution, even just for a little neighborhood lemonade stand.
I’m not saying that we would have made it if we had had one of these systems, but it definitely would have put us in the right mindset. It would have meant that we’d realized the need to provide value before we could extract value.
Now that we’re both working on our commerce degrees, who knows if K&S Homeworkers will resurface in some new form?