Idea Napkin: Part 2

Who are you?

As previously mentioned, I am currently studying Psychology and Management interested in a career of employee development and training, specifically in the Human Resources field. My business idea is centered on self-defense training and crisis management education, specifically for all women, including women of color. With my passion for employee development and training, I hope to transfer those skills and abilities into this business venture and continue on empowering individuals 

What are you offering to customers?

The service is a workshop course that provides self-defense techniques and educational workshops for women and marginalized. First time members can do a course for free if a friend referenced them, but after that classes will cost approximately $15. These self-defense workshops will incorporate some physical techniques, such as Krav Maga, karate, and some judo. In addition, we will incorporate action and case scenarios in which members and instructors can act out hypothetical violent scenarios. Crisis management education will also become a function of the course, where presentations and knowledge on gun violence, domestic abuse, and assault will provided by professionals in those areas. These presentations will provide insight on the necessary dialogue, communication styles, and precautions that need to be taken during these types of crises. We hope that as our service starts to grow and become more popular, we could potentially offer monthly memberships at $20, with four sessions per month.

Who are you offering it to?

The demographic my business will specifically cater to is females between the ages of 17-30 who live in big, urban cities. We hope we can gauge interests and feedback by posting google forms on our social media pages regularly. With this notion, we can then learn how to better cater to our main demographic.

Why do they care?

The portion of persons age 12 or older who were victims of violent crime increased from 0.98% in 2015 to 1.14% in 2017.

In a perfect world, we would not have to fear for our sense of safety. But since we do live in a society where violent crime, especially on women and minorities, is on the rise, being able to acquire the basic skills to defend yourself is becoming more and more integral to peoples’ lives. With violent crimes increasing and life expectancy decreasing in the U.S. from gun violence, assault, and suicide, we need to find a way to better empower our people, specifically white women and women of color who fall victim to these factors. The mission of the business is to feel a sense of security in your neighborhood and be able to live to tell the story. We want to empower our customers and make them know that they are strong enough to deal with these kinds of situations if the opportunity presents itself.

What are your core competencies?

• Empowering women through strength-building workshops and crisis management education
• Not your average gym membership, healthy mind, body, and soul is at the root of our business and most importantly a sense of security, safety, and confidence to conquer any precarious thing life hits you
• There are free programs that provide basic self-defense skills (e.g., Rape Aggression Defense (RAD) program) but they only offer a limited number of sessions. Our program is on-going and is always finding new ways to educate and exercise new self-defense techniques. 
• We believe in giving our dedicated members an opportunity to become instructors and teach these workshops too.

Evaluation

I believe I did a better job at evaluating my product this time around. I described the service more specifically and expanded on the mission of the business. Overhead and rent on performing these workshops is still a work in progress. But if I want to start small, I could reserve space on-campus for free and use that opportunity to provide free services for interested members. It would help with marketing the business and seeing what kind of initial feedback I’ll receive.

Feedback

A lot of the feedback I received on my first Idea Napkin was centered on providing a service that will turn a profit. I reflected on it a bit, and I think increasing the price of the sessions might be a good idea, especially if the benefits are marketed well enough. In my core competencies, I even go about differentiating between the traditionally free RAD programs to this particular service. I make the distinction that my service is an on-going program, not limited to a certain amount of sessions such as other self-defense programs. Hopefully, this distinction will be enough to grow the brand of the service.