After revising my social venture plan, my focus will be more local to the area that I grew up in. The majority of stakeholders in my business will be part time supporters who offer their services based on a passion for fixing cars and helping those in the local community who are struggling economically.
I’m actually convinced that my venture will be even more dependent on people's direct inputs than a traditional start-up business. But my challenge will be making these inputs constructive to the overall goal. It seems relatively easy to find people who can unite around a cause if it’s their primary career focus and you’re able to offer them some kind of defined salary or opportunities for recognition. In pursuing talent to help with my venture, I can’t really offer those types of incentives. The people that I’m targeting will be volunteers with families, full time jobs, or other interests. Although one of the goals is to find interested mechanics in training and vocational students, this will require an even more careful balance. The use of a school’s facilities in human resources will require special care in maximizing the learning potential for these participants and respecting that they’re not yet ‘professionals’.
In moving forward, I will need to give more definition in focus to the process of restoring the cars and set things up so that a project can easily transition between people with minimal downtime. This will help safeguard against high volunteer turnover, or simply the fact that a single person won’t likely have the time to do a full restoration completely alone. Initially, my focus will be on defining the roles and positions within my venture and in the value creation process. Each project must be broken into chunks, or stages. Because restoring a car is a complex set of activities, I eventually want to implement a stage gate process to make the strategy clear to all volunteers and ensure the most consistent path to efficient restorations. While I do need to establish ties to funding and volunteer sources to help me establish and manage the venture, these will likely be arms length relationships. In the day to day operations of my business, having a strong process should help keep things running smoothly even if there is very little structure in the management team itself.
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