20A

Building social capital:

1. Gustavo, the owner and founder of LaZdorm. They provide various services like laundry, dry cleaning, regular cleaning, and other services for their college customers in the Gainesville area.

2. This is the domain expert because a major part of Gustavo’s business is cleaning dorm rooms for students here at UF, the exact thing I want to do.

3. I find this person because many of my friends use the service for laundry and others debated using the service to clean their room. I contacted him using the phone number on their website and we had a five-minute call.

4. One thing I am interested in in terms of cleaning other’s rooms and the service my company would offer is the time, cost, and amount of demand. I asked Gustavo a good amount of questions about this where he told me that a majority of the customers who have their room cleaned do so every other week, a good sign of repeat customers. Additionally, Gustavo said that it usually lasts about 2-3 hours, longer than I planned for my dorm cleaning service to take. Lastly, I was curious how the pricing works. Similar to my concept of a picture and size dimensions of the room being sent in, Gustavo informed me that he does the same practice to see the cost of the cleaning.

5. This will allow me to learn from an expert in managing a service the cleans other’s rooms in the exact location, market, and demographic that I am attempting to reach.

1. Ethan Paikowsky, a financial advisor, is selling his service of his investment programs to his customers, it is B2C much like my business.

2. This is the market expert since Ethan is well aware of how to provide a service to a customer, how to advertise to his client base, and what he needs to do.

3. I found Ethan because he is a close family friend to my dad. I was actually able to Facetime him to talk about treating and marketing to customers.

4. Ethan taught me how to properly treat a customer and to know who you are dealing with. Each customer is going to expect to be treated differently based on their demographic and personality quirks. Because of this, Ethan taught me how to better read the customer so that I could use this idea of who the customer is not only to advertise my service to them, but to better treat the customer so that they bring me repeated business and recommend me to a friend.

5. This will allow me to treat every customer uniquely and maybe adapt my company to be one known for customer care like Zappos or Amazon.

1. I emailed a worker at cleaningsupply.com. This company allows for wholesale cleaning supplies, something I would need in case of starting the company.

2. This is a supplier since they control a lot of stock in terms of cleaning supplies.

3. I found this company after doing heavy research into their reputation compared to other whole sellers of cleaning supplies. We talked over live chat email.

4. I was able to ask important questions about ordering custom order for products that are better with skin care and have a more muted smell, because if a dorm is such a confined space, you wouldn’t want the dorm room cleaning supplies to overpower the smell of the room. This allowed me to understand the type of product and inventory that I could purchase.

5. This will allow me to be known for possessing a superior cleaning product.