Katie’s business concept.

Katie’s business idea does not need a service mark. The approach must be successful. An example is
McDonalds, they make hamburgers, fries, and milkshakes. Those are inventions that are patented by the
corporation. Their consistency is their product. Here the quality of the service that Katie provides is the
unique selling point of her business.

Katie’s business would be working with various engineering societies and colleges; thus, they are
important stakeholders in the business. Her employees would also be extremely important for the
business as she needs to offer personalized services. These employees also need to be capable to
understand the wide variety of fields that their clients could be from. If they are ready to leave and start
a service on their own, then Katie’s business could suffer. Thus, the employees need to be treated right.

The most important consideration is the value for money and thus the financials must be planned out
perfectly. A study to understand how long and what it takes to offer personalized job counseling, which
would include reviewing resumes, cover letters, doing mock phone interviews, and answering various
job search questions will enable Katie to understand what tools or processes she can use to aim for the
value of money that she is offering in comparison to competitors. Phone and email tools could be used
to automated operations and enable the complexity of personalization. Customer Relationship
Management software would be needed for such an operation.

The actual service provided to the client would be personal and thus involve a person’s time. This person
would need to be paid appropriately during times of various workloads. Thus, how the employees are
paid is an important question for Katie to answer. Initially it could be a part time based approach, she
could create a network of recruiters or HR managers and have them help, but that approach means
anyone could copy this business.

All operations would need to be automated. Examples are financial processing, scheduling, measuring
customer satisfaction and engagement metrics. Any operation that could be automated should be
automated as that is the only way Katie would be able to distinguish her business from all the highly
personalized resume reviewers already in the market.

She could end up creating a platform for approved job counsellors to work with clients. Anything and
everything apart from the interaction between the job counsellor and the client could be automated to
minimize operational costs. Standard operating procedures could be devised for common discussions.
The access to these standard operating procedures and the operations platform could be bound by a
Non-Disclosure Agreement so that any employee who leaves cannot copy the business with access to
these trade secrets. The key is to find the fine balance between automating operations, enabling
personal interactions between the job counsellor and the client and keeping track of customer
engagement metrics. A CRM platform could be immensely helpful. An example to study could be
TopResume. They offer professional job counsellors but their platform in their unique selling point.

Sathish Kasilingam Technology Entrepreneurship Assignment 10