Assignment 4 - Forming an Opportunity Belief

My opportunity belief lies within my industry field of construction.  We all know how much everyone hates paperwork.  Managing construction projects involve a TON of paperwork regularly.  With a ton of information that always seems to be sitting in one document that constantly needs to be referenced, revisited, or fished out of an email inbox to complete, much of the process seems repetitive, but no effective solution to maximize this productivity.  My opportunity belief would be a software that takes in files that are reused on every project (i.e. permit applications for the city, inspection requests, subcontracts, pay applications, etc.)  All of these hundreds of files all require similar information:  project number codes (often separate for owners, architects, and the contractor), building addresses, owner information, contractor information, subcontractor state license numbers, etc.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was just one spreadsheet that asked every single one of these questions upfront and prefilled all of these documents?  This would literally save days worth of time for people across the board.  Yes, it would take a lot of programming to create.  Yes, it would take a decent amount of time upfront to sync PDFs and Excel Spreadsheets to this one file. But look think of the hours and days that would be saved on the backend of having hundreds of documents already prefilled and ready to be sent off.

Interview 1: I spoke about my idea to my direct overhead advisor the other week.  He, just like everyone else in the company as well as every other contractor that is known to man and likely a ton of other industries, can resonate with the amount of time that would be saved with software that handled this all upfront.  He was in love with the concept of software that would handle such a large part of our everyday tasks. 

I asked him about his reservations with the idea, and he echoed my previous holdbacks.  His main point that stuck with me was the fact that this type of software would need to have a capability to be personalized to the needs of whoever is using it, whether a contractor, an accountant, a salesman, etc.  

Reflection: His feedback is vital to giving me the opportunity to be more reflective on my entrepreneurial ideas as well as welcome outside and objective opinions.  I believe that it is integral to the entrepreneur to have the end-user in mind in order to make the world a better place.

Interview 2: I also shared this opportunity with the owner of my company, Domenic Scorpio, an entrepreneur in himself.  As a fine believer in processes and procedures, he was also quite thrilled with the idea of a software that would expedite so many processes. 

He gave some input on a way to further develop the idea.  Not only would it pre-fill a multitude of documents, but it would have a server or file folder with log dates to track the documents on whether or not they've been sent out or processed.  This would develop my idea from not only a pre-filling software, but a schedule and document management software as well. This would not only create efficiency with the load of paperwork, but also ensure success for the end-users to stay on track with every requirement for each project.

I soon realized that I may actually be on to a real idea that could potentially make a lot of money, so I decided to not share my idea with anyone else.  Sharing my idea definitely allowed it to develop into a stronger and more detailed opportunity.  This reinforced the idea that entrepreneurs should absolutely take in customer feedback (positive and negative) in order to deliver a true quality product.