I love myself so much, there’s 7 of me To enter a certain backstory, I apologize for disappearing for a little while, I have been working on something extraordinary that will disrupt the training tools for the events and marketing industry. My venture is called The Onboarding Company, and I presented this idea to hundreds of people during a competition. If you missed out on the presentation, I’d love to present what I have in store for you all, along with lovely slides! Enjoy Let me tell you a story. 2 summers ago, I got hired as a brand ambassador for a cleaning services company that a group of college guys founded. The idea was like any kid’s summer job: mow the neighbour’s lawn and wash their windows for cash. It sounded fun, and I was with 9 other ambassadors selling this service as we got paid commission. There was only one problem, and here it is. This is a piece of the PDF handbook we all received, and as you can read from the third line, us ambassadors would benefit from rigorous training and goal setting programs. There was only one problem, this was all the training we got. After that, we received a t-shirt with their logo on it to wear as we sold their service, hoping we would be the best staff ever. And so because of that “training”, I quit after a week and a half, going back to my old job for the summer. And it’s not because I gave up or anything, us interns weren’t trained properly. And now we’re here, almost 2 summers later, and I finally found a way to solve this problem. Cue, me and The Onboarding Company. This is my venture, it’s a micro learning platform for events staff, benefiting brand ambassadors alike. What we do is we automate training for marketing and events agencies. Why am I doing this? Here’s the problem: Out of all of the weekend trainings, webinars and in-person seminars that agencies and companies use as their training tools, the most used resource are PDF handbooks, just like what I had to read in the summer. Agencies are using antiquated training tools, and what’s the outcome of it all? There’s a lack of automation, so a great loss of time and money is spent on resources. There is little to no accountability, so most people forget the teachings that they read or listen to, and the information isn’t absorbed properly. Finally, there’s an inefficient delivery with the content given, since us millennials lack a proper retention span. Think about it this way: PDF’s were released in 1993, and in-person seminars existed since the beginning of time. I don’t know about you, but I think there should be a change. That’s why, The Onboarding Company introduces The OBC App. This is what the app does. It improves training, boosts knowledge, and ensures the success of staff. As you can see from the screenshot, a staff member who is signed up to the app under a certain team will be introduced to a module feed where they can choose a certain quiz. Once they enter a quiz, they will be lead to watch a video on what the brand, product or service is all about. After watching a video, they will have to answer a few questions on the video, making sure that the user is actually understanding and comprehending what they need to know. Another feature that is available is that, if a manager or team lead isn’t 100% sure if their staff knows what the brand product or service is about, the user is able to pitch them a video on it so that every person on the team can ensure success, so that your brand is properly represented. The reason why we’re attacking this market is because of the above. There are tens of thousands of events that happen in North America every day, and these events can range from the people handing out Metro newspapers at Yonge and Dundas, to a catering and events company setting up for a gala at the Hilton Hotel. There are 13,400 marketing agencies in North America that operate in this market, which they hire 300,000 brand ambassadors per year, which ends up being an incredible consumer base. Here’s a nice slide, numbers. There will be 3 streams of revenue that will be coming from The Onboarding Company, starting off with the basic stream, the subscription. If a marketing agency plans to onboard with us, each ambassador will cost $11 per month. For small businesses that do not want to take the time to contact a marketing agency and pay various fees to hire ambassadors, they will be able to curate their own content so that ambassadors who are interested in promoting their brand, they’ll be able to take a quiz on the platform so that these businesses are able to hire individual ambassadors to take on for an event or two, benefitting both sides. Finally, my favourite stream, probably because it’s the largest number on the slide. For white-label companies such as Coca-Cola or Procter & Gamble, not saying they don’t have the tech, but if they want to use this tech, they’ll be able to licence it for a simple payment of $10,000 per year. Here are some stats to validate it. A while back, we worked with a Toronto-based agency at an event held by CIBC to use this idea. And the result of it was this: There was a 100% completion rate of 253 quizzes done by 116 employees. After reviewing how the modules were, 94% of costs were saved thanks to this app. Incredible! Thanks to the help we offered, the agency is backing this venture up. I could be talking about the marketing strategy for more than 8 minutes, but here’s just a brief overview of what kinds of tactics will be done from The Onboarding Company, such as digital marketing, trade show visits, SEO marketing, and a referral program will be put into place. Here’s what you may be wondering about after all of this, the fund usage for the money I would potentially win. Most of the funds will be invested into developing the app. What’s great about the cost is that it’s cut down since we have the tech that we can licence, so the funding will cover most of the cost. Second to it will probably be marketing expenses. As for the sales strategy, I just wanted to point out that the projected core profit will probably come from the subscription fees, as well as the deals made with white-label companies. There’s a quote shown here that resonates well with what we’re trying to change, and it’s from a potential client of ours. Michelle is the VP of Client Services of eventive in New York and she said that she would love to hear more about our platform. She works with brand ambassadors all the time and we’re right, it is difficult to train them sometimes. Knowing that we’re able to cut time and money in half for many of these agencies and companies assures us that there’s potential in this market, and it needs to be saved. Overall, I thank you all for listening. And that’s it. That was the presentation at the Ted Rogers Management Conference. I know this isn’t a top-notch article, but it’s top-notch passion to build something to make the world a better place. If you have an idea, advice, people to meet, anything, message me or comment below! I’d love to get as much traction as I can for The Onboarding Company, because this may be just an idea today, but it may be the next big thing for the industry. Till next time, cheers.
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