An Entrepreneurial Business Venture

Executive Summary

This business report looks at a new venture that could be considered entrepreneurial, disruptive and innovative. It looks to the background of the venture, the reasons for choosing the target markets, strategies used to target those markets and problems encountered. It then looks at potential solutions to those problems, and makes recommendations for the survival of the business while those solutions are implemented.

Background

With 27 years’ experience in vocational education and corporate training, and 37 years’ experience in management, I decided this year to start my own business school. As a start, I decided it was essential to choose my target groups (Alves Gomes & Meisen, 2023). I will be targeting two groups. The first is injured and traumatised law enforcement officers and the second is corporate clients. While these may seem incongruous, they reflect my background.

The first target group comes from having spent three years as a prison officer at Goulburn Gaol, between 1986 and 1989, and having left the job with PTSD and schizophrenia as a result. Knowing the trauma law enforcement officers go through, I have committed this year to helping those afflicted by such trauma to retrain into other areas when they are no longer able to continue in law enforcement.

The second target group comes from my experience in corporate training as an employee, and the needs for higher level training for managers in Australian businesses and corporations (Hogan, Charles & Kortt, 2021). Having commenced in vocational education in 1996, armed with a Certificate IV in Training and Assessment and a background in computer programming from Sydney Water Board and The National Bank, I was immediately thrust into the corporate world. I trained large organisations and government employees in Australia and China. I decided to start the business school as a lean start-up (Shepherd & Gruber, 2021), as I believed it could be self-funding from the beginning.

However, the problem has been that, as an unknown in the industry, it has proven difficult to recruit students and organisations. The second problem is that, dealing with public servants in the police services and bureaucrats in the private organisations, they prefer not to take risks on an unknown entity. These could be described as political uncertainties from the organisations involved (Kotey & Sorensen, 2014) It is difficult to break into the market. I believe these difficulties can be overcome with time, and I have set out some of the planned solutions below.

Solutions

To avoid the costs of setting up and registering as a vocational education provider, I first formed a partnership with an existing registered training organisation (RTO) (Polesel, Klatt, Blake & Starr, 2017). There are eleven qualifications on scope that suit my business school, but I chose to only offer four in the beginning, so as not to over-extend. These are nationally recognised throughout Australia, and all qualifications are delivered online. I am qualified to deliver and assess all eleven qualifications I chose, having acquired a degree in management, an advanced diploma in adult education and a graduate certificate in TESOL.

Additionally, I partnered with an international training group to deliver eight levels of non-accredited training to corporate clients, both in Australia and internationally. In both partnership arrangements, I am required to recruit my own students and organisations, hire trainers, and pay the partner schools a percentage of enrolment fees as commission. This problem is overcome by the fact that I am qualified and experienced to deliver all the qualifications.

The next problem was marketing, and I addressed this by applying the principles in Luan & Sudhir (2010) in addressing the marketing needs. I created course outline leaflets in PDF format for each of the four accredited courses, and for each of the eight levels of non-accredited courses. I did the design and formatting myself to minimise costs.

I looked to social media, and applied the principles used in Etemadi, Hon, Murphy & Manley (2020). I designed and created a website, and made these leaflets available for download from the site, again to minimise costs. The site also has links on every page to the courses available, as well as satisfying all government requirements such as privacy and refund policies. Additionally.

I have included a blog, which features daily articles on Australian history and business tips, with links at the bottom of each post to the courses available. Since March, subscribers to the blog have increased to 2,700. A daily newsletter is sent out to each of these subscribers, again containing links to the courses available. I also have business pages on the major social media platforms, and Facebook in particular has been quite successful, with almost 700 followers.

The next step was to recruit students, and I started this by writing to the police and corrective services government ministers in each state, advising them of my business school services and my background. Several ministers have responded, and referred me to senior managers in their departments, who in turn have referred me to state WorkCover authority management.

While this has been met with enthusiasm by lower-level managers, mid-level managers in the organisations involved have been risk averse to engaging new contractors (Ang, Sun & Yao, 2018). Much of this seems to be to provide the lowest cost service, at the expense of higher quality.

At the same time, I compiled email and phone lists of the largest companies in Australia and in major developing countries, including Africa, Asia and South America. I sent emails to each of these companies, outlining my corporate training experience, particularly in China with the Fortune 500 companies. To date, only a few have responded, as expected. Follow up emails and phone calls need to be made to these organisations in the near future, and a strategy needs to be designed for doing this.

In this instance, I was met with resistance again from small to mid-size organisations who preferred lower costs to higher quality, and resistance from larger organisations who saw a new entrant to the field as a possible risk with data sharing (Sexton, Shepherd, Duke-Williams, & Eveleigh, 2018). There seems to be a suspicion that trade secrets could be misused.

I also compiled email and phone lists of the Education or Industry Ministries in every developing country in Africa, Asia and South America, as well as their Ambassadors in Australia, and sent emails to each of them. The emails outlined how I had previously delivered nationally recognised Australian qualifications and corporate training to organisations in China, and how this could benefit their own countries’ developing economies. In particular, I focussed on Africa and the Middle East, as these seem to be the next economies that will see major growth, and are suited to microproviders such as myself (Lehdonvirta, Kässi, Hjorth, Barnard & Graham, 2019) The reply rate with this strategy was better than with the international corporations, but still low. I managed to get a meeting with one foreign Ambassador in Australia, but need to follow up with more emails and direct phone calls.

Applicable Theories

This business model could be described as disruptive as far as retraining of injured or traumatised workers is concerned. In the past, such training has been conducted face-to-face by people that have not necessarily experienced such trauma, and have no specific training in dealing with traumatised students. The use of technology and online training would be new in rehabilitation services, similar to what is described in Cukier (2019). Workers transitioning to new careers need to become tech-savvy, and online training is a major catalyst that would enhance that.

This venture could be considered a commercialised innovation (von Schomberg & Blok, 2021), in that it is an innovation that was designed to deal with changes in societal expectations and requirements. In this instance, it was a temporary business model innovation (Clauss, Breier, Kraus, Durst & Mahto, 2022) designed to deal with changes in business brought on by COVID-19, but will probably extend as a permanent business model. Additionally, it seeks to address a need in society, which is the retraining of injured law enforcement officers. The current situation is that these officers are simply retrained by a trainer who usually do not have the experience or capacity to retrain the officers.

WorkCover will engage anybody with a Certificate IV in Training and Assessment (TAE) to retrain the officers. However, the TAE simply prepares a trainer to satisfy the compliance requirements for the award they are delivering, and does not adequately prepare a trainer for the complexities of actually delivering training.

Consider, for example, that primary and secondary school teachers need a degree in education to operate in their teaching fields (DET, 2017). Such degrees cover matters such as interpersonal communication, emotional intelligence and behavioural psychology, which are essential for effective teaching. These are not required in vocational education. Additionally, the affected law enforcement officers are suffering from trauma and anxiety that a TAE cannot prepare the trainer to deal with, and the result may be that efficiency and effectiveness of the retraining may be below the officers’ and government’s expectations.

In the business model I have adopted, all trainers would be degree qualified in vocational education, with additional professional development qualifications in dealing with students with disabilities, including anxiety. The trainers would also be required to have extensive and current vocational experience in the fields they are training in. As far as I am aware, no other vocational education provider has these requirements, apart from high schools that deliver vocational education qualifications as part of their curriculum (DET, 2017).

The business model is also entrepreneurial in that it is addressing a work challenge and fulfilling a social purpose (Rowe & Christie, 2008). The work challenge and the social purpose are to provide a better service to injured and traumatised workers. Entrepreneurship also involves creating, launching and managing a business or social enterprise (Rowe & Christie, 2008), and this venture does all three of those.

Recommendations

To overcome the problems identified, that is the risk aversion of mid-level managers, I will need to develop new strategies (Breunig & Skjølsvik, 2020). The first of these is to establish communication with the heads of the organisations, rather than employees at middle management level. In the case of the Police Services, I need to go back to the government ministers who have shown keen interest in the project, and set out a stronger case for it to proceed.

In the case of the private organisations, I will need to establish contact with executives in the C-Suite. It is also worth contacting the industry ministers in the countries I have already contacted, and building a stronger case, with business plans, to sell the idea that such a venture would be beneficial for their respective countries.

Realising that this will take time, and that the new venture needs to generate cash flow to survive, an alternative market needs to be addressed that will provide these cash flows quickly. I have decided to partner with student recruitment agencies to target the mainstream student base, particularly in rural and remote areas where need is great (Turner, 2023), and also in developing countries. To this respect, I have created a list of about 600 student recruitment agencies in Australia and internationally, and have started organising meetings with them. It is highly desirable to further develop these relationships in the future.

Conclusion

The business model chosen has potential to grow and prosper, but dealing with bureaucracies will be time consuming and cash flow needs to be maintained while this aspect of the business is developed. In that respect, alternative income sources need to be established as a means to an end. In this case, recruiting domestic and international students from traditional sources provides this, and should be an ongoing source of revenue.

References

Alves Gomes, M., & Meisen, T. (2023). A review on customer segmentation methods for personalized customer targeting in e-commerce use cases. Information Systems and e-Business Management. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-023-00640-4

Ang, M., Sun, J., & Yao, Q. (2018). On the dual representation of coherent risk measures. Annals of Operations Research, 262(1), 29–46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-017-2441-3

Clauss, T., Breier, M., Kraus, S., Durst, S., & Mahto, R. V. (2022). Temporary business model innovation – SMEs’ innovation response to the Covid‐19 crisis. R & D Management, 52(2), 294–312. https://doi.org/10.1111/radm.12498

Cukier, W. (2019). Disruptive processes and skills mismatches in the new economy: Theorizing social inclusion and innovation as solutions. Journal of Global Responsibility, 10(3), 211–225. https://doi.org/10.1108/JGR-11-2018-0079

Department of Education and Training (DET). (2017). Perceptions Are Not Reality: myths, realities & the critical role of vocational education & training in Australia. Canberra, Australia.

Etemadi, R., Hon, C. K. H., Murphy, G., & Manley, K. (2020). The use of social media for work-related knowledge sharing by construction professionals. Architectural Engineering and Design Management, 16(6), 426–440. https://doi.org/10.1080/17452007.2019.1688637

Hogan, O., Charles, M. B., & Kortt, M. A. (2021). The value of public business education in Australia: challenges and opportunities for decision makers. International Journal of Educational Management, 35(7), 1538–1555. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEM-05-2021-0197

Kotey, B., & Sorensen, A. (2014). Barriers to small business innovation in Australia. Australasian Journal of Regional Studies, 20(3), 405–429.

Lehdonvirta, V., Kässi, O., Hjorth, I., Barnard, H., & Graham, M. (2019). The Global Platform Economy: A New Offshoring Institution Enabling Emerging-Economy Microproviders. Journal of Management, 45(2), 567–599. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206318786781

Luan, Y. J., & Sudhir, K. (2010). Forecasting Marketing-Mix Responsiveness for New Products. Journal of Marketing Research, 47(3), 444–457. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.47.3.444

Polesel, J., Klatt, M., Blake, D., & Starr, K. (2017). Understanding the nature of school partnerships with business in delivery of vocational programmes in schools in Australia. Journal of Education and Work, 30(3), 283–298. https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2016.1165344

Rowe, P. A., & Christie, M. J. (2008). Civic entrepreneurship in Australia: Opening the “black box” of tacit knowledge in local government top management teams. The International Journal of Public Sector Management, 21(5), 509–524. https://doi.org/10.1108/09513550810885804

Sexton, A., Shepherd, E., Duke-Williams, O., & Eveleigh, A. (2018). The role and nature of consent in government administrative data. Big Data & Society, 5(2), 205395171881956–. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718819560

Shepherd, D. A., & Gruber, M. (2021). The Lean Startup Framework: Closing the Academic–Practitioner Divide. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 45(5), 967–998. https://doi.org/10.1177/1042258719899415

Turner, K. (2023). A digital career choice: rural students’ perceptions of the value of digital media learning based on their career aspirations. Australian Educational Researcher, 50(3), 625–641. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-022-00508-5

von Schomberg, L., & Blok, V. (2021). The turbulent age of innovation. Synthese, 198(S19), 4667–4683. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01950-8