Meeting 5.0: 21.05.2015
The PickUsUp team decided to meet on Thursday, May 21st to discuss the final tasks that had to be distributed after the last class.
With the to-do-list already prepared, firstly we decided to go through all the points that needed to be worked on during the next days so we reached consensus on the tasks. Afterwards, we discussed some topics that required all group members to be present since they were relevant for the further development of our tasks. Finally, by the end of the meeting it was once again necessary to split some tasks so that the work could be done more efficiently.
As a basis for our meeting, one of the members had decided to write detailed notes of all the topics to be covered during the next two weeks, so that the project could be finished with quality to be presented to the investors and evaluated by the Professor. Firstly, we had to focus on the Financial Plan, including Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash-Flow Statement. Secondly, the validation of the hypotheses set at the beginning of the project needed to be finished, meaning that the interviews should be analyzed in the next days, and consequently the latest version of the PickUsUp Canvas Business Model had to be published on the website. In the end, we needed to decide which areas of our recent work still needed improvements and which group members would do the pitch to the investors on the 4th of June.
Regarding the Financial Plan, the team had to develop an approach to calculate initial projections for revenues as well as costs for the first three business years of PickUsUp. It was important to have the whole team gathered so that everyone was able to share their ideas and discuss the basic approach as well as the assumptions. The main part of the meeting was spent discussing the process of calculating the revenues and detailing the costs: We decided to consider the entire population living in our target area as a starting point from which we could deduct –based on various parameters- our specific target group and then calculate our revenues based on this target group. We researched the age distribution in the inner area of Lisbon, Oeiras, Cascais, Loures, Odivelas, Amadora and Almada, since these will be the areas we expect to cover until the end of the third year. Additionally, we gathered information about the number of people owning a car, using the car when going out and driving after alcohol consumption. We combined all of these characteristics with the percentage of usage we expect from our potential target group for the first year of service and discussed a reasonable growth for this penetration rate for the second and third year of service. The calculated number of potential users was then combined with information about the average distance of a trip of PickUsUp, the price per kilometer, and considerations of a price discrimination for students and non-students.
As far as the costs are concerned, we decided to use the approach that one of our group members had developed before (for the Presentation IV) and adjust it according to the feedback we had obtained during the last class. We were advised to have as little fixed costs as possible and therefore we analyzed all of our current cost positions and tried to transfer as many as possible to variable costs: the most important factor here is the payment for our drivers. Instead of having employees, PickUsUp will use freelancers that went through a rigorous selection process. They will be paid a share of the revenue we generate by each service.
Eventually, after achieving basic consensus on the financial plan we distributed tasks for the following days with the repeated objective of enhancing our efficiency. Again, we distributed the tasks according to the previous work assignments and areas of experience, for example concerning topics like the interview process or the costs and revenues. Regarding the other group members, one was assigned the responsibility to start the preparation of the financial statements we needed to develop while yet another member was selected to review everything we have done so far and determine potential areas of improvement.
