Problem: I recently went to a Wal-Mart and discovered that the only way to check out was through self-checkout. Similarly, as Nick Huber noted on Twitter, fast food chains like Chick-fil-a have completely revolutionized how they do business to be low-touch and remote friendly.
Chick-fil-a’s innovation during c0vid has been absolutely astounding. Entire parking lot is now a blazing 4 lane drive thru. Inside of restaurant is now an assembly line. I bet they’re selling 50% more food, with 25% less staff, and we’ll never see the dine-in open again.
Nick presents a bold prediction (the world will never look the same again!) but what will the fast food world look like post-covid? More importantly, who will be enabling that innovation?
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Solution: This business would aim to be the leader in consulting insights and implementation of optimizing fast food chains to be remote friendly or more efficient. They would essentially be a marketing and operations firm that specializes in using insights from the COVID-19 pandemic (touchless services, remote-friendly services, and frequent cleanliness) to revolutionize how Fast Food businesses (and others) do business.
Perhaps the best comparable for a thematic-based firm is IDEO. As described by IDEO’s Design Thinking Lab while recounting their history,
IDEO is often credited with inventing the term “design thinking” and its practice. In fact, design thinking has deep roots in a global conversation that has been unfolding for decades. At IDEO, we’ve been practicing human-centered design since our beginning in 1978, and took up the phrase “design thinking” to describe the elements of the practice we found most learnable and teachable—empathy, optimism, iteration, creative confidence, experimentation, and an embrace of ambiguity and failure. We knew from experience that our clients valued these skills as much as they valued the designs we created for them. That moved us to share the mindsets, approaches, and skills of design thinking. You’ve likely heard the proverb: Give someone a fish, and they’ll have food for a day; teach someone to fish, and they’ll have food for life. That applies to design thinking. We want to teach people how to use design thinking in their lives, communities, businesses, and organizations.
Of course, the aim of this business would be to have such a lasting impact on the cannon of business 50 years after being founded. Some of the tactics that the business could employ in its playbook include:
Automation: It’s estimated that as many as 30% of jobs will be replaced by automation, especially the boring and repetitive ones and that by 2030, we lose 375 million jobs. While this is obvious, knowing what and how to automate things will remain a large problem. This business would offer this option as an option in their toolbelt for engagements.
Contact-less Innovation and Installation: In the US, the contactless payment market is expected to exceed $40 billion in 2019 and grow at 15% CAGR from 2020 to 2026. Given this huge growth in the market, there’s an opportunity for someone to be the expert enabler of record.
Workplace design: McKinsey recently released a report about the future of work where they claimed “We find that jobs in work arenas with higher levels of physical proximity are likely to see greater transformation after the pandemic, triggering knock-on effects in other work arenas as business models shift in response.” This business could grow off this trend by attempting to design (or redesign) new workplace arenas and spaces. What will the future hospitals look like? What about the future of hotels? What about workspaces? This business would attempt to optimize all of that.
Monetization: Fees, like the traditional consulting model.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)