Dating Matchmaking Service Business Plan

Suzie Butterfly received her Bachelor of Arts from Colorado College. Upon graduation she moved out to the West Coast where she went to work at Yahoo! as employee number 234.

Initially she went to work in their search engine division as a project manager. Suzie spent three years in this department, increasing sales by 333%.

After the third year Suzie was looking for a change and moved over to Yahoo! Personals in its infancy. Suzie was a natural here, intuitively knowing how to develop the site to provide the greatest value to individuals.

After two years with Yahoo! personals she was beginning to get burnt out. She wanted to take some time off and then start her own business, being her own boss.

Feeling comfortable financially (a result of stock options exercised), Suzie left Yahoo! and traveled for eight months. Upon returning Suzie settled in Denver hoping to start her own matchmaking business.

Having spent a while in Yahoo! Personals, she saw the market opportunity and thought that she could make a go of it on her own. Upon her return she began writing a business plan to verify what she believed intuitively, that this could be a profitable (and enjoyable) venture.

7.1 Personnel Plan

The personnel plan is forecasted to have Suzie working exclusively for the first several months, after which she will hire a part-time worker to help with administrative duties.

She will employ a consultant to develop and maintain the website. Suzie will be responsible for operational activities, marketing activities, and some of the accounting. In terms of the operational activities, she will be responsible for vendors relations, customer service, and business development. Suzie will also undertake the marketing activities.

In addition to the marketing activities mentioned in section 5.2, Suzie will make a point to participate in guerrilla marketing which is a grass roots style of marketing where she will be out mingling with perspective customers, “talking up” the services that CompuDate has to offer.

Suzie will also set up the accounting system on QuickBooks Pro. While she will do some of the accounting, much of the general data entry or bookkeeping with be accomplished by the part-time employee.

The employee will be responsible for a wide range of odds and ends activities such as the bookkeeping, customer support, and much of the clerical activities. The leveraging of the part-time employee and consulting assistance will be based on the philosophy that Suzie should only be participating in value-added activities and that she should have a lower paid employee taking care of responsibilities that do not require Suzie’s skills or attention to detail.