William SircinNick Sprinkel

Steve Williams

Sep. 21, 2012

The StoryUnibike Theories, Inc. was conceived in 2010 at Sky Tree Artpocalypse, the infamous week-long experimental art festival that convenes every September in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Website designer Nick Sprinkel, a first time Sky Tree attendee, and Steve Williams, a brilliant but unpredictable Kettering dropout, met while standing in line for absinthe snow cones and immediately hit it off. They were soon wandering the festival grounds together in one hundred degree heat, taking in a panoply of hallucinatory sights and sounds.

But Sprinkel and Williams’ Sky Tree sojourn, and their newly forged friendship, took an unexpected turn a few days later. One evening they came across a crowd that was cheering on a wild-looking character as he jumped the gap between a pair of ten-foot-high dirt ramps while astride what appeared to be a homemade motorized unicycle. Again and again he flew through the empty air on his contraption, executing head over foot cartwheels and three hundred sixty degree pirouettes, as a girl in a bikini, fur boots, and waistlength dreadlocks stood directly beneath him and blew bright orange fireballs in his direction.

Williams and Sprinkel were both immediately captivated by the demonstration. Williams, who had been nicknamed “Dr. Frankenstein” by his Kettering classmates, fell in love with this beautifully absurd bit of engineering genius. Sprinkel, on the other hand, could not help but notice the number of onlookers who exclaimed that they wanted a motorized unicylce of their own.

After the last jump had been completed and the crowd had dispersed, Sprinkel and Williams approached the performer and introduced themselves. Thus they made the acquaintance of William Sircin, circus acrobat and self-proclaimed “stunt wizard.” He showed them his unicycle, which he had built himself on a dare from another professional stunt performer. Williams and Sprinkel, without having discussed it beforehand, then simultaneously asked if he would be interested in manufacturing and selling them. Sircin intitially scoffed at the proposal, but Sprinkel proved a convincing pitchman, and by the end of the week the three of them had formed a loose preliminary business plan.

They then spent the next six months searching in vain for a source of funding. During that time they continued to modify and perfect the vehicle’s design, and built up a list of friends and acquaintances—mostly other stunt performers—who expressed serious interest in owning one. Finally, in Spring 2011, they met Marcario Tatopolous, the twenty-one year-old son of an expatriate Greek billionaire. An aficionado of sky diving, hang gliding and other thrill-seeking pursuits, he instantly understood the appeal of the “unicycle dirt bike,” and agreed to provide seed capital for the venture. With it they purchased an old auto body repair shop in Portland, Oregon, converted it into a factory/showroom, and produced their first two Unibikes, which were sold to a couple of married stunt riders in Miami.

The TeamCEO: Stephen Williams. Although Nick Sprinkel initially assumed the leading role at Unibike

Theories, Williams very quickly demonstrated a preternatural talent for business organization. He was also instrumental in selecting the half-dozen technicians and designers who make up the company’s “floor team.”

CTO: Nick Sprinkle. Sprinkel’s experience as a web developer made him an ideal choice for the role of Unibike’s “Information Czar.” He directs the company’s internal information management systems, as well as overseeing its online presence.

CFO: Marcario Tatopolous. Marc was given the role of Chief Financial Officer as a condition of his agreement to provide funding. He was clearly motivated by a desire to prove his maturity and sense of responsibility in the eyes of his father. Nonetheless, he has acquitted himself very well in this role. He also has many contacts in the world of wealthy, bored young people who enjoy doing dangerous things.

COO: Williams Sircin. Sircin is the nominal Chief Operating Officer of the company, as well as its public face. He spends much of his time traveling and giving demonstrations of the product. Most of the company’s first customers were his peers in the acrobatic performance world.

The ProductsThe major product of Unibike Theories is, of course, the Unibike, a motorized unicycle designed

for dirtbike-style stunt riding and racing. Each Unibike is a custom-built product, created from scratch according to the client’s specifications. They have become something of a prestige item, and usually cost $12,000-$15,000 per unit. Each unit takes about a week to assemble. Parts are machined onsite. Initial inquiries are made ONLINE, with clients then being invited for one on one consultations to finalize the order.

Also for sale is a range of merchandise—t-shirts, helmets, bumper stickers, water bottles, etc.—bearing the company’s logo. This merchandise is available ONLINE only, at the company’s website.

Unibike Theories also provides an indoor track in a warehouse space adjacent to the factory. Unibike riding lessons are available here to the general public. It is also home to special Unibike stunt demos and races. This is, in reality, the company’s only “STOREFRONT” operation.

Customer DemographicsThe majority of people who actually purchase Unibikes belong to one of two groups:

1. Professional stunt riders or acrobats2. Young rich people

Unibikes are rather expensive and potentially quite dangerous, and they are not legal forms of street transportation in most states. As a result, they are not logical choices for the general population. They sell not more than a few dozen each year.

However, Unibike Theories offers basic Unibike riding lessons at their indoor track in Portland. These lessons are safe, relatively inexpensive, and make the Unibike experience available to anyone over the age of 18. This service provides Unibike Theories with a fairly large portion of its overall income.

MarketingStorefront/ Physical: • Promotional stunt demonstrations - Organize local demonstrations as well as traveling to various states to

promote product. • Print ads (newspaper/magazine) – Not only will we be using advertisements in the following magazines

and newspaper, but we may possibly be able to get some journalists interested in writing about our invention. Stunt demonstrations, online games and viral videos should directly help with this.– MotoCross Mag(http://www.motocrossactionmag.com/Main/Home.aspx)– DirtRider Mag(http://www.dirtrider.com/)– Popular Mechanics Mag(http://www.popularmechanics.com/)

– Newspapers (Seattle Times, The Oregonian)

• Television commercials:– These commercials would start out local to build a base, then move throughout the states depending on how

successful our business becomes. They should target our customer demographics.

Online: • Viral videos – In order to make the most appealing videos, our company might want to invest in some action-sport video

cameras that mount on a riders helmet. A short, well-organized, documentary posted on YouTube could attract a strong customer base.

• Online/App (for Andriod/Apple) games (Unibike Stunt Master)- Our CFO could invest in a companies that could design addictive games that users could play during their free time

• Banner ads – UniBike Theories, Inc. Could utilize banner adds within websites that are popular among our customer base. Consider the magazine websites above in addition to social media sites such as Facebook.

A Spoonful of Alphabet Soup: CRM vs. ERP

Our decision to choose a customer relationship management system over an enterprise resource planning system was based on two major considerations. As Laudon and Laudon (2012) explain, the purpose of an ERP system is to combine business processes within and even across organizations: “Information that was previously fragmented in many different systems is stored in a single comprehensive data repository where it can be used by many different parts of the business” (p. 51). We immediately concluded that such a system would be better suited to a very large organization with many employees and discrete departments. Since our business has only a handful of employees and a minimum amount of hierarchical organization, an ERP would be of little use to us.

What we do have is a relatively small customer base, for whom we provide a custom built product. Maintaining our niche, and expanding it whenever we can, is of utmost importance, and so we decided that we would be wise to adopt a customer relationship management system.

And the Winner is…

We have decided to give Salesforce.com: Professional Edition a try as our customer relationship management system. We are integrating this CRM into our business after several months of operation. Before that we were building our base by making bikes for friends and friends of friends, and relying on a very informal word-of-mouth system. We are now beginning to gain a bit of momentum, however, and have decided to experiment with an information system. This is particularly helpful when it comes to our “side business” offering riding lessons on our in-house dirt track. These lessons are our gateway to the “real world,” offering people outside of the limited demographic of circus performers and stunt professionals to whom we were initially catering.

We will certainly be in good company. Salesforce.com is hugely popular among enterprises both large and small; motor vehicle-centric businesses ranging from the independent vehicle sharing service wheelz.com to motorcycle manufacturing giant Honda claim to be highly satisfied with this particular CRM.

A (Slightly) Closer LookWe admit that we were initially attracted to Salesforce because of its status as the

elder statesman of CRM providers. Also, they offer a 30 day free trial, so we didn’t feel like we had too much to lose. This particular product does, however, have a number of additional attractive features. It boasts a highly detailed “dashboard” interface that organizes important sales and marketing figures for easy analysis. This may not have been important at the outset of our venture but as our in-house business grows and our Unibikes begin selling to more and more clients throughout the country and around the world, it will pay to have these numbers in graph form.

Another potentially helpful feature of the salesforce.com online CRM is Chatter, a sort of internal online network for members of the enterprise. Much of our marketing strategy at this point involves staging demonstration shows both locally and around the country, so any communication tool that we can find will be helpful to us. If one of us is on the West Coast, for example, coordinating a stunt show, we can provide immediate feedback on turnout, etc., using this tool. Chatter also lets us follow customers, but we’ll have to see just how receptive our clients are to using it (Lendino).

A More Slightly Closer LookOne of the nicest features of the salesforce.com product is the accompanying access to AppExchange, “an online marketplace of integrated third party applications built for the Salesforce.com community, managed by Salesforce.com and delivered by partners or third-party developers” (crmsearch.com). AppExcahnge provides salesforce.com users with the opportunity to modify their CRM more or less on the fly as new features become available. There are some 17,000 apps currently available through AppExchange, and Salesforce is planning to provide more based upon customer requests.Finally, we plan to take advantage of salesforce.com’s mass email campaign feature. This Professional Edition only allows a client to send 250 mass emails in a 24-hour period, however, we should be able to work around that. Any mass email campaigns will be centered on bringing in customers to participate in riding lessons on our in-house dirt track. We can use the mass email option to keep previous customers aware of new events and offers, while using social media and print ads in local magazines and newspapers to appeal to new customers.

Pros of SalesForce• SalesForce is an established, professional, and solidly built software as a service (SaaS) company. They

have been in operation since the 1990s and have proven themselves within the field.• SalesForce contains AppEchange, which offers many applications that will allow our company to create a

tailor made CRM system.• SalesForce continually offers new ‘innovative’ services such as Apex, ContentExchange and SuccessForce.

Each of these applications can further streamline our business. Apex is an object-oriented (like C++ or Java) development platform. ContentExchange manages content within the CRM system, while SuccessForce establishes an effective user community within the CRM system

• The user interface that SalesForce offers is simple to use with little or no training required. Therefore, this system is ideal for a company like ours that is just starting out with little or no CRM experience.

• Perhaps most importantly for our company, SalesForce offers cloud computing . Though we have a large sum of money to pull from, the affordability of SalesForce allows us to invest our money in other areas of the company in order to improve upon our product.

Cons of SalesForce• Although SalesForce does offer tailor-made software, there are over five-hundred million people using the

software. This limits how tailored their SaaS can be per each company. • If SalesForce does not have the appropriate solution for a business, Online-Crm.com notes that they

suggest the company build it using their Apex development software rather than build a solution for the user.

• Downtime is always an issue when using a cloud-based CRM system. Online-Crm.com has pointed out that SalesForce has had several outages over the past couple of years.

• Small Businesses can be left out of a service level agreement. SalesForce “selects” who they wish to make agreements with.

The Damages

A subscription to the Professional Edition of Salesforce will cost us $65 per month per user following the end of the 30 day trial period. The only users for the time being will be William Sircin, Nicholas Sprinkel, Stephen Williams, and Marcario; the total cost will, then, be $260 per month. Considering the fact that we have unlimited funds, this seems like a reasonable amount to expend on what is essentially an experiment. (Salesforce.com)

ReferencesKing, R. Salesforce.com reveals brief roadmap for AppExchange through 2013 (2012, September 18). Retrieved October 30, 2012 from

http://www.zdnet.com/salesforce-com-reveals-brief-roadmap-for-appexchange-through-2013-7000004441/

Laudon, K.C., and Laudon, J.P. (2012). Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Lendino, J. (n.d.) Salesforce.com Professional Edition. Retrieved October 27, 2102 from http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2364726,00.asp

Salesforce.com Independent Review. (n.d.) Retrieved October 27, 2012 from http://www.crmsearch.com/salesforce-paas-review.php

Salesforce Pricing and Editions (2012). Retrieved October 30, 2012 from http://www.salesforce.com/crm/editions-pricing.jsp?d=70130000000ryrr&internal=true

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Top 10 Cloud CRM Solutions. (n.d.). In CRM Cafe. Retrieved October 29, 2012, from http://www.crmcafe.com/cloud-crm.php

Wheelz Offers Customers a Smooth Ride (n.d.) Retrieved October, 2012 from http://www.salesforce.com/customers/stories/wheelz.jsp