Author: twx

  • Business Model Innovation: DIY Bakery

    Business Model Innovation: DIY Bakery

    It’s the third post of the Business Model Innovation series and also the third post of the year! In this new normal, the traditional bakery businesses have been hit very hard. While there is less people out on the streets, which means less customers, how can bakery businesses cope? This is where your opportunity lies! You can start your own bakery business right here and now!

    As usual, we will be doing our analysis with the business model canvas. Also, we would like to thank one of my colleagues, who always bakes and brings her best creations to share, which inspired me to write this post! There’s no hard and fast rule to run this bakery, so get innovative in the comments below!

    Unique Value Proposition

    We provide you the freshest baked artisan bread and pastry, right in the comfort of your homes!

    We deliver this UVP through a DIY kit of ingredients. Furthermore, this kit comes with a recipe, so you can replicate the best bakes, right in the comfort of your own kitchen.

    Customer Segments

    Younger people, who have picked up the hobby of baking, while they spend more time at home, are our potential customers. A large proportion are likely females, who may value surprises a lot.

    Key Partners

    The core partners of the business are Bakers, Patisseries and Chefs, whom we can co-innovate with. These partners will be key to develop the recipes which are not only wallet-friendly, but also easy to execute in the kitchen.

    Key Activities

    Some key activities includes prospecting for sales to customers, as well as enrolling more professional F&B veterans onto the platform.

    Key Resources

    Online channels for enablement and distribution of recipes.

    Supply and logistics network, which impacts the fulfilment of the orders.

    Customer Relationship

    We may want to consider having a platform, which is necessary for customers to stay excited and expressive. Therefore, creating an Instagram page where customers can showcase their best bakes weekly might be one way to go about it. Furthermore, we can run contests on the Instagram page, for customers to showcase their own creations, stand a chance to be featured on our Instagram, and win exclusive prices.

    Channels

    An omni-channel approach could be taken, which consists of both online and offline channels.

    We could have a website and application for e-commerce transactions. This can be supplemented with Instagram, which trends among the young people.

    We could do offline marketing at partner bakeries, where there may be foot traffic but not too many buyers due to hygiene concerns. By including a QR code to purchase our baking tools and ingredients online, the expertise in the physical bakeries will not go to waste.

    Cost

    You will incur the following costs:

    Cost of goods sold, basically to simply put it, the cost of the raw materials in the ingredients.

    Platform fees to maintain your website.

    Transportation and Supply chain, which is essential in bringing your products to the consumer.

    Marketing expenditure is also one of the costs which are incurred.

    (Rental does not apply in this case, as this business is more logistical and taps on the capital investment of existing F&B establishments.)

    Revenue

    You can consider these revenue streams:

    Per Unit Sales Model, where customers can order through a system.

    Subscription model, where customers enrol in a monthly membership to be surprised with new recipes every week!

    Advertisement revenue, which can be gotten through sponsored recipes with larger businesses, for instance Gardenia or Sunshine Bread factory in Singapore.

    At last, this is a DIY Bakery business summarised in one page! Do let us know if this worked for you!

    Are you interested in exploring other business ideas? Please drop us a note at businessmodel@tanweixiang.com.

    If you liked reading about this post, do follow us on our LinkedIn Page. You may also like to build your own ramen restaurant, hair salon or photo studio!

    Image Credits: Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

  • Working while Studying, Studying while Working (NBS Graduate)

    Working while Studying, Studying while Working (NBS Graduate)

    Welcome to our second post of 2021! As promised in the last post of last year to be more regular in posting the various topics in this blog, we are catering to our management enthusiasts who may be on campus, or learning in other ways. As analysed in our previous post, we have quite a sizeable portion of student readers, we also wanted to create a post more catered to professionals who may want to go back to school to increase knowledge too! I previously shared about why I decided to return to school, but this post will be more targetted at my thoughts on schooling while working, and also while I was working while schooling while on my internship at KavoKerr. Here are some of my thoughts:

    Improving Time Management Skills

    I have received various questions on how I manage to work and study at the same time for last year, while also running an active blog. How do I find all the time? One of the techniques which I used was to have more time management. Part and parcel of my learning journey was to create pockets of time reserved for various activities. This meant scheduling time on my calendar to complete my coursework, as well as internship or work activities without cannibalising either activities. It helped that there was a timetable at school and I planned my internship around my remaining modules. The true challenge for me this month is that now I’m entrusted with a major work project, and how I’m going to continue to deliver with excellence, I believe that time management will be key. Do read more about time management in this post.

    Learning to Prioritise

    Knowing that we have limited time, knowing how to set our priorities is crucial in ensuring that we get the most.

    For my current priorities, I ranked them as work first, classes and preparation next, blog post third (but rest assured you’ll see the posts you expect to see!), exercise, hanging out with friends, catching more sleep if possible (please don’t reduce sleep priority for too long, usually I’m an advocate that you sleep for minimally 8 hours a day, but please do not go less than 6 hours, I tried it before and do not recommend it!

    Knowing this is only a 4 months long arrangement with 1 month having to work weekends too, it is something which I could manage. But that being said, I strongly urge you to know when and what you should prioritise, to prevent burnout. (It’s not the best feeling to have, felt it when doing 7 CCAs in Year 1 at school but that’s a story for another day!)

    Maximising Value and Efficiency

    Something I learned about studying while working is that we can’t be too perfect at everything, as we have limited time. Gone are the days where we could do multiple revisions of the coursework that we want to submit, in order to try to get the perfect score at school.

    This is one of the times when we can apply Pareto’s Principle where we use 20% of the time to complete 80% of the work. While completing my coursework to a deliverable standard, I can gain 80% of the knowledge with just 20% of the time, this meant that I would be able to learn enough about what I am learning at school, without compromising on my work responsibilities.

    Well that’s all for today’s reflection. If you’re considering to work while studying to gain more experience or study while working to gain more knowledge, I would urge you to consider your time, priorities and how you can maximise your efficiency, in order to achieve the best of both worlds!

    If you liked our post, do bookmark this site, or follow us on our LinkedIn page as we look forward to creating new content for you every week.

    Image Credits: Original Image created by Tan Wei Xiang, using image by Wengang Zhai on Unsplash

    If you’re still in school, here’s a post for you to make the most out of your business school experience.

    If you are interested in pursuing the Mini Masters in Marketing Management, do check this post out on course reviews.

  • Using Google Analytics to Discover our Tops and Flops of 2020

    Using Google Analytics to Discover our Tops and Flops of 2020

    Welcome to our first post of 2021! As promised in the previous post to be more regular in posting the various topics in this blog, we are kick starting the year with analytics to discover our top 5 and bottom 5 posts (credit the tops and flops inspiration from one of my colleagues who loves to use that in her weekly review at work), to better understand the content which interests you, the reader!

    From the cover slide, we can somewhat see that the traffic has been rather cyclical, perhaps we can expand more on that trend in future but today, let us take a look at the top 5 and bottom 5 posts in the past 6 months. While we are currently 1200 users strong, you might also be interested in looking at our previous Google Analytics Analysis of our first 500 users.

    When dealing with analytics, as usual, we want to ask questions which we want to answer. Through the behaviour overview, and full report of Google Analytics we want to know what our best and worst performing posts were.

    What are our Top 5?

    We were able to discover our top 5 posts (In terms of viewership, from the highest to lowest):
    1. Nanyang Business School Business Analytics Module Selection Guide
    2. 3 Reasons Why I picked a Specialisation in Business Analytics at Nanyang Business School
    3. University Internship Hunting Guide (Tips from NTU NBS Graduate with 3 MNC Internship Experiences)
    4. General and Unrestricted Electives Guide – From NBS Business (Business Analytics) Graduate
    5. Which Major to Pick? Business Analytics vs Marketing (Ex-NBS Student)

    These 5 posts contribute to a total of 37% of all our page views, even though they made up about 25% of all content.

    What are our Flop 5?

    We also managed to pick out our flop 5 posts (From the lowest to highest in viewership):
    1. COVID-19 Pandemic: Should I Start Work or Go Back to School?
    2. Business Model Template: Photo Studio
    3. 6 things to do for 2 Hours in Stuttgart, Germany
    4. Integrating Analytics and Management: Where and How to Start?
    5. Key Takeaways from my In-office turned Work-from-Home Internship

    These 5 posts contribute to 4.2% of all our page views, much less than the 25% of all our posts in 2020.

    Additional Remark: The clear bottom fodders were the newer posts of Christmas Text Analytics and Hair Salon Business Model which we would exclude from the analysis as they have yet to pick up, but I urge you to take a read as they are really interesting posts!

    Making sense of the insights

    Our Age Demographics for readership shows that 60% are youths, and a good 40% are non-youth readers.

    From the top 5 posts, there is a clear indication that many students visit us and rely on the information posted here for advice on their curriculum needs. We are really humbled to be able to create impact for the student audience as we always try to pay it forward after learning from the knowledge of seniors and we urge you to pay it forward in future too!

    We also noticed that it was an interesting trend that 40% of our users are a non-youth audience, and we are heartened that we are able to communicate analytics and innovation to an audience that we initially did not imagine to create impact for. Do let us know which content you love in the comments below!

    For the flop 5 posts, one of the central themes which surround these posts is for instance, it being no longer specific to analytics, which we relaunched the blog on (yes we used to include lifestyle posts and travel.), or the very slight reference to the epidemic which shall not be named since this is risk of lowering the search engine score of this post (we instantly apply these insights!!). We hope to continue bringing new content and will continue to generate more content which caters to your hunger for learning about analytics, innovation and management!

    Additional note: We initially wanted to add in a text analytics, but we realised that there isn’t enough posts to do that on this post without getting just words that are repeated non-stop. If you liked the text analytics, you could look at our ranked 6th post, What I learned from Text Mining 400 Spam Comments on my Blog using R, to see what spam users like to write in our comments section.

    If you liked our post, do bookmark this site, or follow us on our LinkedIn page as we look forward to creating new content for you every week. Wishing you a Happy 2021!!!

    Image Credits: Original Image created by Tan Wei Xiang

  • My Reflections on 2020

    My Reflections on 2020

    2020 might be remembered in history as a year of widespread epidemic and economic recession by many, but to me, it was a really interesting year. It was a year which challenged me to do the best I could.

    1st Half of 2020

    Kick started my first half of 2020 with my final semester at Nanyang Technological University, taking 3 modules, inclusive of the legendary killer Capstone Business Analytics Module in NBS, Business Analytics Consulting. I had the chance to interact with the brightest minds from business, as well as computing, to deliver viable business recommendations in health insurance strategy to our client company, Aon. Click here you’re interested to know more about why I chose business analytics.

    As if dealing with one company was not enough, I took on a Regional Digital & Product Marketing internship with dental company KavoKerr, which recently spun off from Danaher Group. Through the internship, I had the chance to conduct market research, create marketing collaterals, do customer analytics, as well as social media marketing on Facebook. Halfway during my internship, it became a work-from-home arrangement, do read this if you’re interested to know how it is to experience both work in office and at home.

    Right after finishing my final class in business school, I managed to secure a job and it was in semi-lockdown in Singapore. Instead of just wasting the time away, I decided to upskill myself through distance learning on Coursera, here are some of my reflections.

    2nd Half of 2020

    Kick Started the second half of 2020 with my first job on a Graduate Programme with Dairy Farm Group, a multinational company in the retail and fast moving consumer goods scene. Managed to get a chance to learn a lot at work through rotations in Commercial, Operations and Supply Chain. I am really fortunate to have had the chance to interact with many senior business leaders as well as mentors to guide me along the way, and looking forward to more growth in my career. If you’re interested to find out more do reach out to my LinkedIn, where I have documented many posts on the experience too!

    For the last few months of the year, I made the choice to return to campus in NTU, to further my understanding of the business sector by taking on a MiniMasters in Marketing Management. While it has been tiring to juggle work with studies, it has been really fulfilling to tackle marketing problems with the brightest minds. (Some have even been in the industry for years!) If you’re considering going back to school while working, do click here!

    Last but definitely not the least, I am happy to have consistently posted blog posts this half of the year despite never quite getting myself started previously. Thank you all for the readership this year and we look forward to your continued support over 2021 where we will bring you more posts about analytics, management and innovation.

    My thoughts for 2021

    Moving forward to 2021, it will be a year of accelerated learning at work, while also completing my MiniMasters programme by the end of March! (Hopefully graduation too, but I am not too sure if it will ever happen now.)

    Most importantly, I realised I have not been the most consistent in posting this year, sometimes disappearing occasionally when busy. A resolution for this blog is to consistently generate at least one post for each topic in analytics, innovation and management on a monthly basis, while also not forgetting some of my readers who are still in school as well. Do look forward to more about my past university experience as well as a fresh employee at work perspectives.

    2020 has been great, 2021 will be even better!

    Tan Wei Xiang

    Do follow our blog by bookmarking the page, or following our LinkedIn.

    Image Credits: Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

  • Text Analysis: Christmas Song Lyrics

    Text Analysis: Christmas Song Lyrics

    Merry Christmas! (Slightly late!) Growing up, Christmas jingles seem to be the part and parcel of every Christmas season, being played at many retail spaces around Singapore (and I’m sure it is in many other parts of the world too.) We’ve decided to carry out analytics on some common Christmas Songs which we recall from a list found online. We then searched for the lyrics data through Google before analysing the data. Presenting to you the word clouds for Christmas. Hope you will like the post and do follow us on our LinkedIn.

    Twelve Days of Christmas

    Well it comes as no surprise for this to be the word cloud for the Twelve Days of Christmas, given that “for the x day of Christmas my true love gave to me … a partridge in a pear tree!” gets repeated 12 times and the whole phrase has no repeats.

    Jingle Bells

    Well surprisingly, sleigh appears to be the most common word used, because we only inputted the chorus in once, and the verses mentioned sleigh a few times.

    Santa Claus is Comin to Town

    Whoever wrote this song was definitely really sharp at using better in a lot of phrases, along with good coming in next place. Despite having shout and cry in the lyrics, the word better has been strategically used to give off the positive connotations in the song to be good and better. Did you realise that previously? Let us know in the comments below.

    Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer

    No wonder we remember reindeers are supposed to have red noses!

    Rockin Around the Christmas Tree

    Rock around the Christmas Tree! Another catchy song which repeats the same over and over. Maybe this is the secret formula to a great Christmas song.

    Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!

    Speaks for itself, just repeat the title non-stop and you’re ready to launch your next Christmas hit! Thank me when you’re famous.

    Jingle Bell Rock

    Well the writer of this song definitely took repeating the title non-stop to a whole new level, even including jingle and bell in the verses. Jingle was repeated for a total of 28 times!

    Last Christmas

    Well we finally have another formula for Christmas songs, it is to make the audience feel special and the idea of giving gifts and all through negative words with positive meanings. The writer is using the Santa Claus is coming to town formula to succeed.

    Conclusion

    Overall, if you want a hit Christmas song, think of Jingle Bells or the thought of giving, or just mentioning the word Christmas works too. You could give it a shot using negative lines but add words with positive connotations or just repeat the title non-stop.

    You are now on track to become the next Christmas Song writer! Hope you liked the post, do follow us on LinkedIn, and Bookmark this site. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

    Image Credits: Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

    Like more text analytics? Do look at our post here!