Using Social Media for Meal Prepping Business Research Paper

Introduction

The implementation plan for the Meal Prepping business is to design the organizational structure: the company will necessarily have to be organized as a non-profit with 501(c)3 status to ensure that big donors can write off donations, which is a major incentive for many who wish to support non-profits. The business will need to be self-sustainable, however, and cannot count on relying on federal dollars, as the government itself is already heavily in debt and future years are likely to see big cuts in federal spending. The business’s success will thus depend upon partnering with other local businesses to gain visibility, using crowdfunding (Zhou & Kuo, 2018) to gain seed money that will support early investment in the business’s development, and using social media in the same way Elon Musk at Tesla has done to turn his $10 a share electric vehicle car company into a world-saving environmentally-friendly car company with a mission (Malhotra & Malhotra, 2016). In other words, to get this business to grow it needs to be marketed as an idea that people want to get behind and support.

Physical and Technological Resources

Physical resources depend on capital accumulation, and as a non-profit with a mission-oriented vision for the business the appeal to donors will be the articulation of the vision and the ability of the company to get that vision out to the public. Social media will be a tremendous help in this avenue, as it will allow the company to gain traction at the grassroots level and seek celebrity endorsement (Stever & Lawson, 2013), which can greatly enhance brand visibility and assist in crowdfunding to get the company’s brick-and-mortar store open and operating. Sponsorships are another effective way of providing an income stream (Lunt & Nicotra, 2018).

The technological needs of the business are going to be substantial as well. The modern app business model used by Uber and Lyft as well as Doordash and other service oriented businesses is one that could be utilized here as well. Families that want to sign up for meal delivery can use the app to place an order and ensure that the child will have a meal at dinner time. The organization will be able to rely on volunteers for delivery of meals after some training on how to engage in safety and security best practices. The volunteer delivery service will require that the business is able to gain suitable traction with people who want to help feed American children in a way that does not require them to have to work in a soup kitchen or homeless shelter, which can be an off-putting idea for many and keep them from serving those in need. The delivery app will allow those who want to volunteer and feel good about contributing to the betterment of the community to pick up the meals from the meal prep location and then deliver them to the waiting children. The app will need to be developed and an infrastructure built out at an estimated $35,000 based on going labor rates for app development. Volunteers and full-time employees will be…

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…so too is solid leadership, which has of late been one of the big problems facing Musk as CEO of Tesla (Yauney, 2014). There will be a need to coordinate and collaborate with others—from kitchen management to volunteer management to IT support and so on. There will also need to be coordination with community leaders who want to assist in helping to spread the word about making sure kids are fed and helping to gain support from big donors like Fortune 500 companies, which are bound to have a stake in the community and have a corporate social responsibility program that will allow them to contribute in an effort to promote and foster greater sustainability. The protection of intangible assets such as intellectual property will be dependent upon the ability of the company to patent its approach, though this is likely not to be successful. The best protection will be a solid build-out of the infrastructure and a quick capture of the market as there is no other organization out there doing this type of work.

Conclusion

The implementation plan for this business is to start by raising awareness of the company’s mission. As a non-profit it will depend upon having the support of donors, both big and small, and that means having a very visible and appealing brand. Messaging is going to be highly important and that is where the social media campaign must come into play. This campaign will have to be monitored and reviewed to make sure that channels are being maximized and networking is done correctly.…