Group Business Plan

Our group has chosen to create a water sports business. We are going to sell equipment for a variety of water sports as well as offer rentals for the equipment. Additionally, we are going to offer lessons for activities like snorkeling and parasailing. The name of our business is going to be Snappy Shark Watersports.

Originally, our group was planning to place our business in Coconut Grove, FL. This area in SL seemed like a good place for a business. However, when we met this past week, our group decided to change our place of business to Key West. After exploring Second Life, we saw that a lot of people had established businesses on islands they had made up and created on their own. Most of the places we visited had very low traffic coming to the area. Obviously, low visitors does not help create a successful business. Then we visited Key West, and we noticed that this area had a lot of traffic. We reasonably concluded that people are more likely to visit places in SL that actually exist in real life. Key West is a well known tourist and vacation area, and people are attracted to it. People know about the attraction to Key West in real life, so they are also drawn to the area in SL. In reality, businesses in Key West receive a lot of business from vacationers, and we feel that the same is true in SL. Since our target audience is mainly vacationers, we decided that Key West is the perfect area for our business.

Key West already has a lot of businesses, so we know that competition might be difficult. For this reason, we have also decided to try to partner with an existing resort or hotel. By doing so, both our business and the business of the hotel or resort would benefit. It would greatly help our starting business because we could easily get business from their already established clients.

The businesses in SL seem to follow many of the same trends and patterns of businesses in the real world. Recognizing the similarities, we have made decisions that we would make in a business setting in real life. Our decision to create a partnership is definitely a trend seen in real life businesses. Based on our research in SL, I feel that our business decisions will be successful in SL.