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Topic: Student Questions
Business Project For An Engineering Student
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The concept behind Formula SAE is that a fictional manufacturing company has contracted a student design team to develop a small Formula-style race car. The prototype race car is to be evaluated for its potential as a production item. The target marketing group for the race car is the non-professional weekend autocross racer. Each student team designs, builds and tests a prototype based on a series of rules, whose purpose is both ensuring on-track safety (the cars are driven by the students themselves) and promoting clever problem solving
To be clear this is an extra-curricular event and is in no way related to a homework assignment.
Team website: https://www.fsae.uvic.ca/
I will admit, as an engineering student with little business background (a.k.a no experience whatsoever) I am a little overwhelmed by the vast amount of information on this website.
The basic idea behind the business component of the competition is to show a group of judges that it is possible to sell four of our cars a day, and to convince them to finance the start-up company.
In the past my team has focused primarily on the manufacturing side, proving that there is a cost effective way to build sufficient amount of cars and make a handsome profit. This year I have approached the problem differently and hope to show the judges:
i) That there is room for the weekend autocross market to grow, due in large part to the untapped female market. With a number of big name female racers becoming successful in recent years, there is opportunity.
ii) There is an interest in our car from the current weekend autocross population. (see survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SC5YYXR )
iii) How big the market is...Question 1: My current method for showing this is taking the number of autocross magazine subscriptions in North America, and overlay it with the number of people who have an income of > $80,000. Is this reasonable?
iv) We can tap into this market
v) We know who are competitors are.
vi) The cost of the start-up
vii) What the investor's can expect to get back
The first half of my approach is all market identification, research, and promotion. I would greatly appreciate any suggestions you might have about going about finding and presenting my findings coherently. As this is my first business experience, simple solutions would be an added bonus.
I sincerely appreciate your time, and thank you for your response.