Everyone needs toilet paper

[mohney]

Hey guys, i'm a new member as of tonight to the forum.

I am a college student and i started an Internet marketing and software development business in the last year. We're doing well, but i have always wanted to make more money, because i can't seem to get enough of the stuff!

Anyway i walked into our fraternity bathroom the other day, and saw a box of toilet paper being put in our closet. Then, i looked right next to it and saw a whole bunch of cleaning supplies, mops, floor cleaners, hand soap, etc. I started brainstorming further, and realized that on my campus alone, there were 11 fraternities.

Now, we usually buy in bulk-size, so we can get a cheaper rate. Does anyone have any ideas as to if i were to buy 11x the amount of supplies we do now, how much we'd save?

Would this venture be even worth the trouble of picking up supplies, delivering to the different houses, etc.? I'm interested in seeing what everyone thinks, because if this turns out to be profitable even a little bit in my school, i could take it to places like Gainesville, FL or other big college towns with fraternities and sororities, and turn this into a pretty nice set of pocket change.

Thanks for reading, guys!

-Sean Mahoney
Regional Sales Manager
AndPlus Design, LLC

[mrpresident]

hey buddy, just read your posting. I run a janitorial supply and wiping company in los angeles, ca i understand when you say bulk/ mass. Let me know. possibilities are high. transporting of goods and quality control maintenable. Let me know. Have a good one. Hector

[mohney]

Anyone who is involved in a greek system, please email me at

mohney@wpi.edu

this is going to work and i want people around the country working with me.

Thanks,
Sean Mahoney
AndPlus Design, LLC

[bigpund]

hey this actually sounds like a pretty good idea. i would be interested in joining you to help out. contact me with some details. you can email me at cpund@radford.edu or catch me on AIM at ProfessionalGFX.

Chris

[Eric Locken]

Any luck with this plan? or has the whole thing gone down the pan ..... sorry couldn't help that one

[bigpund]

Eric- i was trying to work with him on this and spread his idea around to a couple different campuses around me...but his idea will only work for a certain type of greek life- where all the frats live on campus and in huge general houses where there are like 50+ people as opposed to schools where frat houses might be off campus or ones on campus where only a couple brothers live in.

anyway, i suppose it could work for his area, but i pretty much dropped any hope with the idea because it wont work here.

[mohney]

We are currently doing the market research for many colleges and universities with a greek system.

If anyone is interested in setting this up in their school, email me (mohney@wpi.edu), and i will give you all the information for market research. It's basically a quick web form that reports the information to a MySQL database, and gives the results to us when we want to view them.

One thing to note on this project, would be:

This isn't for fraternities or sororities consisting of very few members. This is for houses that keep anywhere from 25-125 (or more) people living in them. Houses that house this many people see a real value in having these things delivered to their door.

We're working on the website right now, and after the market research is done, all the profit sharing is worked out. Anyway, anyone else who's interested, the possibilities are endless, the more schools we get on board, the more money we all make.

I started talking to a user named bigpund or whatever, and he was mentioning that he had fraternities on campus with 3 members. 3 members would not see value in having bulk cleaning supplies delivered to their door. But i'm working with someone at Washington State University, which has 45 fraternities and sororities on campus, not one of them has less than 25 members.

The general idea of this project is finding a greek system with any number of houses (1- 10000) who have at least 20 people living in the house.

Thanks everyone,

Sean Mahoney
AndPlus Design, LLC

[cheng]

Hi mohney, i roughly get your idea but still dont understand your greek system. Why dont you do it for companies and the campus? Large companies and hotel usually need all this for their different departments. For companies, might be stationaries, for hotels will be toiletries.

But i just have one thing in mind whether your idea will work. For products like this, they are generally cheap and to ship them you will need to do it with your own trucks or outsource them. I dont think US postal does this for you since its not cost effective and your goods dont come in a standard dimension (eg mops...)

Will you be keeping stock or do dropship?

[bigpund]

sean- you have your information wrong. what i told you was the the fraternities here have 3-5 people living in a house, have multiple houses, and not all brothers live in a fraternity house. they are actual houses, nothing like a mini hotel such as someone with 125 people living under one roof. im not trying to argue with you or anything, i just wanted you to get your facts straight. good luck.

[sskinner]

About the above post, I went to a school like this. The reason for this at my school (not saying this is why above) was because of a city ordinance that allowed no more than seven unrelated persons to live together in a single house-hold (due to prostitution reasons). There wasn't any designated, off-campus, greek living. However, now that school does allow mass greek life housing and I will see what I can do about getting you in touch with at least one of those frats and possibly two more at Chico State University that my friends are in. I'll email you contact info if I get it.

[mohney]

and Pund - i did misunderstand you.

This project WILL work for companies, the campus and other things of this nature, and if we get big enough, we can start selling to them too, but as it is right now, schools already order everything in bulk, and order for the dorms on the same ticket.

However student-run housing do not order in bulk, and therefore pay retail price for their janitorial supplies. Delivering bulk janitorial supplies to 3 people living in one house just isn't practical and would require too much work separating the products into smaller portions to be profitable. You are more than welcome to try to install such a system, however i dont think it is worth it.

To explain a "Greek system" more, it's just a set of fraternities on one campus. having 30 people living in one house isn't like a hotel, it's far from it actually. I live with 38 other people in my fraternity, and we go through a lot of supplies. This is an instance when we NEED bulk in order to save money.

This idea works for plenty of different niche's, and i'm offering anyone who wants to work with me, their own business.

The best way i found to deal with it, is have everyone run their own company, they will use my contacts for bulk rates, use my website for ordering, and they will receive a check in the mail every month or so.

So - the process that someone would go through for this to be run at their school....

1 - "I think this is a good idea and will suit my school perfectly."
or
"I could sell this idea to this office building and they would definitely buy from me"

2 - you come to me and we set you up so that your customers can log into the website and order their products. The website is intuitive and guides people through the process of ordering janitorial supplies.

3 - your client pays through the website for the supplies, and if you only have one client, the supplies are delivered (drop shipped) directly to your client.

If you have more than one client, the supplies are all delivered (drop shipped) to you in bulk, along with a list of who ordered what. You hire another college kid (or do it yourself) for $30 to separate the goods and help you deliver them. (i estimate this would take 20 mins to separate, and then driving them would take another 30 mins max. Maybe an hour, hour and a half on a saturday sometime to do)

4 - At the end of the month, you would receive a check for a certain percentage of the profits due to your sales.

I'd like to hear people's thoughts on this process, whether people think it's fair, how they think the best way to work it would be, and if you all think this is a solid plan of action.

Thanks for reading again guys, and i'm loving this feedback

-Sean

[DavidHWalker]

just found this thread...apparently it is a semi-old one.

Sean, is it still in the works?

You've got me kinda curious as I attend the largest university in the nation....The University of Texas at Austin...and I do happen to have a decent number of contacts at large fraternities and sororities....

~dave