Day 7: Preliminary Study on "Business for Engineers"

Okay, here's what I found during my investigation on "Management for Engineers".

Market Size:
Alberta: ~47,000 Registered Engineers with APPEGGA
Canada: ~470,000 Engineers
North America: 4,700,000 Engineers

If we conservatively estimate 10% of these are specifically pursuing a career path on the management side that leaves a market size of ~500,000 Engineers in North America with potential interest in Management training.

Lets do it again in potential sales based on 10% penetration, $30 each sale (IE a book).
Alberta: ~$140,000
Canada: ~$1,400,000
North America: ~$14,000,000

Good potential here

Market Analysis
One general comment I should make before I get too far down into this is that this market is motivated since it is mandated by the Engineering professional association that all Engineers spend a certain amount of time each year on professional development. This can include a combination of study on their own (I.E. books or on-line courses) and recognized courses (which I should be able to get into once I put some things together).

In case you haven't figured it out yet, I know all this because I am a registered professional Engineer in Alberta. My background is in power systems automation and computer Engineering, and I spent the last 5 years as a very successful Product Manager for the most successful substation automation device in the world (the D20 RTU) at one of the most recognized companies in the world (GE). I should be able to leverage all that into a good bio for credibility when the time comes.

Looking at on-line resources I found that Management for Engineers brought up a bevy of good hits on Project Management. This is not the niche I'm after, but raises a risk of being lost in the large in the crowd if I target "Management for Engineers". A further check on "Business for Engineers" yeilded results more related to the niche I am looking at. In general I found the following here:
1) there are some good books out there on this subject, but not a lot
2) there are a few good web sites out there that talk about this, but only a few, and the ones I found looked amateurish (good content, but poor presentation)
3) there are some courses available on this, mainly offered by colleges as part of larger programs (IE. there is room for luncheon to 3 day training sessions if I wish to pursue that)
4) APEGGA (the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists of Alberta) identified this as a specific area their members were looking for more info on in their newsletter about a year ago

In Summary:
- I need to further refine my market segment from "Engineers that want to go into Management" to "Engineers that want to go into Business Management" (not Project Management). This is an important distinction if I want to attract the right market.
- the market size is plenty big
- the market is easily geographically segmentable (IE. I can start with just Alberta, or even just my home city of Calgary which would hold around 1/3 of all Alberta Engineers)
- the market is expandable geographically
- the market is motivated to learn
- there is good potential for future back-end sales of books, training, luncheons, etc
- The professional Engineering association provides an excellent channel to reach my market, and I am already a member of it
- this is an excellent fit with my background - I have some credibility in this area.

All in all, I've been thinking about this opportunity for probalby a year now, and this just validates what I thought to be the case. There is definate potential here.

Ok, so what next? Tomorrow will be a day to regroup and set out the next tasks so I'm ready for next week. I'm thinking I need to solidify and articulate my business strategy now.

Day 6: Preliminary "Spanish Kids Sites" market study

I spent most of the day yesterday looking for bilingual Spanish learning sites for kids on the web. What I found is that there is not much there. The sites that exist are mainly for adult learning, and in fact I was only able to locate 1 site that was focused around learning for kids and parents together. The only search terms that yeilded significant results were related to spanish materials for teachers.

This means a few things
1. there is an available web niche for this.
2. it will be a significant amount of work to create/gather content for this site (but no one said this was going to be easy)
3. maybe no one thinks there is a market for this?

The other thing I did was work out the rough numbers for market size. My son goes to one of 4 spanish-english bilingual schools in Calgary. His school has ~100 students per grade. So if I extend this, the market size is roughly as follows:

Market Size:
- Logan's School: ~500 students (Grades 1-6)
- Calgary: ~2000 (4 spanish bilingual schools)
- Western Canada: ~10,000 (5 big cities)
- English Canada: ~20,000 (Based on Stats Canada: ~30% of population is in the West. ~25% in Quebec)
- North America: ~200,000 (USA population ~10x Canada. Should also be greater Spanish interest in the USA)

So a North American market size of 200,000 students is not bad. If I can get $10 each from 10% of the market that would be 20,000 * $10 = $200, 000. Big enough to go after, but small enough that the big players will probably not want to compete there. All in all a pretty good market niche for a small start up.

Tomorrow I'll take a look at the Management for Engineers market and see what I find there.