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In a services-based economy, pressures on individuals to perform at exceptional levels have created considerable lifestyle demands requiring busy professionals to spend endless hours at work with little time to spare. Busy professionals are challenged to choose between spending time with family and friends, and taking care of the basic necessities of life, such as doing laundry and grocery shopping. Executive Easy Wash provides a solution that allows busy professionals to free up some of their time so that they can better enjoy life.

Executive Easy Wash offers time-starved individuals living in high-density condo or apartment buildings a convenient, reliable and high quality laundry wash & fold and dry cleaning service. Without leaving their building, customers will place their soiled laundry or dry cleaning inside an Executive Easy Wash locker and take the key. Then, using their personal computer or BlackBerry, they will send Executive Easy Wash a message with the unique locker number. Executive Easy Wash then will pick-up, wash, dry, fold, package and drop-off their laundry back to the same locker, as per their online customer profile. Unlike traditional laundry and dry cleaning businesses, this locker technology and e-commerce system allow customers' involvement to be minimized to just dropping-off and picking-up their clothes. Executive Easy Wash offers a simple and convenient service that eliminates the burden of laundry and dry cleaning.

Executive Easy Wash targets the Greater Toronto Area, which represents the second largest number of residential towers in North America and has the greatest number of condos in North America.1 The market entry strategy will target the highest density buildings in the downtown market first and expand throughout the Greater Toronto Area and additional geographies thereafter.

The Executive Easy Wash business model will redefine the industry by being closer to the customer, leveraging information technology and using a unique locker delivery system. The simplicity of the model will make it easily deployable, allowing us to gain economies of scale. We will not need a large capital investment as we will not be purchasing machinery, not be opening up a storefront and not be hiring the personnel to do the washing itself. Instead, we will leverage the existing capacity in the commoditized washing and dry-cleaning industry by outsourcing our cleaning operations, allowing us to focus on delivering high-quality service to the customer.

To get this business off the ground, Executive Easy Wash will require an initial investment of $350,000 to cover initial marketing, IT development costs and building scale rapidly. We project that Executive Easy Wash will pay back this investment in just over three years, and by the end of year four it will be earning approximately $500,000 in cash flow per year which will continue to grow as the business expands.

This executive summary was prepared by John E. Kaye, Daniel J. Bandurka and Diana M. Palacio, MBA students at University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management

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