Designing the business plan for a minority-owned Furniture Installation Company
TEAM​
Nishanth Srikanth, MDes MBA 2023
Nigencia James, MDes MBA 2023
SECTOR​
Furniture Installation
DURATION​
June 2022 – July 2022
ROLE
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Design Research
Business Strategy
Workshop Facilitation
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Challenge
Forward Space is the Steelcase furniture dealership in Chicago. A woman-owned business, they supply furniture clients ranging from offices to educational and medical institutions. Established in 2014, the company is mid sized, with ~100 employees across three branches. They were looking to expand their business line to an in-house furniture installation company.
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​Once the furniture is sold, it is delivered to site and installed by a separate installation company. While Forward Space has a few of their own installers, they are a non-union company, while most of the buildings in Chicago employ only union labor, which means they have to subcontract the work to a different company.
Goal: Moving from current state (left) to desired state (right)
The owners of Forward Space wanted to explore the idea of investing in the formation of a new minority owned union furniture installation company to have complete control over the final outcome of the delivered project, while also helping their clients meet their ESG and diversity goals.
Approach
We were hired as a team of 3 consultants, working out the project management and process flow ourselves - based on the project scope. We adapted a design strategy process flow to match the ask and timeline.
Given the complexity of information to delve into, and the time frame, we wanted to have complete clarity on the methods we would use to tackle the next two phases: ‘Discover’ and ‘Develop’. Therefore along with mapping the process and timeline, we worked with the high level questions to plan out the research methods and synthesis frameworks that would help streamline the project and get a comprehensive understanding of the furniture installation industry.
DISCOVER: Over the span of 6 weeks, we conducted 26 interviews with internal stakeholders, competitors and dealers, 3 contextual inquiries with Account Executives and Project Managers, 5 Field Observations to the warehouse and installation sites, and had 50 responses to an internal survey
Field visits and On-site observations of Install jobs gave us a sense of the end to end installation process.
DEVELOP: We developed various sense-making models to organize the installation process and all the stakeholders and variables involved. The ERAF (Entities, Relationships, Attributes and Flows) model helped us understand the different actors playing in this system and their respective relationships with the new installation company. The touchpoint map helped lay out the furniture bid process between the dealership (Forward Space) and the installation company.
ERAF Diagram: Entities, Relationships, Attributes and Flows
Furniture installation touchpoint map
Through interviews and surveys of Account Executives and Project Managers, we found the most desired traits of an install partner were attitudinal and behavioral traits that stem from the core values, vision and mission of the install companies, rather than pure technical skills:
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Ability to work collaboratively with other partners on site
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Ability to problem solve on-the-go
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Flexibility with dealing with changes on site
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Detailed bid quotes with line item breakdown
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Experience with specific product lines
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Minority Business Certification: There's a clear business advantage to being a W/MBE, especially as a tier 2 / subcontractor to federal businesses. Meeting ESG goals will mean strengthening diversity, equity & inclusion practices to spotlight workers who may have been left on the periphery.
Solutions
CO-DESIGN WORKSHOP: Creating the values and mission of the new installation company were imperative for its establishment. The values and mission has to resonate with those of Forward Space. We decided to conduct a co-design workshop with the Level-10 leadership (C suite) to get to the core values and mission the new installation company would be built on.
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​I took the lead on conceptualizing the workshop and centered it on identifying what we care about collectively in Install Partners, and identifying values that we resonate with by asking questions such as "Why will the install company exist?" and "What big picture problems with the install company solve?" A few of the words that emerged as values from the workshop were: "Resourceful", "Diversity", "Tech-enabled transparency".
DELIVER: Synthesizing all the information we collected, we prepared the final deliverables for the formation of the new furniture installation company, that included the following documents:
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Mission, Vision and Core Values
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Executive Summary and Company Description
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Management & Organization Chart with Job Descriptions
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Financial Models – High, Medium and Low risk
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Process Map
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Action Plan
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Marketing Plan
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5 Year Growth Roadmap
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View the final presentation deck here.
Investment Summary
Organizational Structure
Outcome
Forward Space leadership plans to begin the foundation of the minority furniture installation company within FY2024.
