Case: Dental Kidz

 

 

 

 

 

 

I first met Chris Harvell at a Social Enterprise Conference at Columbia Business School. He gave a presentation about the company he has established with his wife, called Dental Kidz. It is a dental office in Newark, NJ, specifically designed to serve kids in this generally underserved community.

 

I was really taken by Chris’s energy and his ideas but honestly I didn’t like his presentation very much. To me it was a lot of details but I never really figured out what his central message was. I told Chris this afterwards and offered to help him.

 

Chris and I talked (or rather Chris talked) for half an hour, and I made the first drawing in my notebook, boiling his half hour talk down to three central points:

 

1_ Chris and his wife is passionate about improving dental hygiene for kids

2_ They have developed a low-risk, profitable, sustainable and scalable business model

3_ They would like to scale up using investor capital

 

 

 

After the conference we coordinated another session and sat down at my office to talk more. We used the overall structure from my first drawing and Chris filled in the details. We ended up with a huge pencil drawing with a lot of words and details.

 

 

Some of the major insights from this second session was that many of our arrows pointed to the theme of combating fear. Chris was scared of the dentist when he was a kid and is still carrying a bit of that fear with him. Also, we figured that there was a lot of complexity in the business model that would have to be ironed out later.

 

 

In our third session I went out to Newark and visited Chris at the office. We went back to the pencil drawing and started iterating on the different elements. The revenue model. The investment plan. The investor profile. And we went back to the overall structure: how could we unite the three main points?

 

Below are some pictures that show just some of the iterations we went through together during this full-day session.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After our third session I took all the drafts, iterations and overall structure and assembled it into an elaborate digital poster.

It is rich in detail and has many features that are hard to see in the overview. However, since it is drawn in vector format you can zoom in on each little detail. 

 

From this single image it is possible to design many different presentation, spending more or less time on each part. Check out this Sample Presentation (PowerPoint) that I made for Chris as an example.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.