Phases of launch

Your launch will evolve. The early days of the market require high levels of support as things get off the ground. Things get easier once a market has reached 100 transactions a week or so.

The faster you get to a market sustaining around 30 sellers the earlier you can ease off the "hand holding" necessary in the very early stages. After that point there should be enough seller availability to keep buyers interested and enough buying power to ensure sellers are incentivised to keep entering availability and taking bookings seriously. As long as you are confident the buying power is available, you may want to register disproportionately more sellers in the first 10 weeks to get to this critical benchmark quickly.

Starting from the day you turn you commit to the project, there are probably four distinct phases in a launch:

1. Pre-launch (can be as little as a few days)
2. Up to 30 transactions a week
3. Up to 100 transactions a week
4. Up to 250 transactions a week

Understanding the phases

We've learned to see each phase in terms of two strands of work:

• Market management routines
• Driving market growth

Because so many people want to sell Slivers-of-Time, work on market growth should focus on finding new buying power. The key to this is:

• Helping existing buyers see if they have a need for more "spare hours" than they currently purchase
• Persuading other potential buyers to start purchasing the time of your sellers

We'd like to offer the checklists we've compiled for priorities during each phase of a launch:

1) Pre-launch

Before the day the market goes live you are likely to need to have:

• Secured the purchasing commitments to underpin the first 12 months of operation
• Had your Slivers-of-Time Marketplace set up on one of your websites (our Operations Team do this for your agency once it is accepted as a user)
  • Register interest as an agency

• 
  Branded your Slivers-of-Time website with your colours and your logo. (The training materials we'll provide spell out how to do this, it takes about 5 minutes.)
• Absorbed the Slivers-of-Time training materials that will be supplied to your agency. Alternatively, your agency should have been set up with a demonstration Slivers-of-Time market. You may prefer going into that and just "playing around" to understand how it works. See also our how it works section.
• The agency needs to have set up standard routines, as outlined in the Training Materials, for:
  • Registering a seller
  • Registering a buyer
  • Payrolling sellers
  • Invoicing buyers
  • Dealing with a failed transaction
  • Reviewing a seller
  • Initiated some outreach to potential sellers and registered the first 10 who have input some availability for at least week one of market operation.
  • Set up an office where sellers can be interviewed.

2) Up to 30 transactions a week

Market management routines

• Check everyone is happy. This is a thin market with not much activity. Buyers will find occasions when there's no-one available for their requirement. Sellers are likely to have weeks when none of their spare hours are purchased. All parties may still be confused as to how things work. To keep everyone on-board as market activity increases you may want to try:
  • Weekly phone calls to buyers and sellers
  • Occasional events: perhaps an open house to all your users for nibblies in your office one early evening?
  • Email circulars; your marketplace will allow the agency to extract all email addresses for buyers or sellers. Maybe send them an update on things every couple of weeks. (There is also a general Slivers-of-Time newsletter which those who have opted-in will receive on the last Friday of every month.)

Driving market growth

• At this stage you should have already secured the buying power that will keep the market growing through its gestation. It's more important to make sure it gets through the irregularities of its birth.

3) Up to 100 transactions a week

Market management routines

• You should by now have a core of sellers who understand how the market works and, crucially, that it will increasingly reward them for doing their personalized bookings reliably. Some of them won't "get it" and could become time consuming. They may not be right for this way of working and you should let them go. The priority should probably be moving towards a hands-off relationship so you can focus on growing market activity that maximizes opportunity for people who do want to work this way.
• Watch for "clumping" in the market. That's when the available work is concentrated among a small number of sellers. That risks the other sellers becoming disenchanted. This is only a problem in the early days where there is little buying power in the market. If you spot clumping in your market it can be worth calling buyers and asking them to help the market along by changing their behavior. Here's the signs:
  • 
    A buyer starts to book long periods of work (eg 1 seller for 2 consecutive 8 hour shifts, rather than, say, 4 sellers for 4 hours)
  • Just one or two individuals are being booked for large numbers of assignments by a buyer.
• Now is the point when you may wish to start entering more cautious, hard to help, sellers into the market. It may be possible to identify funding so those who have no experience of computers can be trained one-on-one by some of your experienced sellers.
  • Buying support workers through Slivers-of-Time
• The weekly routines (see above) should now be over their teething problems. You may want to take a moment to formally record any particular variations on standard routines listed in the Training Materials that have usefully evolved within your operation.

Driving market growth

• 
  You have the seed of something useful to a range of local employers taking shape. Our experience is that it can take a while for potential buyers to understand what Slivers-of-Time can do for them. Now may be the point at which you need to start building relationships. It could be worth putting together a mailshot about the service and the quality of your sellers then sending it to target organisations locally. (Don't forget the council; Local Authorities often have sporadic needs for extra workers.)

• Promotional material for local employers
• Types of employers who need Slivers-of-Time Workers
• Benefits of Slivers-of-Time Workers for employers
• Directory of local employers (Yell)
• Directory of local employers (Thomson)

4) Up to 250 transactions a week

Market management routines

• Do you have "heart sink" buyers or sellers who constantly trouble you with problems? Now may be the time to initiate a conversation that seeks to understand their underlying issues, and puts a response in writing. It may be that an automated marketplace such as this is the wrong forum for their needs?
• This may be a good point to revisit your standard weekly procedures. Are they as lean and efficient as possible? Anything that could be done to make them easier?

Driving market growth

• You now have a tangible resource that could be immediately useful to other local companies. Does the local supermarket need extra shelf-stackers some nights? Who drops leaflets through letterboxes in your area, could they benefit from having your sellers do it for them? What events are coming up that may need stewards or cleaners for a couple of days? Begin outreach to the appropriate decision makers. For example:
  • See if the local Chamber of Commerce or other body for business people/employers will give you a speaking slot. (Download slides explaining Slivers-of-Time to an audience.)
  • Look for PR opportunities. Will the business pages on the local paper run a feature on your marketplace for example?
  • Write up case studies: you should have buyers who have got their work done better using your sellers and you should have sellers who love their Slivers lifestyle. See our  case studies section  for one way of capturing the information. Case studies can be circulated to prospective buyers and the press (so long as the subjects of the study are willing of course).
• 
  Begin to partner with other agencies offering a Slivers-of-Time marketplace. That can increase the opportunities available for your sellers and you can set the mark-up required for your agency. (The Training Materials tell you how to do this.)

The long term

Beyond 250 transactions a week in one area you should have a market that sustains itself and can grow as much through word-of-mouth as any promotion you initiate. The manual for how to get the most out of these markets as they fully mature is still being written. Be part of it!

• Putting Slivers-of-Time in your bid