BUSINESS DESIGNER

TIFFANY j. hOPKINS

redefining value and voice

Futurism done a little differently

I’m an independent business designer - supporting radical organizations to find success with super cozy product-market fit.

What do you do when you know how you want your business to function in the world and that world doesn’t support you? I help people build their businesses around their values. This involves making tough decisions and generally not maximizing profit at every turn. It involves thinking and acting from the perspective of not just customers but employees, communities, the planet. Business design merges typical design thinking with marketing, finance & strategy. The result is innovative, lovable, financially viable and operationally feasible solutions. This can be the usual design process with quantitative research & analysis blended in or the typical work of a business strategist but with a holistic, stakeholder-based approach to decision-making.

Sometimes we make the usual stuff, it just looks differently: financial planning to establish goals & budgets; analytics review to determine baselines & ensure we can measure results; marketing strategy to inform content production, campaign development & operational planning. Sometimes we think deeper with stuff like business modeling, competitive landscapes, pro formas and market sizing.

This is a graphical interpretation of the Milky Way!

I’m an intuitive who loves numbers.

I use spreadsheets for everything from the usual personal accounting to ice cream recipe creation to my annual wellness plans. I’ve worked as both a tech businesswoman, running marketing departments for e-com companies; and a design researcher, developing life-changing innovations for design firms and their clients. Everywhere I go I’ve brought my spreadsheets to quantify findings, hunches and hair-brained ideas for better communication and decision making.

My alternative name for a business designer is a capitalist-for-hire. I work with organizations who want to keep their souls intact while understanding how their funders and customers think: in terms of value.

Careers in Years

Where I've Worked

Organizations That Hire Me

Key Business Design Projects

**Better Giving Studio:** reimagining what it means to engage with a cause

***My role:*** *Business Designer* ***Date:*** *July 2021 - ongoing*
IDEO and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation teamed up to drive innovation in the technology that supports non-profits and their donors. We’re bringing together organizations large and small to discover and test solutions to systemic issues like how to equitably curate or support hyper-local volunteering.
**Key deliverables:** piloting support, collaborative sprint design & execution, program development (meta-business design!).

Read more on BGS's website

**Elephant Repellent:** Protecting people and wildlife

***My role:*** *Business Designer* ***Date:*** *March 2021 - ongoing*
An innovative, organic repellent that protects farmers’ crops from elephant raiding was struggling to spread and create a market for itself. We needed to find a way to get it to every farmer who needed it across vast rural areas AND make it financially sustainable. Design to the rescue…we flipped the existing system on its head and discovered that centralized production and a bulk distribution model makes a high-quality and affordable product possible. We’re currently preparing for a pilot in early 2022.
**Key deliverables:** prototype and pre-pilot field support, a model for production, pricing and distribution for five potential business types.

Read more on Design for Wildlife's website

Screenshot_2019-10-09 Speakeasy Care(1).png — **Speakeasy:** Preventative mental healthcare

***My role:*** *Business Designer* ***Date:*** *March 2019 - March 2020*
Knowing they’d want to find funders post-prototyping, the Speakeasy founding team approached me during the design research phase to provide marketing & financial strategy. The outcome of their work has is a new mental health model that reinvents the look, feel, location, and format of care to actually fit with what people want. They are currently looking for investors, please reach out to me for more information.
**Key deliverables:** market sizing (TAM, SAM, SOM, LAM), pro forma, unit economics worksheet, capital use plans, go-to-market timeline, competitive landscape, pitch deck financials, impact assessment

Read more on Speakeasy's site

**YLABS:**
Transforming the market for HIV self-testing

***My role:*** *Project Lead* ***Dates:*** *May - Oct 2018*
Our US-based team of an epidemiologist, visual designer, design researcher, HIV research specialist and myself spent the summer in Kenya, along with local team of six researchers to interview and prototype with over two hundred young men and women. Funded by CIFF and the Elton John AIDS Foundation.
**Key deliverables:** Research plan; theory of change; design research insights; prototype ideas; customized KPIs for prototype evaluation; summary of prototyping results; final prototype pitch with live prototyping results.

Read more on YLabs' site

**IDEO.ORG:**
a radical new approach to contraception

***My role:*** *Business Designer* ***Dates:*** *March - October 2015*
After the success of several live prototypes, IDEO.org approached me to join their Diva Centre team for scale-up first in Zambia then in Kenya. In addition to my own deliverables, I assisted in live prototyping and funder engagement. Funded by Marie Stopes International and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
**Key deliverables**: business model comparing existing services with suggested prototypes; management & staffing plans; design & test of revenue generating prototypes; report of scale-up plans.

Read more on IDEO.org's site

Typical Business design project

Featured

1. Research Planning

To properly plan, we’ll need to scope the project in terms of time, talent & budget plus conduct secondary research to understand the context, background and analogues.

2. Design Research

The typical recruiting, interview guides and interactive tools are requisite. However, I add quantitative assets to the process: recruitment analysis, pre- & post-interview surveys and qualitative data organization.

3. Ideation

Bringing a business mind at the co-design, brainstorming and prototype development stages means we aren’t using voting dots to determine which prototypes we go with - I develop an evaluation matrix for every project which ensures we’re seeing the big picture when we make our choices.

4. Prototyping

Everyone loves this stage. I love beginning to collect real numbers around cost and effectiveness. While we’re learning about how our prototypes work IRL, I’m measuring feedback and implementation details so we can make a decision with numbers to support our quotes and feelings.

5. Live Prototyping

While we can get some numbers during prototyping, it isn’t til we live prototype that we’ll get enough to have the data we need to say our ideas will work or not. This is the stage we gather the proof investors/funders/decision-makers need to greenlight a project.

6. Package and Pitch

Typically, the people deciding on the project are going to be concerned with money. This is where all our quantitative data from the design process comes in handy: we will have facts & figures from day one needed to back up the story we tell. I also help a lot with translating findings into business terms to ensure we’re all speaking the same language.

Model For Me Baby! A Few Examples from my Spreadsheet treasure trove.

Marketing Channel Report

Basic Business Planning

Calculating Personal RDAs

Freelancer Bookkeeping Tool

Product Launch Planning

Formulating Herbal Bitters

Given the sensitive nature of most of my work, I’m limited here to models I’ve done for personal projects or those which can be shown without revealing client data. Please don’t steal my bitters formulas.

a typical marketing engagement

1. Market Assessment

First thing’s first: understanding where your product fits into the marketing. Key deliverables in this stage include total addressable market models, customer profiles and competitive analysis.

2. Business Modeling

The next critical step is using an understanding of the projected market to determine the prospects for the business model. Key deliverables include cash flow estimates and comparisons of potential revenue generating activities.

3. Go-to-Market Strategy

Once we know who are customers are and how we will serve them, we can make a plan of attack for bringing our product to market. Deliverables include operational models, marketing mix, timelines and launch checklists.

4. Execution

I provide support for actual launch, including hiring support and reviewing performance results.

key Marketing Roles

**VROOM**: Selling used cars online

**Marketing Director**, 11/15-3/18
**Direct reports:** 12 **Reported to**: CEO
**Monthly Ad Spend:** $250k
**Primary responsibilities:** social media; brand reputation; content production; email marketing; public relations; outdoor & radio buying; swag; blog.
**Major projects:** market-specific launch tests; managing the transition of an acquisition into the marketing team & budget; transforming the customer experience; strategic understanding of manufacturer recalls.

Read more about VROOM

**Rocket Internet:** Duplicating e-com outside of the US

**Head of International Marketing (Home24)**, 11/11-11/12
**Direct reports:** 22 **Reported to**: CEO
**Monthly Ad Spend:** €2m
**Primary responsibilities:** SEO; SEM; social media; content production; EDM; PR.
**Major projects:** comparing SEM performance across six continents; codifying & disseminating SEM best practices; launching South African homegoods site; managing the business intelligence department for South African fashion site.

Read more about Rocket Internet

**MTV:** Transitioning to the digital age

**Director of Digital Programming**, 6/07-6/09
**Direct reports:** 4 **Reported to**: VP of Digital Programming
**Primary responsibilities:** social network product development; measuring marketing effectiveness.
**Major projects:** designing & pitching a new, revenue-generating social network for the TV station; quantifying cannibalization effects; coordinating site launches across the network properties.

There's No Link, You Know About MTV

Education

NANYANG TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, SINGAPORE

M.B.A., FINANCE (Dual degree program)
Graduated November 2010

university of st gallen, switzerland

M.B.A., INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS (Dual degree program)
Graduated August 2010

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

B.Sc.Hons COGNITIVE SCIENCE, HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION B.A. INTERDISCIPLINARY COMPUTING IN THE ARTS, MUSIC
Graduated June 2007

interests

EXPERIMENTAL COOKING
WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION
BEING OUTSIDE WITH MY DOG
LISTENING TO NOT FOLK MUSIC
pLAYING FOLK MUSIC
Reading everything THE OCCULT
personal health ANCESTRY

VOLUNTEERING

surj: showing up for racial justice chautauqua county League of women voters

Past// Nevada County wildlife rescue Raptor clinic
lily dale assembly
englishworks language school
New vintage baroque
bear clan council

Contact

Email: THOPKINS@NOBOX.US
Phone: 716 595 8000
lOCATIONS: LILY DALE, NY Languages: english, basic spanish, tiny german

Contact Form

Name

First Name

Last Name

Email Address

Subject

Message