yet another bazillionaire idea

Yet again I was on a two hour walk this evening, with a stop at Wendy's and no less than four instances of SLI when I was thinking about yet another idea that I'd love to take on if I was a bazillionaire.

First I would interview and then hire a horticulturist and an aquaculturist so long as they agreed with my plan and to work with me to bring it to fruition. The first phase will be to find the space, build the hydroponic vertical farming units, build the aquaculture tanks, build the water linkage system between the two and then begin the experiments. First we would try to grow the food and grow the fish that have the most likely chance to succeed, to scale up quickly and fine tune the growing methods. At the same time that this small team is doing this work, perhaps with a few additional workers to help, I would engage a technology company to start the work on our system.

I envision this technology system to be extremely smart, with sensors all over the hydroponic system and the aquatic system, taking periodic and frequent measurements of all kinds. The next part will be to develop tasks for future workers to do. The idea is that this system that is measuring everything could come to know that hydroponic stack three rack four has grown to optimum size and is ready for harvesting, or, that said rack has been harvested and needs to be cleared out, or, that said rack has been cleared out and needs to have the growing medium put in place, or, that said rack now needs to have seeds planted in the growing medium. Similarly for the aquatics that said tank requires harvesting the fish, second largest tank needs its fish net-lifted out of second tank to be put into largest end of life tank, then third largest tank needs its fish net-lifted into second tank, and so on. Or, fish to be fed, or, harvested food to be packaged, or, floor to be swept and mopped and so on, with more tasks created as we learn what the tasks are that need to be done.

In the latter half of the first year, it will be time to start working out the first scale up location, separate from the first location where it will continue to be used for experiments. The first scale up location would be about half of what the final scale up location would look like. Again the hydroponic vertical farming units, the aquaculture tanks and the linked water system would be built at this half full scale size. At this point a location foreman and an HR person would be brought in, the former to manage the site, the latter to become HR for what will be an ever growing company. As new employees are hired who will start as basic task doers, the entry level position would be at whatever the minimum wage is, and the tasks that would be given to the entry person would be limited to the tasks that a person can be taught in a half or full day training course. So imagine five people starting at the same time, participating in a one day training course and the next day they are ready to do tasks. They would have a device that they get when the come in to work, they'd sign in to the device, and then the device, hooked up to the overall system, would give them a choice of two different tasks that at that moment need to be done. The two tasks would be of two different types so as to give the employee a choice and to eventually work out if they have a preference, an affinity, or are more productive at being at one task type as compared to another. For the first few weeks the system would measure how long it takes for people to do each type of task to eventually get what an average duration is for a task to be done. This would then allow for the system to begin to monitor if a person is performing within, say 10% of the average task time. If they persistently fall below the 10% then either they won't be assigned that task any longer, or they'd get a warning, or they'd be let go, depending on the situation. The system would be constantly fine tuning these average times to even be able to determine if time of day has an impact, or day of week. Maybe Tuesday mornings for whatever reason it has been found that task X takes 9 minutes while the overall average is 11 minutes.

It would be possible to get a raise in pay, and the way I envision this is that you will get paid based on the amount of time that you work, and that is tracked by the device you have been given that assigns you your tasks. In addition to the time being tracked, you will be given points for each task that you complete. A simple short task might give you only 1 point, harvesting may be more effort and more time, so may give you 5 points; scrubbing down an empty aquaculture tank may be laborious and take two hours and get you 20 points. The system would keep track of this and would always be visible real time to the employee. Employees who work full time hours could reach say, the 1000 point level sooner at which point they get a pay raise to min wage +1$. Part time workers may reach that 1000 point level later, but will be able to calculate, based on their rate of work, how long it will take to get to 1000 points, in fact, their device could probably tell them this. To encourage productivity or efficiency, there could be weekly and/or monthly rewards for employees who have the highest number of points per hour worked over a previous week. Having a high points per hour would mean getting more done in a shorter amount of time. The bonus could be additional points. In fact, there could be a leader board up on the wall in the lounge with the top five points per hour people showing their real time points per hour value. Similarly, the foreman could look at the employees who have the lowest points per hour and find out if there is anything that can be done to help them, or to give them a first warning. There could be another raise at 10,000 points, and maybe a final one at 100,000 points. Of course these numbers are just pulled out of a hat; a more robust analysis could determine those point-raise thresholds.

When someone reaches a higher point level, the number of times that they get a low point value task could be diminished, well, depending on their preferences - perhaps an employee is really good at and really enjoys doing a basic task but through other means has gained already 100,000 points.

Another way to help an employee is that periodically during the year there would be additional training sessions to teach employees who do not yet know or are not yet approved to do certain more complex tasks. Once they have taken the training, these types of tasks would be added to the possible tasks that could be assigned to them. Also, these more complex tasks may garner higher points.

Once this half scale facility is up and running and any learning has been done to improve it and to fine tune the points and tasks system, the first full scale location will be scouted out, with the hydroponic vertical farm, the aquaculture and the linking water system all built. This could be repeated to more than one full scale location, perhaps having a dozen in one metropolitan city, and then start expanding to a smaller number of facilities in smaller cities; or going out to another metropolis. Once an employee has joined one facility, they have become an employee of the company, and given this, they are now able to work at any time at any facility. Tasks would be the same irrespective of where they are, so if an employee who almost always goes to location A is visiting with a friend where location D is closer, this employee can go to location D, get the task device there, sign in with their own employee account, and off they go, given the choice of two tasks, to do one.

The facilities would be open every day of the year, every hour of the day. It is quite possible that given enough hydroponic racks and enough processing of produce and fish, that there would always be tasks that need to get done and employees would be welcome to come and do tasks at whatever time suits them. Of course, if we have too many employees and not enough tasks, or too many tasks and not enough employees, these are things that would be monitored very carefully. It ought to be fairly predictable once a full scale facility is running at full production; the number of tasks of each type of task would eventually reach a maximum threshold and so at that time the right number of employees can be in place.

As time goes on the initial experiment facility would continue to try new farm products, or refine existing ones, or take the data that is coming from the full scale facilities and see where some optimizing could take place. Similarly, different fish could be tried, and perhaps each facility could be growing one of three or four different types of fish so that a variety can be offered out to the market for three or four facilities that are reasonably close to each other.

In the same way that there is a system that monitors the hydroponics and aquaponics and assigns tasks and counts points and tracks employee time, the same system could be relied upon by restaurants or other customers who want to buy our produce or fish. They'd have a mobile app or website that they could go to that would in real time provide to them what is currently available to be ordered, and what we expect to be harvested and available over the next few days, can place an order and pick a specific time for it to be delivered right to them. The idea is to make this as easy a process as possible for the restaurateur and for any business wanting to buy our food and fish. Similarly, I would give an account to soup kitchens and other charity places where we would do donations but they would order in the same way a restaurateur would.

Similarly I could see a subscription based consumer plan where they could order through the system, create a subscription and then have delivered to them their order on whatever frequency that is agreed upon between the system and their desire. Alternatively, we could partner with any existing farm to consumer distribution system that already exists in the metropolis.

Each facility would have one or two (or maybe three) electric vehicles with clear company branding on the sides that would be used as delivery vehicles that take the produce and fish from the facility to the location(s) where they have been bought. Yup, you guessed it, this is yet another task type that only people who have the driver's task ability would receive. The system would track the driver and the car to get to and from the destination business with the idea that an average time based on time of day would eventually be found so that then if a driver falls far outside of that average time, the system could provide an alert.

To vertically integrate, over time perhaps a facility further afield would be intended purely for seed growth to see if we can provide to ourselves at least some of the seeds. Similarly for fish, have a fish spawning facility so that we can transport the fry out to the various production facilities.

And finally I would want to do what I can to help with promoting engagement from the employees, so we would offer limited benefits to part time workers and full benefits to full time workers; things like health and dental, RRSP Matching, monthly transit pass, a lounge and/or games room at each facility for the employees to mingle or for events, company swag, generous vacation day policy, and so on. There would also be an open policy for employees to provide suggestions for improvements that apply in any way, and if the suggestion is adopted, the employee could win some points. Also, a referral bonus could be given if an employee brings in a new one where both get the points bonus.