Archive for the ‘business planning’ Category

Posted by admin on July 16th, 2011

Will Your Business Plan Succeed? Enloop Will Tell You

Posted In: business planning

Whether you’re starting a new business or expanding your current one, a good business plan is essential. Don’t know the first thing about writing one? A Web service called Enloop promises to both build your business plans and forecast your chances for success.

The plan builder walks you through each step of the process, which is divided into sections: Business Idea, Market Industry, Product Sales, and so on. As you answer guided questions along the way, Enloop generates a performance score — a “predictive algorithm that helps forecast the likelihood of success for any business.” The higher the score, the better your chances.

315a3 enloop Will Your Business Plan Succeed? Enloop Will Tell You

Interestingly, you can modify your planning decisions as you go and see how that affects your score. In theory, Enloop will help you craft a business with the best possible chances for success.

The service also offers automated financial forecasts for things like sales, cash flow, and profit loss, all formatted for easy review by banks and investors.

Currently in beta, Enloop offers only a Basic service plan, which is free. That entitles you to one business plan and PDF downloads of it, both in-progress and completed. In the near future, Enloop will provide Premium and Pro subscriptions that give you more options and ad-free PDFs. (The Basic plan adds an Enloop logo to the footer of each page.) Prices for these plans will start at $9.95 per month.

I’m not sure I see the point of a subscription for something like this, as most startups just need to generate a business plan and be on their way. That said, you could sign up for just a month and then cancel. And 10 bucks for something automated and informative is an outright steal.

Of course, for now, Enloop is free anyway. If you’re in the process of developing a new or expanded business, I definitely recommend giving it a try. And if you do, come back here to tell me what you think of the results.

More on BNET:

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Posted by admin on July 13th, 2011

5 Reasons Why You Need a Business Plan

Posted In: business planning

Starting a business? You should write a business plan–even if you’re not raising money any time soon.

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Writing a business plan doesn’t mean you have to hole away in a library for months compiling 40-plus pages of text. You can create a plan in under a month, working part time. Use a presentation format like PowerPoint or Keynote to save time, and make it easier to share your plan.

Not all founders or start-ups are the same, of course. You’ll want to plan in more detail if you’re raising capital or taking on a lot of risk—like investing your savings, leaving a job, or supporting a family. Less detail is fine if you aren’t raising money or taking on much risk. For example, if you are writing code in your dorm room, you can experiment to find out what consumers will latch onto before thinking about implementation or financing. 

But either way, you need a plan, and here’s why:

1. To avoid big mistakes: The last thing you want to do is work on your start-up for a year, only to realize you were doomed to fail from the start. Many founders learn the hard way that they didn’t set aside enough capital to reach their goals, took on partners with the wrong skills and resources, or don’t have a viable way to make money. Developing and sharing a business plan can help ensure that you’re sprinting down the right path.

2. To counterbalance your emotions: At times during your start-up experience, you’ll be manic—so passionate about your ideas you lose sight of reality. At other times, you’ll be overwhelmed by doubt, fear, or exhaustion. When your emotions get the best of you, having a business plan lets you step back, and take an objective look at what you are doing and why, what you know for a fact and what you are trying to figure out.

3. To make sure everyone’s on the same page: Chances are, you are not building a company by yourself. Ideally, you’ll have partners, so you can launch faster, smarter, and with less need to pay employees or suppliers. Even if you don’t have partners, you’ll have family, friends, and advisers involved. A business plan helps get everyone involved in your start-up heading in the same direction.

4. To develop a game plan: At a start-up, execution is everything. That means you have to set priorities, establish goals, and measure performance.  You also need to identify the key questions to answer, like “What features do customers really want?,” “Will customers buy our product and how much will they pay?,” and “How can we attract customers in a way that’s cost effective and scalable?”  These are all things you’ll address during the business planning process.

5. To raise capital. If you raise or borrow money—even from friends and family—you’ll need to communicate your vision in a clear, compelling way. A good business plan will help you do just that. An October 2007 study by Babson College found that start-ups with a business plan raised twice as much capital as those without a business plan within the first 12 months.

David Ronick and Jenn Houser are serial entrepreneurs and start-up advisers. They partnered with Inc. to create Upstart Bootcamp@Inc., a program that guides entrepreneurs to start up smarter. To learn more about business planning, take UpStart’s on-demand course. Or get a free “reality check” to find out if your plan is ready for action.

Start up smarter with the UpStart Bootcamp @ Inc. Newsletter.

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Posted by admin on July 10th, 2011

From college project to business: Linn’s Presitge Kitchens celebrates 30th

Posted In: business planning

FORT WALTON BEACH — In 1981, John Linn was finishing up his bachelor’s degree in business management at University of West Florida.

For his final project, he and some classmates came up with a business plan for a cabinetry and remodeling company called Prestige Kitchens. His wife Sherrie designed the company’s logo for them.

The business plan turned out so well that the Linns used it to start their real business after graduation called Linn’s Prestige Kitchens and Baths. The company is now celebrating its 30th anniversary.

“When you’re young and trying to figure out what to do, you just dive in and start working,” Sherrie Linn said. “We started when Johnny just had a little blue pickup truck and some door samples and he would go around and call on builders and ask them to give us a chance. I would draw the plans and do the design work at home at night before we had an office.”

The company has grown to include showrooms in Fort Walton Beach, Destin and Pensacola. It employs more than 30 people.

Most of their work comes from new construction, remodeling or commercial projects. Linn’s Prestige Kitchens has done custom work for TYBRIN Corp., O’Sullivan Creel accounting firm and the South Walton Fire District.

About 20 years ago, the company started selling appliances so customers could have all of their remodeling needs met at one location, Sherrie Linn said.

Linn’s has won more than 20 national design awards for clients’ homes. The company also has remodeled second homes for local clients in Arizona, Alabama, Louisiana and as far away as San Francisco.

Linn’s currently is featured in the summer issue of the national publication Renovation Style Magazine, profiling a kitchen and bath renovation the company completed in Pensacola.

“We carry a lot of different product price points,” Sherrie Linn said. “Whether you’re a first-time home buyer starting out or it’s your last luxury home that you really want a gourmet kitchen and luxury bath, we’ve got all of the high-end products as well as the starter products. When we design something, the client actually gets to pick the budget they want to be in.”

 

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Posted by admin on July 7th, 2011

YourNews: Local students win business competition

Posted In: business planning

Emily Deas and Kelly Lin, rising seniors at Hardin Valley Academy and Bearden High School, respectively, along with four other teammates, received first place in the Business Plan competition at the 2011 Governor’s School for IT Leadership held at Tennessee Tech University.

Their product was called MockingBird Technology. Providing “real time translation for global conversations,” their software works over the phone to translate conversations into the client’s native language. The business plan included concept, manufacture, advertising and marketing.

The competition began when 36 student scholars were selected from schools all over Tennessee to gather at Tennessee Tech University. Divided into six groups of six students, each group was assigned a mentor who was a local entrepreneur to guide them. Teams worked together to accomplish the ultimate goal of writing a complete business plan for a made-up product.

This is the ninth year Governor’s School for IT Leadership has been held at Tennessee Tech University.

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Posted by admin on July 5th, 2011

2degrees unveils business market push

Posted In: business planning

2degrees unveils business market push

2degrees is now directly targeting the business market and unveiled a number of new mobile plans this morning.

The company’s chief sales officer Mark Cleary said the plans had been soft-launched for a number of months but were now being extended to the wider business market.

The plans, which range between $39 and $149 per connection, are designed for both small business or those with several hundred employees, Cleary said.

“We’ve been researching the business market for about a year. When we entered in the market it was very deliberate, we came into prepaid first and built up a base there, entered and postpaid have been doing well and moving into business was always a natural evolution for us,” he said.

The company is confident it can compete on price with incumbents Telecom and Vodafone, despite launching less than two years ago.

“We did a study in the last few weeks looking for New Zealand’s biggest mobile bill. We got hundreds of bills sent into us and we put them in our billing engine to see what they would have been priced at if they were actually on 2degrees. What we found is that everybody would have saved something and eight out of ten business would have saved 25 per cent,” Cleary said.

2degrees carry-over minutes still apply for business customers and calls between the mobiles on each 2degrees business plan are free.

While optimistic the plans would attract customers, Cleary would not reveal what 2degrees’ present share of the business market was nor what it hopes to get to over the next 12 months.

In March, it was revealed the company had about 11 per cent of the consumer mobile market.

Asked if the move was a way of driving up the revenue received from each customer, Cleary said business customers did tend to spend more on calls, texts and data.

The company declined to comment on whether it was doing too much too quickly and said entering the business space now was always part of the plan.

According to documents released by the Companies Office last week 2degrees lost $76.8 million for the year ending December 2010 on a revenue of $107.6 million

For the previous financial period – the first nine months of its operation in 2009 – it lost $51.8 million on revenue of $27.3 million.

By Hamish Fletcher | Email Hamish

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