|
|
| Strategic Planning Information |
|
|
|
|
Advice To Manufacturers Creating A Business Plan
If you are a manufacturer wanting to use your business plan to attract investors, then your plan must do two things. It must: Earn the Trust of Skeptical Investors? Prospective investors want to select the best investments. For an investor, this means earning the highest return on their money for the risk they take. Besides their own research, they seek more specific information from business owners and entrepreneurs about potential investment opportunities. The major challenge to investors is deciding what is a good opportunity. Often asked to invest funds with little reliable information, investors have difficulty deciphering information about the various investment alternatives they are evaluating. This leaves them fearful of getting into an awful deal and skeptical of the deals being presented. In addition, time pressures often force investors to decide on investing in a business when their time frames don't align with the business' need for funding. To your prospective investors, the most important factors you must show are results and evidence. They simply want the opportunity that they enter to match the expectations that they have developed. They want to be educated about the investment opportunity and the investment options available to them. But, they won't accept this education at face value; they want to see the evidence to support it. Even for niche businesses. When investors object to investing in a business, the objection is often of the "Educate me?" type. Tell me your story, show me your numbers, and then prove it. Prospective investors want information that they can validate, options and risks that they can see, and to be educated about your specific business. Moreover, they want to know why you and your team are the ones that can produce the projected results. If your business plan doesn't address these "educate me" objections, it will fail to win the trust of your prospective investors. When that happens your plan will not get funded. Period. If you successfully win the trust of potential investors, then you must be able to? Show Why Customers Will Award Their Business To You Rather Than Your Competitors? Investors invest money in businesses based on the business' expected cash flow. To create cash flow, you must first win business. That's why it is important for your business plan to show investors why customers will award you their business at a price that allows you to provide investors a return on their investment. When potential investors begin evaluating your business plan, they are likely to be skeptical of your ability to consistently win business. In their minds, there is already a manufacturer who is providing the same or similar product as yours to your prospective customers. They are skeptical as to why prospective customers with little or no time to investigate the options available to them and who are reluctant to upset their own customer base would change manufacturers. You can expect your potential investors to understand that your customers need to move product and generate higher margins. They expect quality and general customer support to be givens, the basic requirements to win business. Therefore, their focus will be on understanding how you help your prospective customers earn more money. To your potential investors, the biggest problems your customers face are products that stay on the shelf, don't work properly, or carry low margins? situations that cost your customers money and the opportunity to make money on other products. Does your business plan show investors how you plan to solve these problems? It should if you want to capture their attention. Be sure to clearly explain why you can win over prospective customers who have extensive experience in dealing with manufacturers in your market space?customers who have "heard it all." Your business plan has to reveal to investors how you'll protect your products from damage during transit, guarantee their availability, offer a wide range of product selection, and modify the product as needed. In short, your business plan has to leave investors feeling confident that your product will be delivered as ordered, undamaged, on time, and working properly. You'll also have to convince investors that you can overcome the biggest objections your customers will have in switching manufacturers, which from the investors' perspective will involve product quality and your ability to deliver on time. If the product stays on the shelf too long or doesn't work properly because of poor quality then that is a problem. If the product can't be used or sold because it hasn't been delivered then that is a problem. Prospective investors know that to win a customer's trust you'll have to show them quantifiable evidence that they can earn more using your products and that the risk of changing over to you is low. Since this is what it will take to win business, it is only logical that your prospective investors will want to see this same evidence before they invest in you. Points For Manufacturers To Address In A Business Plan In summary, if you're a manufacturer trying to attract investors, these are the points you must address in your business plan:
When you address these points with verifiable evidence to support your position, potential investors will have to conclude that they would be foolish to invest in any other manufacturer but you. Mike Elia is a chief financial officer and an advisor to venture capitalists and leverage buyout specialists. His business plan ebook "Business Plan Secrets Revealed" shows how to make your business the most appealing investment choice to venture capitalists, bankers, and other business investors. For his free business plan guide click here.
|
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
5 Strategies That Will Boost Your Business Productivity Today! - Part 1 Building a dynamic small business is a constantly evolving, increasingly demanding role. Could You Be Setting Your Business Plan Up For Failure? David E. Gumpert, author of Burn Your Business Plan, often tells the story about how he and his partner failed to raise money after sending their business plan around to venture capitalists and meeting with several others to make presentations. Disappointed by the fruits of their labor, they considered giving up on their venture in 1995. Fortunately, on the advice of their board of advisors, they chose to divert their time from massaging the business plan to making sales. The financing, they were told, would come later. Why Do a Business Plan? To Grow (Catapult) Your Business That's Why. Parking Business, the Details on Increasing Lot Revenue If you are in the parking business and own or manage parking lots you may want to think on some additional concepts to increase lot revenues. Whether you are looking to add value for your customers, expand your customer base, or simply increase your revenue, the addition of a car wash and/or detailing service to your parking facility may be the answer. There are many options available to you if you want to provide these services. You can contract with a local independent company in your area with a good reputation, co-market with a detail shop nearby who will service your lot, buy your own unit and run it in-house or purchase a franchise name and equipment from a national company. Top 10 Tips to Create A Business Plan! (For People Who Hate Business Plans) One of the key challenges for any business is to remain focused and invest resources for maximum pay-off. It's said that 80% of a business's activity accounts for only 20% of total profits. In plain language, most of the work we do is unfocused, poorly designed and ineffective. In today's competitive world, no business, whether it's an individual professional or a large manufacturing operation, can survive with that much lost time and wasted effort. A business plan can help, but most small business owners (and some managers/supervisors) hate doing them! In the spirit that any map is better than no map, here are my top ten keys to creating your own map to success: City of Cortez and South Western Colorado Market Survey We have been spending many hours surveying the market for a potential business location in the South Western Region (region # 9) of Colorado. Pouring through data, seeing the tourist sites, and understanding the market there. Meeting with officials, business people and visiting businesses we learned quite a bit about the region and the future prospects there for someone opening a business. 6 Changes You Can Make to Increase Business Profits I read once that something like 30 percent of all drinkable water gets wasted on the way to the consumer by leaky pipes. Likewise, your business may be letting potential revenue drip away, to be lost forever, all over the place. Use this checklist to make sure you are taking best advantage of all the opportunities for earnings that would be arriving safely if you only plugged up those holes. The Top Ten Rules of Effective Networking Many of us are discouraged by the networking events that we go to. We feel swamped by people just looking to get money from us, and we rarely feel as though the event was worth our time. Strategy Without Tactics is Futile From time to time there seems to be a flurry of studies and surveys on effective communication in the workplace. As a communication specialist, I'm always eager to read these studies, but am often disappointed with what I see. That's because they all seem to be about communication strategy. Is Plan B Ready? Business owners and entrepreneurs are, by nature, risk takers and adventurers. If we didn't have that "optimism gene" floating around, not much of any progress would ever get done. But every so often the adventurous get in trouble. Why Six Sigma Will Work in Healthcare If ever there were an industry where we want zero defects, it's healthcare. Patients, medical professionals, and healthcare administrators all want mistakes eliminated and quality and efficiency improved. Although most industries have undergone some type of data-supported, systematic, quality-improvement process, healthcare still has not. Medical and technological advances continue to outpace process and education adjustments. Demand and expectations for medical care are increasing. Inefficiency also leads to(causes, brings about, etc.) overcrowded emergency rooms, customer complaints, and lost revenues. The Best Entity to Hold Real Estate Possibly THE most frequently asked question of me is "What is the best business entity to use for real-estate investments?" My recommendation to most people is that a limited liability company (an "LLC") is the best entity for this type of use. Here's why: A Backup To The Internet Is Vital & Now Cost Effective It doesn't take a Terrorist Act, Tsunami or Earthquake to put a business heavily dependent on the internet in the dark and effectively out of business??for hours or even days into weeks. When Do I Need To Hire A Business Plan Consultant Every new business owner knows that a business plan is critical ? it is drilled into them by potential investors and every banking officer they meet. So why is something that is so important to the launch of a new venture so difficult to write? Good question! In this article I will try to address when you should go out and hire a business plan writer versus taking on the task yourself. First time entrepreneurs often cringe when sitting down to write their business plan. Some spend 6 months agonizing over each period and comma, and even worse others spend 6 months procrastinating and do nothing. So lets break it down and see where / when a business planning company should be brought in: Business Strategy Planning Made Easy Ask Yourself three simple questions that affect your strategy planning... What direction is my business going in? How do I create my business strategy so that I can position myself as a leader in my industry? Where do I go to find out information about business strategy planning? Business Plan Descriptions of Computer System Entrepreneurs often give little if any consideration to their computer system needs in their original business plans. It is a necessity to have mention of your computer system as bankers and/or investors will want to know how you will keep track of your future endeavor. You need to carefully spell out your needs and their costs to insure you are asking for the right amount of money for your new project and to insure that you know what you need in advance. All too often entrepreneurs are not completely sure of what is needed and then when they see what is available they want it, this adds costs. Then comes the customization and feature creep as high paid programmers design the modifications. How to Write a Business Plan Market Analysis Writing a business plan is an essential part of the initial strategic planning of any company. One thing, which seems to hang up most entrepreneurs, is figuring out what kind of data and information goes into the Market Analysis section. So often entrepreneurs will attempt to bluff or BS their way thru it. Often you find those with MBA write meticulous Market Analysis sections and although they may have little if any true entrepreneurial skills going into a new business, their business plans are sure to impress. But you need not be an MBA to write a proper Market Analysis section in your business plan for your next business. Corporate Contingency Planning Part 1 What is Your MSP? For many consumers and producers, MSP is an acronym for Manufacturer's Suggested Price. Today, I would like you to consider a different definition for these commonly used letters ?Marketing, Sales and Profitability. 8 Ways to Earn More Without Working Harder Conventional wisdom has it that there are only three ways to grow your business: find new customers, increase the amount of each sale to existing customers or get customers to buy more frequently. But I've seen business owners go blank when presented with those three options. So here is a more useful list of ways to increase your total revenues without in most cases having to put in more hours at the office.
|
| home | site map |
| © 2005 |