Embrace the grind
Cannabis Business Plan
Latinos for Cannabis came to Your Startup Guru for help with their cannabis business plan. The funding request would be used for growth, operational overhead, and raising awareness.
About Latinos for Cannabis
Latinos for Cannabis is a community-based organization that is committed to raising awareness of the social, economic, and medicinal benefits that Cannabis has to offer.
The goal of Latinos for Cannabis is economic, social, & political empowerment by demanding racial equity and accessibility to the cannabis industry. As such, we offer three major service categories:
- Civic Engagement & Education
- Engage voters, public officials & community influencers – Organizing community town halls; lobbying and advocacy work to build community awareness. Promote social responsibility through public education about medicine, nutrition, and the movement.
- Industry Access
- Promote growth & accessibility – Access to capital and business infrastructure support for new and existing industry members. We will offer training and resources on how to start/operate a business. Provide information on regulations, access to licenses, entry into the industry, market, and jobs through industry workshops.
- Reparation & Social Justice
- Maintain a level of accountability to Latino communities – We will monitor tax revenue of cannabis initiatives such as Prop. 64 and use grant capital to provide job training, record expungement, penalty reduction, drug treatment, and education, as well as immigration training and workshops to educate our community on the law and their rights.
Launch and Grow Your Business
Contact us for your cannabis business plan today.
The importance of niche-ing
The importance of niche-ing cannot be emphasized in business. To clarify what niche-ing is, let’s start with a question: How should new products/services be created?
A) Make a novel, untested product/service, then find customers for the product/service
Or
B) Find a group of customers, find one of that group’s unmet needs, then create a product/service to address those unmet needs
Answer: B
Explanation: The development process of the product/service will take time regardless of choice A or B. However, with choice B, the likelihood of having to rework the product/service to make it more closely meet the needs of the target market is lower. Also, with choice B, you have a better idea of the size of the target market. Having a market large enough to grow your business is very important. More on that is below.
A great example of choice B is Girls Auto Clinic. Girls Auto Clinic is a brilliant combination of a female-focused auto repair shop and salon.
Founder Patrice Banks felt what many of us feel when car issues come up:
“I felt like an auto-airhead. I hated all my experiences going in for an oil change, being upsold all the time for an air filter,’ she said. “Any time a dashboard light came on, I panicked.” – Patrice Banks, Girls Auto Clinic Founder
Many people come up with business ideas like how Patrice did: through personal experience. However, what most people fail to consider is that their own experience might be too niche. In other words, the market might be too small. How do you know if your market is too niche? Market research. Market research is a process of analyzing factors such as demographics, purchasing habits, direct and indirect competitors, macro and microeconomics, and other elements. As much art as science, thorough market research is a critical step before moving forward with any concept.
Launch and Grow Your Business
Finding your niche through market research is one of the many services Your Startup Guru offers at the most competitive prices in the industry. Contact us, and let’s find your niche for your new business.
Brilliantly topical
Not recommended for small new businesses because of course with every controversial ad, there will be criticism. However, such a campaign will instantly give your brand more personality, and fans may become even more loyal.
How to make a better pitch deck
One of the key tasks for any startup is pitching your business. Whether it be to potential investors, lenders, future partners, etc. Conveying information compellingly is difficult so creating a narrative is helpful. As with any narrative, stories are best told with pictures.
Presentations with bullet points and lots of text are ill-advised…and some very influential people agree. Google CEO Sundar Pichai used only about 40 words over the course of 12 slides in his presentation at the company’s developers conference this year. One researcher concludes that the average PowerPoint presentation contains 40 words per slide. The slides in Sundar’s presentation mainly contained pictures and animations. The slides with text were only used to succinctly describe the image.
This is because it is difficult for the brain to do two things at once: namely, read and listen. However, looking and listening is much easier.
Contact us and let’s craft a beautiful, highly, persuasive pitch deck for your business.
Market Adjustment in the Retail Space
According to a new Credit Suisse report, up to 25% of U.S. shopping malls may close in the next five years signaling a retail space market adjustment.
What are the reasons for the market adjustments in the retail space? Of course, Amazon and online shopping are the most glaring causes. However, another factor is mall overexpansion. Currently, there are around 1,200 malls in the US. Between 1970 and 2015, the number of malls grew more than twice as fast as the population. That number is predicted to decline to 900 within the next ten years.
Brick-and-mortar retail stores will never completely disappear because of the needs listed above and because humans are social by nature; only the type and make-up of retail stores will change. Pop-up stores (a strategy utilized with great effect by Halloween stores) will likely become more common.
Another consideration
The market adjustment may result in the closure of 300 malls over the next decade. What to do with the vacant buildings? There is a lot of space that could be used for other purposes. Maybe mall owners will lower their rental rates to continue use . In some areas of Manhattan, retail rents have declined 10-15%.
More housing? Closures from major chains like Macy’s and J.C. Penney are pouring up to 37 million square feet of space back into the market. That could reduce some housing costs however more expensive housing markets generally have greater discretionary spending. The discretionary funds are often used for shopping. Also, the time and cost to demolish existing structures, rezone, and rebuilding them into residential properties along with their infrastructural linkages are not insignificant.
Some mall owners have indicated that vacant properties will be renovated and updated to attract new tenants and raise rental rates.
What to do?
Who knows what the future will bring but keep in mind that juggernauts like Walmart, Macy’s, and Sears are affected, so starting a service or online store that doesn’t compete with what Amazon sells is a safer option. Branding your own product (e.g., Bonobo, Dollar Shave Club), and controlling your own distribution is another option. B2B businesses are insulated from mall closures as no one buys industrial components at malls.
Services such as dentistry, restaurants, car mechanics, and large difficult-to-ship products such as mattresses, etc. will remain (so far) an insulated industry.
Analyses such as what is shown above are a small and cursory part of the industry/market analysis and strategy consulting services provided to clients.
“We never give up.” – Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba.com
Amazing resilience and determination
The Hard Thing About Being The Boss
I was chatting with my buddy who is the VP of Product at MomentFeed, an online customer experience management platform for multi-location brands, and we talked about The Hard Thing About Hard Things a book by mega-investor and venture capitalist Ben Horowitz.
Entrepreneurship is not for everyone. There are many very tough decisions with no “right” answer. As such, I tell a lot of my clients that entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone. To the many up-sides, there are many down-sides that unless entrepreneurship is a calling, can be too much.
In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley’s most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, draws on his own story of founding, running, selling, buying, managing, and investing in technology companies to offer essential advice and practical wisdom for navigating the toughest problems business schools don’t cover.
His advice is grounded in anecdotes from his own hard-earned rise—from cofounding the early cloud service provider Loudcloud to building the phenomenally successful Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm, both with fellow tech superstar Marc Andreessen (inventor of Mosaic, the Internet’s first popular Web browser). This is no polished victory lap; he analyzes issues with no easy answers through his trials, including demoting (or firing) a loyal friend;
whether you should incorporate titles and promotions, and how to handle them;
if it’s OK to hire people from your friend’s company;
how to manage your own psychology, while the whole company is relying on you;
what to do when smart people are bad employees;
why Andreessen Horowitz prefers founder CEOs, and how to become one;
whether you should sell your company, and how to do it.
Filled with Horowitz’s trademark humor and straight talk, and drawing from his personal and often humbling experiences, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures.
An eye-opening, sobering, and inspiring read. Recommended for anyone interested in business.
Business PLAN vs. Business MODEL
Sometimes my clients ask for a business plan but aren’t yet seeking funding or aren’t beyond the ideation/conceptualization stage. This is where a business model is helpful.
“I have an idea for a product/service. How do I monetize?”
At this stage, you don’t need to exactly know the details of marketing strategy, distribution channels, location, etc. unless it is crucial to your business model.
At the ideation/conceptualization stage, you need to know who your market (i.e. customers) is, growth rate of the industry, who your competitors are, the major costs to bring your product/service to market, and any other major hurdles (e.g. regulatory) that might be a barrier to entry. Business models are 30,000 foot views for seeing how the business will run: who the customers are, selling price of the product/service, who the competitors are, etc.
Business plans go further into depth than business models by including details of the operation, marketing, product/service, financial projections, investment ask, and other pertinent information specific to the industry/sector that your company will occupy. A business plan can then be presented to investors and lenders to raise capital to launch the business.
Also, a business model should not be confused with revenue model. Revenue model is a piece of the business model. In other words, how the company generates revenue: production, subscription, advertising, commission, etc.
No matter where you are at the business development process, contact us to help map out the strategy for your business launch.
The Comfort Zone
I always say that entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone. However, if you feel that it’s your calling, you owe it to yourself to check out your options.
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