SBA website improvement

The Small Business Administration is a great service for entrepreneurs. They connect you with a wide array of lenders and will guarantee up to 85% of your loan. Loans can go as high as $5 million and rates can be as low as 4%.

Sometimes navigating the site was difficult and before you had to contact an SBA representative to get the ball rolling. Now they have LINC, an online referral tool that connects borrowers with participating SBA lenders. You answer a short online questionnaire and SBA lenders will contact you within 48 hours.

I filled one out for my client yesterday and got three bank emails already. Check it out once you are ready to start looking for financing.

June 17, 2015

Clients

Over the past few years I’ve had the great pleasure of helping many clients create and expand their business. Here are a few projects I have been fortunate to work on.

9 Bar Roasting is a coffee kiosk in one of the busiest intersections in Los Angeles — Hollywood Blvd. and Highland Ave. I wrote a business plan for 9 Bar Roasting so they could move into an existing business.

ADR Solar Solutions is a solar panel installation company based in Woodland Hills, CA. Among their many projects they are credited with the largest residential installation in the world — at the 6,000 sq. ft. house of esteemed green architect Mr. Carl Harberger. I wrote a business plan to help ADR expand their current operations to a retail space in Calabasas.

DGAPlus is a specialty firm providing innovative strategies and solutions that meet the many requirements of enterprise utility companies and agency partners. I created a business proposal for DGAPlus to present to partnership targets to incorporate their patented systems.

H.E.R. House is a private women’s only lifestyle club in Newport Beach, CA. I made a business plan so that H.E.R. House could find the startup capital and equity investors needed to launch this rather large operation. Coming soon.

Maitri Yoga Store is a yoga clothing and accessories specialty store based in Culver City, CA. I wrote a business plan for Maitri so it could attract startup capital from lenders and investors. Open Feburary 2015!

Skyview Consulting Group is an advisory firm based in Beverly Hill, CA, specializing bringing foreign companies into the US. I wrote several business proposals for Skyview to help them with a roll-up strategy for multiple business sectors in the Antelope Valley, Santa Clarita and surrounding areas.

November 13, 2014

Rivalry within an industry

Last time, I discussed one way to analyze uncertainty within an industry. Another way of looking at the uncertainty of an industry is looking at the relative power of suppliers and the threat of new entrants. In the previous example, technological changes and the predictability of purchases were used to gauge uncertainty. If all four are taken together you get famed Harvard Professor Michael Porter’s 5-Forces Analysis.

This framework states that the rivalry, or competitiveness within an industry is based on 4 external factors that combine to make a 5th element, the rivalry within an industry. The 4 factors are:

The Bargaining Power of Suppliers
- This is the power suppliers have over purchasers in an industry. For example, saccharin (or cane sugar) suppliers over Coca-Cola.
Threat of Substitutes
- This is what can be substituted for Coke. Pepsi comes to mind. Also, this goes back to the previous article. Are new technologies begin developed? Instead of cola, will there be a new way to ingest beverages
Bargaining Power of Buyers
- This goes back to the previous article about industry uncertainty. Do the buyers have to have Coca-Cola? Things like electricity and food are higher up on the hierarchy of needs. Also, are the buyers unable to form a coop to purchase things in bulk?
Threat of New Entrants
- New cola brands are coming in to challenge the old guard. The more this happens, the more uncertainty there might be in an industry.

These factors , can be ranked low, medium, high (or even 1-5) to give the relative rivalry within an industry. Now, there is no uniform standard stating that the threat of substitutes in the semi-conductor industry is low, but rather a general consensus of industry analysts will say that there are few viable substitutes to the silicon semi-conductors we most frequently see in today’s electronics. Maybe in the future, we will we graphene based semi-conductors. When they come, then the rivalry will go up.

October 19, 2014

How to gauge uncertainty within an industry

One way as shown in Harvard Business Review is measuring demand uncertainty vs. technological uncertainty. There are others, such as low barriers to entry (i.e. competitive climate) and bargaining power of suppliers, but that is for another discussion.

When there is uncertain demand, your revenue stream becomes jeopardized. For example, you know people have to eat everyday, so the demand uncertainty of a restaurant is relatively low compared to that of construction. New construction is highly dependent on whether the overall economy is doing well or not. So does eating out at restaurants, but a burger costs less than a building. Remember, this is all relative.

Technological uncertainty, can be described as the rate in which the technological landscaping is changing. For example, will new inventions come along to disrupt existing methods? Are new materials being developed? Going back to the restaurant and construction example, the technology of a restaurant (e.g. grills, spatulas, etc.) have been relatively consistent compared to that of new construction materials and architectural structures.

In the end, one ways to gauge the uncertainty of your industry is looking at how stable demand is and how stable the technological climate of your product/service is.

Here is a comparison of various industries plotted by their relative uncertainty.

October 7, 2014

Industry and Market Research

Pretty much every single business plan has an industry and market overview section. But how do you go about getting that info?

If you’re loaded, then you can buy industry research reports such as the ones produced at IBISWorld.com. They cost several hundred dollars and cover the industry for the entire US. So unless you have a business with nation-wide reach, it will not be cost effective.

A good and free place to start is at the Economic Census page. From there, you pick an industry that you’re interested in. It gives you a snapshot of the industry on a national scale. If you want more detail or focus, click on the American FactFinder link. Navigating the American FactFinder page is somewhat difficult, but with practice becomes…well, it’s still a pain but less of a pain. Kind of like driving a stick shift in traffic. From there, you search for the elements you’re looking for (e.g. number of hair salons in Alabama).

If this all sounds a bit much, do not hesitate to contact us, and we’ll do the legwork for you.

September 26, 2014

How many drafts have you gone through?

Learned an interesting bit of Matrix trivia today.

The Wachowskis harbored their vision for five and a half years, working through 14 drafts of the screenplay. The final concepts took up 500 storyboards.

Creating a business concept or writing a business plan takes adjustments and adjustments and more adjustments. Keep at it!

May 13, 2014

How to calculate costs when you don’t know the costs

Sometimes all you have are a few figures. Revenue, cost of goods sold, rent. Now what?

It certainly isn’t enough to write a business plan but there is still a lot of information you can extrapolate from that. Industry averages of financial ratios are very helpful in determining what other companies in your industry are spending on, for example advertising. There are many paid databases, such as Factiva and BizMinder.com that provide this information but Bizstats.com is a free site that offers information on general industries. Also, at your local library they should have the Almanac of business and industrial financial ratios, and Industry Norms and Key Business Ratios. Two helpful and highly detailed reference books that I use regularly.

There’s always a will if there is a way so keep researching and gathering as much info as possible. Like they say, it’s better to measure 10 times and cut once than vice versa. Know as much of your costs first before taking them on.