We are excited for First Plate Hangout to launch later this year. First Plate Hangout is a food truck that will provide savory home-style meals to the New England market.
We created a custom-made business plan with target market analysis, actionable marketing strategy, flexible financial projections with adjustable revenue start periods & blended fixed – variable expenses, and more.
Contact us today to launch and grow your business.
Finding your target market requires analyzing your skillset, market characteristics, competitive landscape, and barriers to entry.
It is shocking how many entrepreneurs select their target market without a thorough analysis. Entrepreneurs often base their identification of the target market solely on their experience. This is a massive mistake. A developer wouldn’t build a house only on their knowledge of how to frame a wall. They would look at the soil underneath, the weather, the population, regulations, and much more.
A complete analysis to find your target market requires finding the intersection of your skillset, market characteristics, competitive landscape, and barriers to entry. Let’s discuss in greater detail:
As you can see, there are a significant number of considerations beyond just the entrepreneur’s skill set. Contact us today to conduct a thorough analysis to find your target market.
Don’t wait until you get fired to find a new job. Americans’ confidence that they will find employment is at an all-time low.
Take proactive measures to set up your side-hustle or startup today. Dozens of businesses are recession-resistant, such as vintage thrift shops, vending machine owners, medical equipment pickup, estate cleanouts, and more.
Side businesses can be a safer and lower-commitment entry into entrepreneurship. We have the resources, such as business plans, marketing services, and access to capital, to help you launch and grow your business.
Contact us or schedule a meeting with us today to start planning for your future.
This checklist provides a general overview of tasks involved in starting a new business. You’ll want to adapt it to your specific industry, business type, and location.
This checklist is a starting point, so the specific tasks and their sequence might vary.
You can buy a business for less than launching a new one! Contrary to popular belief, entrepreneurship isn’t just starting a new, novel, business. You can buy and grow an existing one. Some benefits of buying a business vs. launching a new one:
Example New Cost Comparison
Example Existing Cost Comparison
Not all businesses are sold because they are unprofitable. Sellers list their business for many reasons such as retiring, moving, and changing priorities.
To buy a business, you will need several things, including:
Contact us today for help with buying a business.
Very loosely based on actual events but Flamin’ Hot can teach us a few things about entrepreneurship.
Flamin’ Hot is a fictionalized dramatization of how the wildly popular Flamin’ Hot line of products was created. A more detailed account of the creation of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and related products can be found in this LA Times article. Although it is very loosely based on actual events, the film can teach us a few things about entrepreneurship.
Richard Montañez, the supposed creator was a natural entrepreneur since childhood. In the film, he was bullied by his classmates about his burrito lunch. He persuaded them to try it and got them to buy burritos from him. Richard then sold burritos to the entire school. Richard also showed interest in machinery early on which helped him understand the chip manufacturing process.
Not everyone is born with the traits and proclivities to create something new, but if you are, it’s a big advantage.
Selling drugs got Richard in trouble with the law which limited his career options. So he pleaded his way into a janitorial job. Richard swallowed his pride and did the work.
Our perceptions about our self, how we think others perceive us, where we think we should be in life, pride, shame, etc. are all factors that can sometimes limit us. Overcoming this is probably more important than being a natural entrepreneur.
Richard learned his job as a janitor but also learned how the chips were made. He also asked questions about chip manufacturing to people that were not in his department; thus crossing over departmental “cliques” — sanitation doesn’t mingle with engineers, etc. This allowed him to learn more about chip manufacturing than almost anyone. His willingness to overcome shame/embarrassment, in this case overcome corporate culture, also allowed him to access knowledge that others were unwilling/uninterested in learning.
Additionally, Richard’s Mexican-American background gave him exposure to spicy food and awareness about the large Latin-American population. In 1980, 6.5% of the US Population was Hispanic; by 1990, it grew to 8.8% as the total US population grew 22 million in that time. He saw how his friends and family would add spicy seasoning to their foods. Richard also saw, when he was on a delivery run with a coworker, that mainstream snacks were the only option in neighborhoods like his. A large and rapidly growing market did not have a spicy option.
This is all part of industry and market research.
In reality, Fred Lindsay, a Frito-Lay salesman that worked the Chicago and Great Lakes region noticed spicy products from regional competitors out-selling Frito-Lay.
Learn everything you can about your business, other people’s businesses, your customers, their customers. Knowledge is power.
It is important to note that Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (according to the movie) did not happen over the course of a couple of years. Richard was working at the plant for over 8 years when the idea came to him. Also, in the movie, Richard’s wife Judy, developed the recipe in what seems like less than a year.
In reality, Lynne Greenfeld and a team of product developers at Frito-Lay was assigned in 1989 to create a snack designed to compete with spicy snacks sold in the inner-city mini marts of the Midwest. Greenfeld would go on a field marketing tour throughout the Midwest and bring back 50 different bags of snacks that were all new to her. Eventually, she and her team honed in on a flavor combination and chubby devil branding that we know today. This process took around a year.
With the recipe in hand, Richard needed to acquire chips to coat the newly developed spicy slurry with. At the Frito-Lay factory, brown chips were thrown out because they only wanted the lighter colored chips. Richard took the discarded chips to create his first batch.
Finding inexpensive solutions is a crucial task in entrepreneurship.
A pivotal moment in the movie happened when Richard looked up the contact info of Roger Enrico, CEO and Chairman of PepsiCo Inc., the corporate owner of Frito-Lay, to pitch the idea to him.
In the movie, Richard stumbles when asked about market share and product yield. This is where our services come in. Our industry leading pitch decks come with industry and market overviews, projected sales, and much more. Companies from a wide range of industries have used our pitch decks to raise funds from banks, SBA, and angel investors.
Even after convincing Enrico to launch the Flamin’ Hot line, it was not all smooth sailing. In the movie, Frito-Lay did not launch an advertising campaign as most companies do for most products and services. As a result, the products were not selling.
To raise awareness for the product, Richard resorted to guerrilla marketing. He rallied his friends, family, and coworkers to start giving away unsold bags for free to anyone in the neighborhood. This strategy, more specifically, is called product sampling, and is commonly used by companies to raise awareness and increase the chances of initial purchases.
In reality, the Flamin’ Hot line of products had the full force of Frito-Lay’s marketing department. Unfortunately for most entrepreneurs, they do not have a large corporation driving awareness for their newly launched product.
Contact us today for help with your new product development.
The WOCCON Summit is an invitation-only conference that brings together entrepreneurs, allies, and thought leaders to explore ways to help women of color advance on the grow-scale-exit trajectory. The Summit will share stories about the unique entrepreneurial journey of women of color, facilitate honest conversations about allyship, and propose solutions that can lead to systemic change.
While a growing number of Black and Latinx women-led startups crossing the $1MM threshold, the majority of Black and Latinx women-led startups raise significantly less than the average funded startup. For those who have not raised over $1MM, the median seed round raised by Black women founders is $125,000 and the median seed round raised by Latinx women founders is $200,000. As of 2020, the national median seed round funding for a startup is $2.5M. Source: ProjectDiane2020
Your Startup Guru is thrilled to attend the WOCCON Summit and committed to creating a more inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystem. Capital constraint remains a defining problem for the majority of Women of Color entrepreneurs. As our post, What Angel Investors Prefer discusses, there are considerable pre-money valuation and round size discrepancies when it comes to the various demographics of entrepreneurs. This highlights a disturbing flaw in the angel investment community.
This post on Reddit talks about how an entrepreneur lost over $200k trying to start a business brings up excellent things to consider when starting a business.
Every business is different, but some key lessons that apply to almost all businesses are numbers #3, #7, and #9.
Lesson #3: Don’t Build Everything At Once
As an entrepreneur, you are likely the CEO and janitor. In other words, you have a lot to juggle and little cash to spend. Getting the core product/service to market takes precedence over spending time and money adding bells and whistles.
Lesson #7: You Can Be Either Low Frequency or Low Price, but Not Both
In other words, you can make infrequent big sales or frequent small sales, but not both. Most businesses fail because of illiquidity (i.e. not enough cash). Expenses never stop and must be paid even in between sales, so make sure you are always generating sales. A SaaS/user-base business is slightly different because the revenue model is based on data and advertising, but a similar maxim still exists.
Lesson #9: A Founder’s #1 Job is Sales
Once the CEO is done with janitorial duties for the day, it’s back to the phones making calls. For example, one of the main jobs of a partner at a law firm is increasing yearly revenue. They might not be doing contract review or picking up trash, but they are rainmaking.
See the full Reddit post below:
Launch and Grow Your Business
Contact us today for guidance on how to not lose money trying to start a business.
Your Startup Guru Managing Director, Joon Hong, recently had the opportunity to advise the 2022 cohort in the Emerging Young Entrepreneurs (EYE) program on their pitch decks.
The National Minority Supplier Development Council’s Emerging Young Entrepreneurs (EYE) program is a year-long program uniquely designed to provide the next generation of minority entrepreneur participants ages 19-35 with support to enhance their growing business. Business owners will receive guidance from corporate sponsors, MBEs, and additional stakeholders. EYE will utilize an interactive pre and post-conference curriculum along with five days of hands-on training and practical application. Participants are provided the skills, tools, and strategies to start or grow their innovative businesses.
Founded in 1972, the National Minority Supplier Development Council Inc.® (NMSDC®) is the longest-operating business growth engine for the broadest group of systematically excluded communities of color (Asian-Indian, Asian-Pacific, Black, Hispanic, and Native American), and our impact goes far beyond supply chain. It’s about upward mobility for the emerging majority of Americans, an equal shot at participating in the American experiment of free-market capitalism and entrepreneurship. Our work is about correcting the unequal access to wealth-building opportunities.
Pitch decks are a fantastic document to raise capital for your business. Contact us today to get started on your pitch deck.
The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) is investing up to $2 million in seed funding, aka America’s Seed Fund. America’s Seed Fund is a program within the National Science Foundation and housed within the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships. This congressionally mandated program aims to foster innovation and help create businesses and jobs in all areas of the United States, and small businesses funded by our program have since gone on to tremendous success, changing industries, and helping people and the planet. Click here for more information.
Contact us today to get started on your pitch deck.
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