Your Business Road Map
Published October 18, 2010 | 
To prove and set up important credibility it is crucial that a business plan does not allow too much for market sizes, take too lightly the competition, or get carried away and project results too aggressively. To be more precise, they must present reasonable game strategies for accomplishing success, including:
• Highlight past accomplishments: One of the best indicators of future success is a company’s past record of success. The formal business plans prepared for previously funded companies must illustrate what milestones they set and were able to achieve with those funds. New businesses must show how the achievement of past successes by the management team will make it possible for the company to meet and prevail over expected challenges.
• Clearly understand and define the realistic and relevant market: Incorrect sizing of a company’s target market is an illuminating indication of a badly rationalized business plan. Let’s take the U.S. healthcare market for example, even if the U.S. healthcare market is a trillion dollar market, a company does not exist that could reap $1 trillion in healthcare sales.
To be more precise, a more meaningful measure is the appropriate market size, which represents the company’s sales if it were to secure 100% of its specific niche of the market. Always Keep in mind that defining and communicating a believable appropriate market size is considerably more persuasive than offering generic industry figures.
• Understand and accommodate to customer needs: Investors have an extremely precise focus on the company relationship with its customers. In its business plan, a business must clearly make a statement about how its products and or services meet precisely identifiable customer wants and needs, and recognize which target markets most demonstrate these needs.
The business plan must also delineate an easy to follow and reliable roadmap of the company’s strategies to fully understand its customers.
• Establish barriers to entry: A business plan must include strategies that best demonstrate how the company not only can, but plans to develop long-term barriers around its customers. Asserting a first mover advantage is plainly not persuasive enough in today’s funding environment.
• Develop realistic financial assumptions: Many lenders and investors go straight to the financial section of the business plan. It is extremely crucial that the assumptions and projections in this section be as accurate and reasonable as possible. Plans that show market penetration, operating margins and revenues per employee statistics that are inadequately logical, incompatible or purely unlikely, to a great extent harm the reliability of the whole business plan.
In complete difference, clear-headed, well-thought out financial assumptions and projections convey operational reliability and trustworthiness.
Understand it is more imperative than ever to present lenders and investors with a practical, realistic and convincing business roadmap that plans for success. Such a business plan sets a company apart from the literally thousands of other companies actively looking to raise capital, and strongly indicates to investors and lenders that your company is effectively well-managed and prepared for success.
Understand When You Need to Create a Business Plan
Published April 28, 2010 | I continue to be amazed how time after time Entrepreneurs will walk into their commercial bank, sit down with the commercial loan officer and try to explain their need for a loan to help them fund either the start up of their business venture, expansion, or more recently, their pressing and legitimate need for working capital during the current recession. 
The response recited to them by the banker, the same in almost every case, is the need for them to develop and prepare a business plan for what they are trying to accomplish, whether start up, business acquisition, business expansion, or maintain current operations.
The business plan requirement has been standard operating procedures for some U.S. government agencies including the Small Business Administration which works directly with the lenders by guaranteeing commercial loans approved and funded to Entrepreneurs for their small businesses by commercial banks.
I cannot imagine why any Entrepreneur would knowingly asking for a loan without a detailed business plan to present to everyone involved (including themselves) with the loan approval process, providing answers to all their questions and issues with the related risks.
How can any entity from the smallest, to ones the size of the U.S. Automobile Manufacturers (General Motors, Chrysler) ask for any amount of money, especially from the people of the United States without a detailed 
Business Plan outlining the funding needed, defining the “use of proceeds” for the funding, and what they think the results will be, based on a set of general assumptions developed through experience and research (i.e. jobs created, retained, capital formation, etc.).
In looking back over the events of the early recession, the auto makers behaved like they had been told by someone to just show up, ask, and no problem, they would get the funding they wanted with not too many questions in the process, but to their surprise they were told to come back when they had prepared a business plan explaining why they should get the loans and how changes to their business models if any, would result in positive cash flow, associated net profits and positive effects to the balance sheet. This is one of the greatest examples ever, that not having a formal Business Plan is a major weakness in all but the simplest and smallest of self-funded business models.
A detailed Business Plan was also missing for the stimulus package and many questions about the package details were simply met with shrugs and statements like “details would be provided” after funding has been approved, which makes it no wonder that consumer confidence has been shaken to extremely low levels.
Business Plans are never easy to prepare and shouldn’t be taken lightly as a major business tool, even after one has prepared hundreds of detailed plans for projects from businesses representing all major industries and levels of spending, 
but the planning principles remain the same, just as the principles of successful business models remain the same, resulting in profit, cash flow, increased equity, and associated wealth and job creation.
You should always remember that Business Plans should be prepared to provide feasibility information for the process of determining whether funding should even be pursued at all, and if so, what type of funding, and successful Business Plans not only help Entrepreneurs and businesses potentially realize their greatest dreams, but also avoid their worst nightmares as well.
Ustream: $20 Million in Funding Raised with $55 Million Option!
Published February 3, 2010 | 
If you haven’t heard of the live video streaming platform Ustream yet, chances are you will be noticing it more in the future, as Ustream has just announced that it has been able to raise $20 million ($20 Million with option to invest up to additional $55 Million) in a Series B round led by Softbank, a telecom firm based out of Japan, and additional funding from investors that have provided previous funds remains pending.
Ustream is a website which consists of network of diverse channels providing a platform for lifecasting and live video streaming of events online. The website has over 3,000,000 registered users who generate 1,500,000+ hours of live streamed content per month with over ten million unique hits per month, and received $11.1 million in Series A funding for new product development from DCM and investors Labrador Ventures and Band of Angels, and plans to use the new funding to expand their live video platform beyond the states and into Asia.
Ustream Raises $75 Million in Funding
Ustream’s Actual Round: $20 Million Now, An Option for $55 Million Later
Twitter News Alert! Twitter to Raise $100 Million in New Funding!
Published September 24, 2009 | 
That’s right! $100 Million in funding based on a recent valuation of $1 Billion for the wildly popular micro-blogging platform, in spite of the fact Twitter has yet to implement a revenue model, although potential revenue streams are being developed as part of a model under work.
WSJ – Breaking News: Twitter to Raise $100 Million from Insight, T. Rowe Price, and Other Investors
Mashable – WOW: Twitter to Raise $100 Million in New Funding
Critical Tips for Entrepreneurs Starting a Business
Published June 28, 2009 | 
The most difficult task that an Entrepreneur faces when starting a business is the building of a client base, as they will find that many prospective clients are already established with other companies, or simply just not interested in taking a risk with the new business, and these types of challenges they face are typical and definitely to be expected, so the real task for the Entrepreneur is to maintain focus and rise above the challenges and build the business’s reputation in its own right, and here are a few tips to follow.
Put yourself in your potential customer’s place and ask yourself, if you were considering becoming a customer of a new business, what would factor into your decision making process, and what could be said that would persuade you to switch allegiance to a new business? The more answers that you can develop to questions like these, the better results you and your business will achieve during the initial stages of the business’s progress.
Research Your Competition
- You’ve probably heard it many times before and it doesn’t hurt to be reminded again to do your research, and start by investigating the competition in your industry by looking online at their websites, as this can grant you access to a huge amount of information including mission statements, vision statements, product attributes, customer testimonials, and other very important information you need, since you want to emulate the techniques they are doing right and seem to be working for them, as well as stay away from any negative issues you find.
Request Feedback from Your Customers
- Ask your potential customers about any of their experiences with your competition, as they can offer some real insight on their likes and dislikes, and this provides you with extremely valuable feedback that you can then incorporate as part of your mission and vision statements, but be prepared to at least match or in most cases exceed the competition’s services, as no customer switches loyalty to a new company without enticing incentives that give them a reason to change.
Develop Strategies Specific to Your Target Market
- After you have gathered enough customer feedback you can start by tailoring your marketing position to their responses, for example, if everyone you talk to insists on the need for 24 hour customer service, this is an indicator of a courtesy you should strongly consider implementing, as words are meaningless unless you take action to back up your intent, and this shows the customers that what they think really matters.
Free Stuff
- As most of the business world has known for years there’s nothing a potential customer likes better than getting free stuff, and what you receive in return for your investment with the customer’s business pays off in future dividends, for instance, if you are starting a business that offers monogramming, be sure and offer free name engraving on any item purchased, as this is a relatively small and insignificant expense to you, but has the huge potential to drive a lot of new business your way.
Business Funding
- Everyone knows that with any business, money is the name of the game, and to get a new business off the ground and operating you need to have appropriate initial funding. It is important for you to figure out just how much money you currently have and how much money you are going to need, as studies show new startup businesses that have less than $50,000 in funding have higher value or rates, and your plan should be to have enough financial assets in the way of initial startup funds and working capital for your business to have a solid foundation to start and build with.
Road Map of the Future
- Last but certainly not least is something that should never be overlooked and is critical to any Entrepreneur that wants to experience long-term success, and that is a business plan, as getting a new business off the ground and successfully operating requires a comprehensive and unbiased analysis of everything from the Entrepreneur’s capabilities and business responsibilities, and you need to have a clear focused strategy for the marketing and operating aspects of the business.
Any starting business that has a realistic outlook and well-planned strategies has greater chances of survival, and having the vision of your expectations and backup plans for unexpected developments and circumstances is the best path to take, and be assured it can make the difference between a business that is successful and prosperous, and one that collapses and fails.