BIO:
“Tim Berry is co-founder of Eugene Social, founder and Chairman of Palo Alto Software, founder of bplans.com, and a co-founder of Borland International. He
taught starting a business at the University of Oregon for 11 years. He is
author of books and software including Business
Plan Pro, published by Palo Alto Software, and The
Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan, published by Entrepreneur Press. He has a
Stanford MBA degree and degrees with honors from the University of Oregon and
the University of Notre Dame.
His website is at timberry.com
and his main blog is Planning Startups
Stories; he also posts on several other blogs including Huffington Post,
Amex OPEN Forum, and Industry Word at sba.gov. He is an active investor member
of the Willamette Angel
Conference.”
Key Component of a
Business Plan:
Berry talks about the important of a business plan and what
investors look for when looking for potential investment opportunities. The key
components of a business plan are your Executive Summary. The Executive summary
is a brief summary of everything that is explains in the body of your proposal.
It gives an investor the opportunity to see if this venture is worth investing
or meets their needs prior to reading the entire plan. We then move on to the
second key component, the Marketing Plan.
The marketing plan relates to your product and service and should be
outlined in your business plan. This shows an investor how the product and
service will fulfill the demand within your marketplace. However the company
would also need to show that it has advertising, marketing and sales force to
effectively get the product and service distributed and build its brand
awareness.
The third key component is your
competition analysis. This shows who the competition is and how the competition
is effectively penetrating the market. If there is not a lot of competition
then this proves that there is a need for this service in its market and an
open field for business. If the competition is high then the investor would
need to see what you do better and why the market purchase your goods and
service over the other competitors.
The fourth component is Management. Investor likes to learn
about the key personnel and any strategic alliances the company has. Management
is very important to any company because they are the ones who see to the success
of the business. Without the right people who have a track record that proves
they are capable of running the business investors will walk away from the
venture.
Finally the last key component that
set the tone for the plan is the Financials. Financials are essential for any
investor to feel confident that the team understands the market, real costs of
business where profits will be earned. For many start-up companies, the
financials are done in a pro forma fashion. This means that figures are placed
as hypothetical numbers based on data known to the company. For instance, a
company may know how much it will cost to make a widget and what it will cost
to market it, but may place a constant in for total sales within the year to
demonstrate what revenues for the company might be.
These components are key to any business plan and key to
your investors. Focus on what makes your company unique, look for employees
that are creditable that have a track record that will be beneficial to your
company success. Tim Berry lets us know that he has seen it all from the small
companies to the large companies both good and bad, and in order for any
company to land a good investment deal the business plan has to be creditable
to draw any investor attention.
Source:
Time Berry
Tim Berry Photo
Time Berry Blog
A Good Business Plan by Tim Berry September 12, 2012
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