Consulting
Consulting
Business Plans
“People don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan.” How much cash will you need to kick off the business? Will you advertise in traditional ways or use guerilla tactics? How many people do you need, with what skills and at what stage? What is the competition, the barriers to entering the market in that business?
A business plan addresses all these issues and more. It’s a road map that keeps you on track, or shows you shortcuts, better paths with less resistance. If you are looking for investors, they will surely ask you for it. There are several components, the Executive Summary, the market analysis, the financial projections of profitability and cash flow and more. It must be tied together, coherent, easy to follow, and have all the facts you need to move forward.
Commerce International will work with you to get it all out on the table and then package it in a way that you can show it to investors and refer back to it to keep the company on the right track. Eighty years combined experience in all aspects of business will be added to your unique knowledge to generate a working document and tool to measure your success.
The SBA says:“A business plan precisely defines your business, identifies your goals, and serves as your firm's resume. The basic components include a current and pro forma balance sheet, an income statement, and a cash flow analysis. It helps you allocate resources properly, handle unforeseen complications, and make good business decisions. As it provides specific and organized information about your company and how you will repay borrowed money, a good business plan is a crucial part of any loan application. Additionally, it informs sales personnel, suppliers, and others about your operations and goals.
Plan Your WorkThe importance of a comprehensive, thoughtful business plan cannot be overemphasized. Much hinges on it: outside funding, credit from suppliers, management of your operation and finances, promotion and marketing of your business, and achievement of your goals and objectives. "The business plan is a necessity. If the person who wants to start a small business can't put a business plan together, he or she is in trouble," says Robert Krummer, Jr., chairman of First Business Bank in Los Angeles.
Despite the critical importance of a business plan, many entrepreneurs drag their feet when it comes to preparing a written document. They argue that their marketplace changes too fast for a business plan to be useful or that they just don't have enough time, but just as a builder won't begin construction without a blueprint, eager business owners shouldn't rush into new ventures without a plan.
Before you begin writing your business plan, consider four core questions:
- What service or product does your business provide and what needs does it fill?
- Who are the potential customers for your product or service and why will they purchase it from you?
- How will you reach your potential customers?
- Where will you get the financial resources to start your business.”
Employee Policies and Procedures
Before you hire your first employee, you should have thought through and documented all of the terms and conditions involved in working with you, and in the state of California. With differing numbers of employees you have certain obligations regulated by the state. Most importantly, you must get them to do what you need done as efficiently (with the least cost) as possible. Happy employees have the best potential to generate profits for your enterprise. Surprises about your rules and working methods do not usually lead to happy employees.
Commerce International will help you develop a handbook of workplace terms and conditions that meets your business needs, while ensuring compliance with state and federal employment regulations. Further, we can help write position descriptions with measurable components and estimate time needed to accomplish these positions after the learning curve, leading to minimization of labor cost.
We can also write ads and screen candidates, so that you can spend the least possible time hiring the best people to help in your venture.
Regulatory Compliance and Safety
OSHA, EPA, Storm water Pollution Prevention, HAZMAT, MSDS, Yes, we actually know what these all mean and what needs to be done in your particular circumstances to ensure your workers are safe and the various agencies do not issue fines or worse.
Accounting and Taxes
Accounting is thought of as the ‘necessary evil’ in business, but the most successful business owners know it is how they can keep their ‘finger on the pulse’ if they have the right systems in place. By looking at certain key statistics on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, they can see quickly if something is wrong, or if their decisions are generating the results they wanted.
Nirvana for an accountant is when all transactions that affect the business automatically flow through the accounting system from deciding how many products to make, buying the components of the products to actually shipping the finished goods out to customers and receiving payment.
Both of the principle partners of Commerce International have been CFOs in various size companies, including their own. From Excel Spreadsheets to complicated fully integrated accounting systems, they have done it all. They will help determine what is right for you based on the size and cost, then get it implemented all the way through to the reporting you need to manage your business the way you want.
Technology
Are you a MAC or a PC? Technology has come so far in the past thirty five years from IBM card punch machines to 32 gig flash drives, and quad core duo processors. Do you want a completely paper free office? How much of the data you need to run your business can be obtained without data entry? Key strokes on a computer are the enemy, because they so often lead to mistakes: a missed digit, transposition, too many digits, a bad part number.
We will help get the right technology in to ensure the highest quality information is used in the execution of your business. Although the principles have done some light programming in the past, their expertise is best used to find and communicate with the right people who can do it efficiently, if it is needed.
Web Services
You can’t ignore the Web! We already know that the internet has taken 85% of the market share away from traditional phone books and yellow pages. In order to be found, companies now have to put energy into building a great website and doing good SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Since we all know how important internet visibility is, it's equally important to know the dark side of internet visibility; don't do business with the wrong internet technology company or you will lose it all! Unfotuately, there are far too many internet technology companies that through either inexperience or impatience use "black hat SEO tricks". These tricks could work in the short term, but in the long term they destroy your company's reputation with search engines, making you completely invisible!
Having worked in internet technology since 1997, we know all about the virtual world, and how to get you the visibility you need. We call our strategies "aggressive white hat SEO". We say "white hat", because we play by the rule book written by the search engines, and we do it aggressively. We also know all the "black hat SEO" tricks techniques, which allows us to find potential problems and fix them before they do damage to your company's reputation
Proofreading
We are probably not experts in your business field, so you will have to write copy for ads, websites, training materials, etc. Either your external customers or your internal customers will read this material, and it will make an impression on them (hopefully multiple impressions). It is important to make a good, professional impression if you want your external customers to work with you or buy from you. Your internal customers (employees, investors, colleagues) should also get the best impression so they will convey the highest regards for you to those you don’t reach directly.
With over 80 years experience writing and reading business documents, in addition to newspaper experience and a journalism major, we can check each document or web page for spelling, grammar, usage and punctuation. We can understand what feel you are going for and make sure the words you publish create that feel.
High Performance Workplace
The business case for creating high performance workplaces is increasingly strong, with studies in sectors as diverse as steel mills, automotive plants, banking, retail and healthcare.
They show that good management of people leads to improvements in performance measures such as productivity, profit, new products to market and customer satisfaction.
Some key examples include:
- In a study of 968 US firms in 1995, the researcher Mark Huselid found that organizations using progressive people management techniques made $27,000 more sales and $4,000 more profit per employee. For a company employing 10,000 staff this equates to roughly $27 million more profit - well worth having!
- Malcolm Patterson and colleagues at Sheffield University, in their 1997 study of 67 manufacturing firms in the UK showed that 19% of productivity and 18% of profitability was explained by the use of high performance people management
- A study of 366 UK firms published in 2003 by David Guest at King's College showed that high performance management was strongly linked to lower staff turnover and higher profits per employee
- Michael West and colleagues at Aston Business School, examining hospitals in the NHS in 2003, showed that high performance people management was linked to lower patient mortality rates and higher quality of care, having controlled for other factors such as number of doctors per bed
The key point about the evidence above it is that rather than just rhetoric, there is now strong research evidence that getting the people element right really does make a bottom-line difference.
Incorporation
There are different levels of registration and licensing for your company: city, county, state, federal. Why and when do you need to do each? We can advise you on some of this up to the point short of giving legal advice, but more importantly, we can do some of this at a fraction of what an attorney will charge. We have formed hundreds of corporations and limited liability companies in various states. We can help you decide when to see an attorney and what questions you might ask to minimize your costs in that area.
Properly formed entities like corporations and limited liability companies can protect your personal assets from risks taken in your business. In some circumstances, they can protect an asset or group of assets from another asset or group. Legal entities can either cost more or help minimize taxes. We can help guide the discussion with your CPA on this subject.
Fiduciaries, money managers, wealth managers, chartered accountants, etc. outside the U.S. have been using U.S. LLCs for well over a decade to help their European and South American clients minimize their tax liabilities in their own countries. We can provide the proper documents, filings and other materials to aid in this task.