Sample Business Plan
The purpose of a business is to make a profit; otherwise it is a government department or a charity. In order to make a profit, people have to give you money. Why do people give you money?
One other characteristic of
a business is that it can last longer than the people who started it. The
Hudson’s Bay Company started about 375 years ago, on May 2, 1670. I don’t know
many people that live for 375 years.
Two Items:
People today 'pay ' for products but they 'buy ‘Satisfaction.
There is a large out migration of people from the rural areas of Nova Scotia. This includes the small towns and villages.
The Problem
Older people are selling their larger homes and moving to be closer to the Hospitals in the bigger cities. Younger people are leaving to find work where employers pay a living middle-class wage. The average income in Canada is $48,250. If the work week is 40 hours this equals an hourly wage of $23 per hour.
The going wage of $12 per hour will not be attractive enough to keep the bright, well educated people in the rural parts of Nova Scotia. The government had paid a great deal of money to care and educate the young people only to find they leave for other Provinces.
A series of small businesses located in small towns and villages that paid $18 per hour plus bonuses based on production, would create an attractive reason for people to stay in these communities.
Countless studies have been conducted over the past decades to uncover what makes people happy at work. The research almost always focuses on three areas; ability/skills, experience, and knowledge a person brings to the job.
Not being happy in their work is one reason to leave the area.
A feeling of incompetence is a barrier to creativity. Although competence leads to productivity, it does not mean that the individual is engaged by the work. Individuals value different things – money, recognition, intellectual challenge, travel, prestige or something more personal.
People with the same abilities are motivated to follow different career paths based on their value system. Some wish to stay at home and some wish to travel to 'where the grass is greener'.
The
Solution
We have an unlimited source of products that can be manufactured in small plants with about 25 employees all making $40,000+ per year. This would provide a payroll input to the communities of ($40,000 x 25 =) $1,000,000 per year.
Because the local people will spend most, if not all that money, this amount will be received by local merchants and then used to buy goods and hire people. Thus it has a multiplier effect of 3 times and thus adds $3 million to the local small town economy.
Only about 5% of all the patents issued are ever put into production. This leaves 95% of patents that can we can curate and then select categories of products that can be assembled in Nova Scotia and exported to the rest of North America.
A quick look at one week in 2020, about 11,000 patents were issued each week. Using a spreadsheet we can sort these into actual physical devices and into processes or chemical formulations. Then we can sort the physical products into groups that would be compatible.
Such groups might include Gardening, Cooking and Kitchen tools, Home Décor, Medical Aids for Older People, and Independent Living for Elders. Normally to sell a product, you would have to buy shelf space at a retail store and make a TV ad to pull the merchandise from the store. There is a simple inexpensive solution to this.
Marketing
"An idea is something, but distribution is everything."
Over a short time Amazon had grown from an internet bookseller to a seller of everything. They know a great deal about selling books, but not that much about selling general merchandise. As a result of that, they let other people sell the merchandise and they collect the money, warehouse the products, and ship the products. Because of their volume, Amazon has great shipping rates.
Because customers trust the Amazon name, their business has grown to almost $8 billion per month ($96 billion per year). They have a total active user base to 244 million customers, which is which is 30 million more than last year.
If you combine this with the fact that Facebook has an advertising message delivery service to reach their 41 million active Page Holders in Canada and 151 million active Page Holders in the US, you have a way to reach a consuming marketplace of 192 million people.
Facebook allows you to place a small add directing the page holder to click to your website. If anyone clicks, you pay a small fee, and you can limit this amount to $5-$10 per day. In this manner you can control your advertising expense and only pay for those market segments that are receptive to your ad.
