Bringing Creativity and Intelligence Together

A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. They lay out, in broad terms, the vision for the organization and what it is they want to accomplish.

Through a process of active listening and discussion, we will develop a business plan that is best suited to your industry and developed into the format best suited to your purpose:

The Elevator Pitch: a three minute oral or written summary of the business plan. This is often used as a teaser to awaken the interest of potential funders, customers, or strategic partners.

The Formal Presentation: a slide show and oral narrative that will trigger discussion and interest potential investors in reading the written presentation. The content of the presentation is usually limited to the executive summary and a few key graphs showing financial trends and key decision making benchmarks. If a new product is being proposed and time permits, a demonstration of the product may also be included.

The Written Business Plan: a detailed, well written, and pleasingly formatted plan targeted at external stakeholders for the purpose of securing financing, raising venture capital or convincing potential customers to utilize your products and services.

Go to Step 2

A business plan identifies the opportunity and goal for the venture, a strategic plan lays out the specific path: time, money, and actions that need to happen to make the goals of your business plan a reality.

Set SMART Objectives: by creating specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound objectives, you will take the largest goals and break them down into quarterly, weekly and even daily activities. Ideal objectives will give you a regular ‘to-do’ list that will inevitably move you toward success.

Prioritize Your Objectives: once your objectives have been set, you need to identify which objectives will take priority to give you the maximum return on your investment of time. Make no mistake: bringing an enterprise to a profitable position is, by necessity, a time-limited proposition.

Create Your Plan: place your objectives into quarterly, monthly and weekly plans that involve regular reports and feedback from the key members of your management team. By following your plan, you gain an immediate reality check on your plan, goals and objectives.

Go to Step 3

Very few start-ups are profitable in their first two years. A well written business plan and a clear strategic plan are the machine that will make you successful. Money is the fuel to get things moving.

Calculate Burn Rate: by calculating how quickly a start-up business will use up its cash reserves, you can determine how much financing you need to get to a profitable financial position.

Develop a Financing Strategy: once you determine your requirements for financing your business to the point of profitability, you need to determine the mix of finacing: self-sourced, loans and venture capital. This mix is dependent upon the kind of business you are doing.

Develop an Equity Offer: Venture capitalists want to know what they are buying into and what percentage of return they will receive on their investment. Knowing how to make this offer attractive to venture capitalists is the key to financing success.

Here are my Letters of Reference

Green Party Letter of Reference

CCR Letter of Reference

Situation

In November 2002, Dominion Information Services Inc., undertook to change their suite of internet products to SuperPages.ca, the online directory service.  A report was required to track sales and individual product performance as well as to measure sales rep acceptance of this new product.

“The report not only enabled managers to identify their top sellers in each product category, they were able to tailor training to products that their reps were having difficulty with.”

Task

The report currently used to track internet sales was based entirely upon manual data entry and only provided single dollar amounts for sales reps and teams in Alberta.  The report took approximately 2 hours per week to complete and did not break down sales by product or provide any trending data.

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Situation

In February 2002, Dominon Information Services adopted a sales compensation package based upon a 5 pay period quota average to pay their sales reps and managers.  After the first 5 pay periods, it was necessary to provide an evaluation of their pay plan according to a desired standard for both directory and SuperPages.ca sales.

Task

It was my responsibility to take the 5 pay period data and perform an analysis which would show how each team performed against the desired standard.

Action

Once I received and proofed the data for errors, I used Microsoft Excel to classify each sales rep into the following 5 categories: below 50% of quota, between 51-75% of quota, between 76-125% of quota, between 126-150% of quota and exceeding 150% of quota.  I was then able to compare these counts to the desired quota curve:

Result

Upon reviewing the report, it was discovered that 3 of the 17 teams had high averages due to the efforts of one or two of their sales reps. In addition, analysis of SuperPages.ca  showed that over 50% of  sales reps failed to obtain over 75% of their quota, illustrating the need to provide additional sales force training for reps or the need to re-vamp the quota levels for SuperPages.ca.

Situation

One of the challenges of the Inbound Queue Manager was to effectively allocate his CRM’s to answer the calls required to attain an 80% Telephone Service Factor (TSF), as required by the CRTC.   An 80% TSF means that 80% of the calls to the Inbound Queue are answered within 20 seconds.  Unfortunately, there were no forecasting tools to enable him to attain this and he was dissatisfied with the accuracy of the reports he was receiving from CAMSI.

“Using an Erlang-C distribution, the manager is then able to best allocate sales reps in order to attain 80% TSF (Telephone Service Factor).”

Task

I sat down with Inbound Queue Manager and helped him map the problem out.  We worked out the mathematics for managing the queue based on previous calls and the number of CRM’s he had available to answer calls.
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Situation

When I first entered the position of Budget & Results Analyst in Telus Business Sales, there was no systematic tracking of CRM sales for any of the areas and no reliable reporting in place for toll and toll-free losses.

Task

It was my job to assess each of the 4 areas of the Small Business Market: the Inbound Queue, the Small Market Channel, Emerging Markets and Telus Marketing Services (TMS) and  develop a reporting structure that collects results from these channels and funnels them into weekly, monthly and quarterly performance management reports.

” Quarter at a Glance [resulted in] a signficant time savings.  What took 15-30 minutes per day was reduced to 15-30 minutes per week resulting in an annualized savings of $650,000.”

In addition, I was required to provide managers with reliable reports detailing toll gains and losses over the 4 areas of the Small Business Market.

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Situation

In August of 2008, Ecomax Energy Services was purchased by a new owner and taken private.  I was one of only two employees from the old company that were retained.  I was offered the position because of my success with the previous company and my knowledge of the pressure services industry.

In December 2008, CCR acquired the distribution rights to 5 new product lines.  In order to take advantage of this, it was necessary for CCR to raise the monies necessary to purchase starting inventories.

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