Forget business plan templates for a minute. Any plan for your business has to have the following points that cover all aspects of your business: 1- desired outcome 2- steps to reach your outcome 3- cost of each step (in dollar and time) 4- return on investment (ROI on your cost above) 5- risks for all above 6- people involved In your business case, you have to implement those strategies so you can take your business to the next level and increase your profit by 20% in less a year: 1- think of recurring revenue (like birchbox.com) 2- No accounts receivable (just eliminate them from your business) 3- automate your system so you can make money while you are sleeping If you think that 90% of your operations are Sales, you are on the right track, otherwise you have to rethink of your strategy. Back to business plans: any template will not make a difference. Implement the strategies above and you'll see your business strongly growing. Happy to help you on growing your business. Just give me a buzz.

I have been helping clients design, build, and deploy data platforms for many years. Initially on premise, but now in the cloud. This is a really good question. My immediate thought is, yes, there is value in this data. The more difficult one to answer is where and how? The obviously answer is monetisation i.e. what would people or organisations be willing to pay for this data. More importantly, is this my data (vs. customer data) to sell? The data may also represent your intellectual property or be your "secret sauce" so you might not necessarily want to sell it. It is then worth asking questions like "what would the impact on my organisation be if I did not have this data?" or "what would the impact on my organisation be if my competitors had this data?". Hopefully this has given you some ideas. Feel free to book in a call if you have any questions or would like to delve into the detail.

Hello I am Veerendra Kooshna from Mauritius and has been writing articles on Facebook for some years now. My writing passion is appreciated by those who read my posts. Now, what is Clarity really about? As its name points out, it aims to clarify any doubts you may have on a subject. It's a platform where experts in various subject areas meet those with questions to answer them. With its wide variety of experts, you can expect someone to answer you and clear your doubts. It's more about giving than taking; this is what makes it beautiful. This is also a means for experts to get to know people with questions and select the most serious ones for further discussion. This is where it becomes a marketplace. Experts would be more inclined to go deeper into the subject matter only when they believe you are serious. In today's world, time is a really precious commodity and we need to respect each other's time tables. Experts shall find time to help those serious seekers and charge for that. This is quite normal; investing time and knowledge deserves to be remunerated. In this win-win formula, the seeker is given due attention and advice for the betterment of his or her venture. I really hope this has helped you. By the way, am an adviser in presenting more investor-friendly business plans and an exam coach by experience. You may contact me for more information. Thank you.

Online coaching is a great space right now, and I'm glad to see someone with real-world coaching experience making the shift. The agency I started worked primarily in the fitness industry, and I helped plan, market, design, and build over 300 websites for personal trainers, gyms, and online coaches. I am also a regular contractor for Precision Nutrition, which is an enormously successful online coaching platform. My expertise is in inbound marketing, lead funnels, and the design and software architecture to make that happen. I'd be happy to jump on a call and discuss strategies with you if you're interested. Good luck!

I'm a positioning and messaging expert, working now and previously for several software companies in CMO type roles. Ideally you'll want to focus on your propositions to both sellers and buyers independently. You concept is dependant on providing the mechanism for bringing these markets together, so a failure on just one side means a failure for the system as a whole. Focus early on what works and what doesn't for each group, and what's broken in the relationship options they have today. Nail your positioning and messaging to each specific side of the relationship, then create test campaigns and landing pages for each. I wouldn't try wrap it up in one landing page just yet, make sure you understand what's working for both the buyers and the sellers independently first. Good luck, drop me a line if you'd like to speak further on it!

I have 2 youtube channels and combined I have more than 100M views, my 2nd Channel is growing by 70% month to month and I estimate that this channel by itself will produce 30-50M views per month end of 2016. With that said the single most important stat you should be on the lookout is engagement rate. Try to have videos that have a high engagement rate, preferably anything that is above 50%, if you want further details and other techniques happy to have a call

You should always give someone what they deserve. Never more and never less. Most people don't know how to do this so they guess. They try to predict the future or they look for rules of thumb or they try other ways of guessing. Kind of like you are doing now. The best way to determine this is to consider one person's risk relative to others. When someone contributes to a startup company and doesn't get paid they are accepting risk. The value of that risk is equal to the fair market value of the contribution they made. For instance, if you could earn $100,000 a year doing whatever it is that you do and you do it for a startup without getting paid you are, in effect, risking $100,000 a year. Taking risk in a startup company is essentially betting on the future outcome of the startup. If you and I bet $10 on the same hand of Blackjack we are each betting the same amount and, therefore, each deserve exactly half the winnings (if any). So, the right way to split equity in a startup company is to keep track of what's been contributed, then perform this simple formula: Individual Ownership (%) = Individual Risk/Cumulative Risk The model changes over time as more contributions are made. Each day a person contribute their stake would change. This means that at any given time, no matter what changes, who joins or who leaves. Everyone always has exactly the ownership they deserve to have. Unlike traditional models that require us to predict the future, the relative risk model is based on easily observable values in the market. Everything has a fair market value. So, the answer to your question is simple. Add up the risk he has taken and divided it by all the risk taken by everyone (including you). Each person's share can be calculated this way and the total will always equal 100%. On day one, before he's done anything, his ownership will be 0%. As it should be. Over time, as he risks, his % will change based on relative risk. This is a perfect, unambiguous formula. Every other equity model lays the foundation for disputes later on. Only a relative risk model will give you the fair answer. I've written a book on this topic, called Slicing Pie, you may have a copy if you contact me through Clarity.fm or SlicingPie.com.

I would recommend that you start attending industry trade shows in your area and/or country. These are excellent platforms to connect and network. I have organized and attended over 300 trade shows and events over the last 20 years, and suppliers and manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors are at these events. Additional sources are with export offices, government entities, and other multipliers. There are also specific focus groups in the furniture business, as well as groups that you can connect with. Let me know if you want to discuss this further in a call. Good luck.

I'm not familiar with the specifics of iOS's interruption of other apps when calls come in, so there may be a simpler solution somewhere in the iOS device API. An end-around solution might be to keep the call alive on a central server that acts as an intermediate switchboard (a third caller, sort of), so that even if one user disconnects, the call itself is still live. Then the app could attempt to rejoin the call once the interruption has passed. (Or, if rejoining is impossible, reinitiate the call.) This makes several assumptions, so you'll need to dig around in the API documentation for both iOS and Twilio. However, assuming there's not an existing solution inside iOS, creating a call controller on an external server should be able to solve (or at least work around) the problem. If you'd like to get a second opinion or a more in-depth review of options, I'd be happy to schedule a short call to review options, and — if necessary — some hands-on work with your code to help you solidify a fix to the problem. Good luck!

Interesting, but very loaded, question. It depends on the industry segments, location of your business and the reach you want to have, as well as your budget. I have organized trade shows all over the world and in over 65 industries. So look at industry, location, country/city, attendee profile, demographics, and some other factors. There are over 10,000 trade shows every year in the USA alone. You need to do some "shrinking" of the reach and take it from there. Let me know if you have specific questions and we can schedule a call. Good luck!

Assuming Twilio allows multiple calls to the same number to happen simultaneously (I've never tested this), you could build a lookup table in your app that stored active calls, then give the user a control to swap between active calls. You could send a push notification to notify the user of additional incoming calls (a vibration) if there's not a way to play a sound or otherwise notify the user through the active Twilio call. (There should be a way to send an audio notification, though.) This is all untested, so I can't speak to whether or not Twilio can/will support that setup, but — assuming multiple calls are allowed through their service — it should be possible using something like that. Good luck!

Kickstarter has indeed a stronger brand and the quality of its projects is generally higher. It seems Indiegogo is always the fallback plan. However, Indiegogo has a few strong points: * It is very strong in internationalization. It supports many more currencies, languages and countries than Kickstarter. Kickstarter seems happy to be present mostly in Anglo-saxon countries * Indiegogo is very strong in community (non-profit causes) and also in film projects. Additionally it has many health tech projects and finance projects that Kickstarter has not. When was last time that you saw an innovative finance project on Kickstarter? * Indiegogo is growing faster than Kickstarter. Lately, Kickstarter has announced they will switch to a non-profit status and it's been a while they haven't announced new expansion while Indiegogo has fresh investment $$ and has announced new products * Indiegogo has a staff that can help entrepreneurs and creatives. They will give you support before you launch and can give you advice to raise more. Kickstarter has very little support - apart from its shiny interface and automated interface. At the end of the day, what matters is selecting the best platform that is best for your project. Conduct due diligence and see where the best performing projects are in your industry.

Why a coach? You'll probably have an easier time finding a hire or someone outside to help. There's no shame in bringing on skills in another person instead of building them in yourself. If a venture backed startup founder told you that they've lost tens of thousands in revenue from server downtime, would you recommend that they hire a coach and learn it themselves? It would likely be cheaper, faster and more effective to get an outside IT service provider, and at some point it would make sense to build a team internally. Maintaining a competitive skill set is tough enough in one discipline. There is a big opportunity cost to trying to chase two.

Obviously that wouldn't hurt, and there are likely benefits to doing so. The thing to consider is will doing this save you time and make you a better leader or will it take time away from leading, growing and building a vision for the company? Only you can answer that. Being in a technical industry myself there is no way that I can know as much as my team knows. They are the ones in the trenches and understand the details better than I ever could. But I still need to have an overall grasp and understanding of how each of their roles applies to the projects and coordinate how they work together to get the job done. I could spend more time digging into the details, but ultimately that would take my time away from leading the company.

Message the expert directly and make the request. Many of us are available pre-call to address this kind of issue. If they're pressed for time, they'll let you know and you can reschedule the call. Otherwise, they'll just keep on the call until you've answered all your questions. The calls do not get cut off if they go over the accepted timeframe.

Clarity is a great platform for people to connect with Experts. If you feel that you'd be able to offer expert opinion, or can add valuable insight to someone seeking information, become an expert here.

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Social media is probably the best channel available, with reasonable returns. However, "free" may be a false economy, as it takes a lot of time/effort to do it effectively. Pick 1 or 2 relevant social media platforms (Twitter & Facebook?) and put your effort there. A lot depends on who your target market is, and what level of reach you need. E.g., if you need to a very specific set of users/customers, then make a list of your targets and try and reach out to the individuals on social media. If you have a wider set of users/customers, reach out to specific hashtags/keywords. Alternatively, put some money towards Google AdWords, LinkedIn ads or Facebook ads. Go for the "long tail" of keywords, which should be fairly cheap. Let me know if you need more detail around this.

You're definitely going the wrong direction. That's my opinion. But I'm right, and here's why: Your domain strategy is hyper-extended. You've got 4 domains in .CO.UK – hopefully 8 counting .UK rights. That's all well and good for a British audience. But you deliver work online; so why not appeal to a global audience? Here in the USA, ccTLDs (a.k.a. country codes) are not recognized. Your business will look strange and be misremembered as .COM. That means your marketing will be inefficient; you'll leak traffic to Google, parked PPC pages, or even competitors who develop sites with the same brand name(s) in the same niche! Meanwhile you'll pay extra in ongoing advertising costs to compensate. And you don't own the 4 corresponding .COM domains. I checked. They're owned by a pair of people / companies – both known to me already. To acquire these 4 matching domains, you'd need to spend about $10,000. That's based on the typical list prices these guys set, which you can verify, I'm sure. On top of this, you'd face brand protection issues for at least 4 distinct names. That obligates you to further domain purchases or risks ... in proportion to the number of brand names you're attempting to operate. After all, WantApp is confusingly similar to WantApps; and WantWebsite resembles WantAWebsite. And let's not forget .DESIGN and .WEBSITE, which means your WantDesign.co.uk is competing against both WantDesign.com and Want.Design, while your WantWebsite.co.uk has to shout extra-loud to be heard above WantWebsite.com and Want.Website. Things get complicated fast! You'd eventually face competitors with these names unless you bought them all. You might even get embroiled in trademark disputes, which are no fun. For that amount of money ($10k upwards), you can buy a really great domain name and consolidate all your efforts on a single brand name with worldwide appeal and a single website. In the long run, going the way you're going, you will pay thousands of pounds one way or another. Maybe you won't buy those other domains, but you will put extra cash, sweat, and time into marketing. You'd probably lose a few customers over the years as well, since they'd go somewhere other than your site and find other people to hire. I also have concerns about branding with multiple domains, managing multiple websites, or asking customers to bounce around between several sites. But there's no space to go into that. The domain issues already sank your battleship, I'm afraid. If you'd like help selecting a single unified brand name for all your services – which is what I recommend – let's talk. Naming and domain procurement are both areas I specialize in.

Hmm. We'd have to see how you're emails are worded. They might feel extremely spammy. I'd reach out to Donnie Cooper on here. He's an expert in email drip campaigns.

Hello -- I've hired and grown both field sales representatives and inside reps for the last decade. I think the answer to this question depends on how your deals are currently won. If your deals are currently won over screen share or phone, it makes sense to hire the person on the west coast, and have them work directly in your office. Monitoring activity and understanding how deals move through the funnel, and fall out of the funnel will be easier when someone is in-house. If your deals require that you visit the customer in person, then I'd advocate for hiring them wherever your customer base is located. It seems to me like at 40k, this is an opportunity for an in-office hire. I'm happy to jump on a call to discuss in more detail.

Planning software projects — especially estimating timelines — is a consistent challenge for developers. When I ran an agency, I constantly struggled with my team's ability to hit deadlines until I figured out how to plan more effectively. I've written up my approach here: http://lengstorf.com/effective-project-planning/ The short version is: 1. Make every task a yes/no question. If there's room for interpretation, it's not clear enough. 2. Keep the goals visible and track progress in a central location (somewhere you can both see). 3. Break tasks into single-day efforts whenever possible. So instead of "build home page", it's "A) style navigation; B) create opt-in; C) add testimonials section; etc." — the goal is to create momentum with a daily deadline that can absolutely be completed. It takes a little more effort up front, but it pays dividends in the long run. I used this strategy with my team to decrease our average turnaround times by nearly half, and my consulting clients have used this strategy to similar effect. I'd be happy to help you create a concrete plan using these techniques. Schedule a call or send me a message and we'll get started. Good luck!

Two key issues in your question: (1) when you say "majority are making millions" you're not seeing the hundreds of startups that failed in the same space... (2) if it's such a great idea, you should have traction. CHALLENGE: Adding photos to menus is tricky... Good pics are very expensive, and bad pics will detract from a menu's appeal. I could let a restaurant owner fax me a menu and get it online for around $2 using offshore labor for data entry. But a good photo shoot would cost hundreds or more and require local talent everywhere (or place a large and expensive burden on the restaurant owners). It's also labor-intensive to get thousands of restaurants signed on to something. Are you planning to scrape other sites and spam restaurant owners? Walk door-to-door? Buy a mailing list? If you've been personally soliciting restaurants, that's useful for market research - but obviously can't ever be profitable. You should test a scalable strategy for acquisition. Remember, a menu service that has only 30% (or even 60%) of the restaurants in my neighborhood is pretty much useless. Can you acquire them all, cheaply? Do they even want photos of their food? Only restaurants like McDonald's, Cheesecake Factory, and Chinese take-out do that these days. To earn investment dollars, you'll need to prove: (a) you can execute this concept at scale, on boarding hundreds of restaurants, (b) restaurant owners are signing up, and (c) you're able to gain sufficient traffic to the site for the business to generate ongoing value. RECOMMENDATION: prove yourself in one city, and investors may help you to expand to many. But if you want funding to pay for initial marketing / webdev / photography while you "gain traction", then that would be a wasted effort. Investors need to see scalable proof, and since fund-raising is time-consuming, better to invest your own energy in proving the business first.

I think you have to go with your gut on this one. We've worked with clients to coordinate the use of telemarketing services through UpWork and have had a good experience. But we stuck with native-English speaking freelancers. Most on them were from the US. When they call, ask them to not only explain the service, but also ask them to request an email address where they can send more information. Give the telemarketer a company email address and a pre-set message about your service to email. Or you can do this yourself. If you're simply trying to raise awareness, a phone call is no big deal and would be great. If you're trying to sell, it will be a little tough, and it might be better to simply have them setup a time for you to return the call and close the sale. Whenever you're having to talk and explain a service over the phone, it's important to have a firm grasp on the language and vernacular phrases. Look into some of the telemarketers from outside the US who list themselves as expert English speakers and setup a time to talk with them over the phone to gauge their phone skills and grasp of the language.

I think I get where you are going with this. Your company buys products/merchandise from people looking to sell that merchandise. Example: Amy has a printer and she is looking to sell her printer. She does not know where to sell her printer so she Google's, "Where can I sell a printer" and you want your landing page to surface specifically for that product. This is an excellent growth tactic and one that can be extremely effective. First, I would start by creating a general template for this set of pages including everything except that which would be specific to a specific category. Then I would go down a level and think about how you could speak specifically to each category. Example: Instead of saying something general like, "XYZMarketplace has bought 100,000 products this year" I would be targeted on exactly what they originally searched for. So this could be along the lines of, "XYZMarketplace has bought over 1,000 printers this month" or "Sell Your Printer in 5 Minutes". This talks directly to what they are searching for. Often times companies stop there and after a user clicks your CTA (call to action) the user is pushed into the standard onboarding flow. This often leads to a higher drop-off rates during onboarding. I would suggest that you customize your onboarding flow for that specific category. Example: The user that was searching for, "Where can I sell a printer" and landed on your printer landing page liked what you were offering and clicked the CTA of "Sell My Printer Today". Now you may have an onboarding workflow that says, "We are thrilled that you decided to sell your printer on XYZ. What type of printer do you have?" Then use icons and images, to take them through the decision tree. This does take more work than having just one generalized onboarding process, but it will greatly increase your conversions. The tools I would use to do this is a combination between Unbounce and Optimizely. They both are going to be hugely beneficial. If you are looking for a free alternative, I would suggest Google's little-known option called Google Experiments. This will get you started, however, based on what you are looking for it may not be powerful enough to effectively manage the number of A/B tests and landing pages you would be doing. In regards to spam, it is highly unlikely your pages will be marked as spam as long as your pages contents are considerably different. If you duplicate the product specific landing pages and only replace the instance of the product then you are running a significant risk. If you actually speak to the differences beyond the product name you will not have this problem. I would love to chat with you further about this. Here is my Clarity.fm VIP link for a free call. https://clarity.fm/lipmanb/vip/t