Building a business' Valerie Holt'

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Building a business. Valerie Holt.
Flintshire Celebrates Business Are you ready to
try?
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Building a business

• Be sure you want to do it it isnt easy
• Create a Plan - but be prepared to change it
• Find a supporter/s to avoid isolation
• Be prepared for a change in life style
• About 50 of new companies fail and of those that
  succeed over 80 do just a small thing better
  then the company the founder left.

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Write a plan

• Outline your concept research, research,
  research to validate your suppositions
• Attempt to quantify as soon as possible
• The competition
• The resources you will need
• The time scale to which you are working
• Create your own LUCK by being hypercritical, by
  reading trade press and asking for help.
  
  
  

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The Business Plan step by step

• Analyze the market and the competition
• Competitive analysis of market is it a
  developing, growing market or is it mature?
• Competitive analysis of products services
  are the products innovative or an extension of
  current products?
• Get to know your target clients and their
  characteristics
• Is there a seasonal pattern to purchase?
• Who buys and why?
• Build a financial Model that shows 3 year
  development
• Identify possible exit routes.

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Funding and Protecting the proposition

• What are the barriers to entry for subsequent
  competition? You need to be very honest about
  this.
• Identify any Intellectual Property and file for
  protection this takes time and money
• Can you build a revenue stream without outside
  funding?
• How will you raise the necessary funding? Angels?
  Now almost everyone wants to see revenue before
  even Seed or Angel funding. What about grants?
• Identify your Unique Selling Proposition and use
  it to separate you from the competition and your
  products from the rest of the market.

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The company culture and the people

• What needs doing and who is going to do it?
• How do you find these people and how do you keep
  them?
• Recruitment and training
• remuneration and rewards
• Create a learning environment and develop the
  team.
• It is important to have a backup system so that
  if there is an accident the momentum is not lost.
  Equally, you set the style from day one as we
  all recruit in our own image Not one of us
  syndrome. You need to have outsiders and
  mavericks can be very creative.

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The processes you need to install

• Financial models and systems to record
• income streams projections to show maximum,
  median and minimum
• margins higher if direct sales but possibly
  faster growth using indirect channels to market
  as well
• work out your ratios sales is truly a numbers
  gamethe more you start the more you finish
• costs a controller is more important than
  almost anything else. Have you captured every
  cost? At what point do you reach cash neutral?
• purchasing is a real job and suppliers are key

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Build template processes

• Define your products
• Unless you are starting a consultancy create
  definitive products
• Create a legal contract for these
• Be careful not to kill off products by
  introducing new products too quickly
• Human resource model for growth...
• standard contracts for taking people on quickly
• allocate responsibility and define boundaries
  between people and teams
• Create training expectations from the beginning
• Legal resource plan...
• In house or out-sourced
• single source or shared

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More processes

• Marketing plan
• how will people get to hear about it?
• can you identify the best route to your target
  audience/s?
• can you afford the route or can you find a work
  around? Can you test and measure?
• what impact will promotion make on sales?
• can you produce to demand if successful?
• It is important to learn from mistakes.

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More Processes

• Corporate communications planning means that you
  must articulate your message to all audiences.
• Create a regular and planned staff meeting and
  make it as interactive as possible
• Develop a timetable for external statements to
  Pressnational, trade, local etc.
• Customers
• Local Community
• Suppliers and trade Partners
• Dont forget your bank and your shareholders!

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Division of responsibilities

• The entrepreneur starts the company and finds
  the partners, the people and money to get the
  business off the groundshould probably cease day
  to day control as soon as a professional manager
  is required. There are transitional changes at
  about 40-50 people and again at around 200.
• The entrepreneurial managertakes over and
  introduces order into what is frequently chaos
• The investors provide money from seed funds,
  angel round investors and then venture
  capitalists in return for equity in your company

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Building a business. Valerie Holt.
Are you ready to fly? Good Luck.
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What helped me most?

• My grandfather
• Hill Samuel Investment Department not 16 but 26
  of corporate tax comes from the city
• A strong physique and a good education
• A creative imagination and the confidence to
  trust my gut
• A wide network of people and the gall to ask for
  help repeatedly.

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A life in and around business

• Read Natural Sciences and Economics at Trinity
  College Dublin. Secretary of the Union, stroke
  of a Womens Four and inaugural editor of Atlas,
  an interdisciplinary magazine.
• As a V.S.O. Set up the Extra-mural Department of
  the University of Zambia on the Copperbelt and
  wrote courses for the International Labour
  Organisation and the Zambia Congress of Trade
  Unions.
• Managed private clients and then gross funds in
  Hill Samuel Co Wood Street.
• Recruited to help support management at Acorn
  Computers in Cambridge 1985. Saw Electronic Mail
  and thought that with it I could change the world
  everyone laughed!
• Joined Unipalm with my computer and some ideas
  and went on to help build Pipex, the first UK
  Internet Service Provider
• Joined PSI the worlds first commercial ISP, ran
  the UK, Benelux and Jersey. Built the London
  Hosting Centre in Docklands.