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BizMiner for Small Business
Industry Trends for your Small Business Plan
Many of you are writing a small business plan to take to a bank or investors. Others are looking for local market data, small business failure rates or sales per employee trends to inform the projections in your business or marketing plan. In either case, you will need to compare your business vision and experience against industry averages for operations like yours, identifying strengths and explaining how you plan to overcome any concerning industry trends as you create the business plan. We have a lot of small business data that can help, especially in our Financial Analysis, Cash Flow and Marketing Research Profile series. We develop separate small business and startup trends in each. In other words, we can help you understand how small businesses that are in your precise industry are doing. That crucial information forms the competitive backdrop to your small business plan, to writing a marketing plan – or to your evaluation of whether to go full steam ahead. It also helps you create your own operational and market targets, and alerts you to obstacles that you might need to address as you tell your story to a bank or investors. Our Financial Analysis and Marketing Plan Research Profile series each develop separate trends and measures for small business and startups for every industry segment we analyze (over 16,000 lines of business in all). Information in the Marketing Plan Research Profiles ($99) and the State Market Index series ($599) is available in both national and local versions, so you can match your type of business and market area to businesses in similar situations. In other words, we can help you understand how the industry and small businesses within it are doing. That crucial information forms the competitive backdrop to your business plan or marketing plan. It also give you information you need you formulate business goals, and alerts you to concerns that you might need to address when you tell your story to a bank or investors. We can help you assess how your small business is doing relative to your competition. Our local and national Marketing Plan Research Profiles ($99) address a series of competitive trend issues in your specific line of business, including average sales, total area market volume and failure rates for the industry and small businesses in it. The reports even track small businesses that began three years ago and report on the growth of those that successfully maintained operations – including average sales growth, sales per employee and staffing trends among these “survivors”. You can easily compare your business performance to these real-life experiences for any of 16,000 industry segments in every state and most metro areas. Use the Marketing Plan Research series to bring your business goals in line with the experience of other small businesses – or to sharpen the tasks you need to undertake to make your business different. If you operate or plan to locate in several states, our State Market Indexes ($599) give you an overview of the vitality of a selected industry segment in all fifty states and DC. If you don't need a complete set of industry trend measures, our Industry Data Buffet (from $84) lets you select only the measures you want for up to four market areas. In general, retail and service businesses find Local Marketing Plan Research Profiles most useful, since they reflect a particular local market area. Manufacturing, mail order and internet-based service or retail small businesses should look more toward the national comparisons in our US Marketing Plan Research series. One note -- if your market area doesn't have at least 25 firms in the analysis pool that is used to analyze the industry in that area, consider selecting either a larger area (state or national) or a broader, less specific industry category. We can help you investigate potential target markets or find specific marketing plan data You can use our Marketing Research series to investigate the performance of your industry in any US state and most metro areas. If you are considering expansion into a new geographical market, our Profiles provide a quick, reliable way to assess the competitive landscape and the dynamism of the local industry, including local market volumes, average sales, failure rates and a host of other measures. Likewise, if you are in a b-to-b market, the Marketing Plan Research series can help you understand your customers. Select a profile for a customer industry and you'll have the information to decide how the industry is doing, whether you should target a particular area – or turn your energies to some other location. If you have expansion plans, each Marketing Plan Research Profile lets you analyze industry vitality in a different area, while our State Market Indexes examine the performance of a selected industry segment in all fifty states and DC. Many small businesses use Marketing Research Profiles to assess industry trends and “paint a statistical picture” of the competitive market in their area. The series includes an array of breakouts for small businesses, including average sales trends, staffing, sales per employee failure rates and startup activity. We can help you create or update data for a small business plan, or to tell your story to a bank or investors. Many small businesses come to BizMiner looking for reliable, detailed industry benchmarks they can incorporate into their business plan. Some of you are writing a plan on your own, while others are following guidelines from a piece of business planning software. In either case, you will need three year's worth of solid data to support the assumptions in your plan. Some business planning software offers one year of limited balance sheet and financial ratio data, but your bank or investor is likely to require a more comprehensive set of industry benchmarks, including:
Our Financial Analysis and Cash Flow Profile series provide information for more than 10,000 lines of business. We offer versions that analyze industry-wide measures, various sales class peer groups, small business corporations, sole proprietorships or startup segments, letting you model your plan on business experiences closely aligned with your own. Together, the Financial Analysis and Marketing Research profiles help you tell your story. The analysis creates a backdrop of competitive knowledge that lets you seize on the positives and identify potential obstacles like high failure rates, low sales growth in your market, or relatively low efficiency levels in the local industry, as measured by our sales per employee data. Your recognition of both – and your explanation of how you plan to overcome problems you identify with the help of our reports – is a powerful tool to bring to a bank or investors – or just to have in your internal planning arsenal. We can help you understand what kind of performance to expect from your small business. Our reports help you understand what to expect from a small business by analyzing the experience of others in your situation – in your line of business and in your market area. Our local and national Marketing Research Profiles develop special “survivor” measures that help you assess where successful businesses with your characteristics usually land in three years. The “survivor” measures add a dimension to traditional industry “snapshot” analysis, which we also include in our Profiles. This multi-faceted view of the industry – “snapshot” and “survivor” images – is one of the great advantages of BizMiner analysis. Another is the range of industry and location detail. The third is the set of proprietary measures that we offer to sharpen your understanding of what's to come: survivors sales, sales per employee measures, failure rates, and concentrations of high growth firms in your market area. These and other analytical advantages help you understand the current picture of the line of business you are in – and where it may be heading over the next few years. Other Tools for Small Businesses We have other tools to help you, too. You can view free samples of any of our profile series. The samples show you exactly what measures and format you can expect with any report of that series and version. If you are struggling with the measures in our reports, we provide free Marketing Research Edge and Financial Analysis Edge memos that help you understand how to understand and apply various measures. You can even read more about our analytical methodology. And of course, you are always welcome to contact us with questions. |
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