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BizMiner
for Startups - Industry Statistics for your Startup Business Plan
Some of you have already made a decision and are writing a startup business plan to take to a bank or investors. Others are looking for industry trends to sharpen their understanding about what to expect from a particular type of business. 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 a business plan. We have a lot of information that can help entrepreneurs, especially in our Financial Analysis, Cash Flow and Marketing Research series. We develop separate trends and measures for small businesses and startups in the Financial Analysis and Cash Flow profile series. Much of our information is available in both national and local versions, so you can match your type of business and target market area to others in the same situation. In other words, we can help you understand how startup businesses that are pretty much just like yours are doing. That crucial information forms the competitive backdrop to your small business plan, your marketing plan – or to your evaluation of whether to go full steam ahead. It also helps you create your own performance and market targets, and alerts you to obstacles that you might need to address as you tell your story to a bank or investors. We can help you assess your startup business idea. 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 startups. The reports even track startups that began three years ago and report on the growth of those that made through that first, difficult period. You can easily compare your business vision to these real-life experiences for any of 16,000 industry segments in every state and most metro areas. Use Marketing Plan Research Profiles to bring your vision in line with the experience of other startups – or to sharpen your argument about how your business will be different. If you are starting a b-to-b business, the Marketing Plan Research series also helps you understand your customers. How are they doing? Should you target an industry segment in a particular location? If you 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 startups will 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 startups 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. For more information on this, check our explanation of industry classification systems. We provide business plan data that helps you tell your story to a bank or investors. Many entrepreneurs come to BizMiner looking for reliable, detailed data they can incorporate into their business plan. Some are writing a plan entirely on their 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. Many entrepreneurs also use our local and national Marketing Research Profiles to assess competitive trends and “paint a statistical picture” of the competitive market in their area. The Marketing Plan Research series includes an array of breakouts for small businesses and startups, including average sales trends, staffing, sales per employee failure rates and startup activity. These profiles help you tell your story. The data in them creates a backdrop of competitive knowledge that lets you seize on the positives and identify problem areas like high failure rates, or low sales growth in your market. 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 investors. We can help you understand what kind of performance to expect from your startup business. Our reports help you understand what to expect from a 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 Plan 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 a set of proprietary measures that help sharpen your understanding of what's to come: survivors sales, sales per employee measures, failure rates, entrepreneurial activity rates and concentrations of high growth firms in your market. These and other analytical advantages help you understand the current picture of the business you are starting – and where it may be heading over the next few years. Other Tools for Entrepreneurs 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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