Enterprise - Business Plan - So far

1.The nature of your business

1.     Business name              

      

       Fourth wall

2.     Business activity

We are a branding and identity company for events within the culture sector, located in the North of Britain.

3.     Mission statement

We are a design agency that focuses on branding and identity for the culture sector, of the North. We offer efficient yet considered designs that will shape and transform or enhance your company / create buzz.

4.     Business objectives

Our business objectives within the first 12 months are to focus primarily on promoting ourselves, getting known within the industry increasing our presence. To do so we expect 10% of our estimated income to be used to advertise. Resulting this, we intend on gradually increasing our profit.

Over the next two years we intend to expand outside of theatre to other sectors within the culture sector. Also, the option to collaborate is certainly something to consider in order to grow our business.

Long term goals consist of building reputable relationships with clients, In order to gain returning clients. We intend on making a bigger profit over time, and with this to expand nationally resulting in a bigger client list and reputation within the industry.

5.     The people in the business

·       Total of 4 people

·       Simon Cherry                 Design work, Tea Maker, Branding

·       Chris Lawson                 Design work, PR & Networking, Designer

·       Stephanie Lawson           Management, Promotion, Head Designer

·       Liam Rushfirth               Financing, Book-keeping, Design work, Creative Director

6.   What is the structure of your business?

7. What is the legal status of your business?

·       Partnership

·       Share the profits equally

·       Having four people in our business, there will be more money to be put into finances, allowing more potential for growth, thus resulting in higher profits.

·       Being in a partnership, it will be less strict in management and the way it is run in regard to laws, as those in the business are the only ones who have say in the way the business is run as long as we can all agree.

·       Shared responsibility allowing us to demonstrate the best of our abilities. We can split the management and running of the business in regard to our skills. For instance, some will be good with finances, some with design, and others with sales.

·       When it comes to making decisions, we can help each other out in ways needed. Working in a partnership means we each have our own business ideas, which can be shared in regard to solving problems, that the business may encounter.

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2. Resources

1.   Products or services

       Our services as a branding and identity company;

      

       90% Event Promotion

       10% Branding for new and existing groups / organisations

The majority of our time would be taking jobs from existing clients and designing promotions for their next event, if they feel our work for them previously was to their taste.

The rest of our time would be to rebrand an existing company or to target new organisations that do not yet have a selected identity.

2.   What resources do you require?

·       Apple imac x2

·       Apple mac book x1

·       Adobe software x3 licences

·       Printer / Ink

·       Scanner

·       Headphones x 2

·       Desks x 4

·       Computer chairs x 4

·       Filing cabinets x 2

·       Company car x 1

·       Cutting mats x 2

·       Craft knives x 2

·       Paper

·       Card

·       Stationary

·       Guillotine

·       Kettle

·       Toaster

·       Culinary equipment

·       Mice

·       Internet (depending on location) – Router, Modem, Wireless support etc

·       Telephone (depending on whether we are having landline)

·       Waste bin

·       Pin Board

·       White board

·       Microsoft software package

·       Ipad x 1 (for presentations)

·       Subscriptions to design magazines

·       Light box

·       Microphones

·       Spray mount booth

·       Metre rulers

·       Shelving

·       Pantone Books

·       Graphics Tablets x 1

·       Drawing Board x1

·       Projector

·       Fonts

·       External Storage Devices

·       Anti-virus, firewalls

                             Total = £15,000

3.   How much stock do you need any stock to start your business?

£0 – Stock (paper, ink) is included in equipment costs

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3. Prices

1.   How have you worked out your prices?

Starting with individual spreadsheets to work out the cost of living, added to the price of running the business including equipment and premises. The result shows how much we would need to charge per day/hour.

2. How do your prices compare with your competitors?

·       Name 3 competitors and give evidence of their prices

4. Customers

1.     What evidence do you have that anyone will buy your product / service?

The service we provide already exists to an extent, which in itself proves its popularity and need. There are many Graphic Design related businesses, which design and cater for the culture sector, but not primarily.

Our idea is new in the sense no other company out there is solely directed at and focused on just the culture sector, we can put all our time and effort into simple this factor; other companies possibly wouldn’t do the same. New and upcoming businesses within the culture sector are more likely to want work produced by a solely based design business within the sector due to more experience and knowledge about the subject at hand.

Our target audience is based within Yorkshire and the surrounding areas, there are several new and upcoming developments currently in play, just one being the Leeds arena; the demand for branding and identity will be huge. Every year more places like this come about and design proposals are made, there is a continuous stream of work available for the culture sector.

2.     Who are these people?

Our target audience is the culture sector, primarily theatre establishments. These are located throughout the country, with several throughout each city. Our target audience is vast, the establishments we can aim at can be anything from tiny, to huge, have very few visitors or thousands can be of popular culture or high culture.

3.   Where are they?

·       It may help to include diagrams or maps

4.   How many are there of them?

·       This must be described in numbers form.  (e.g. population, tourist visitor numbers, number of local bands, number of retail outlets)

5.   Why would they buy from you rather than anyone else?

Strengths:

New Graduated - Fresh and Modern approach to design

USP

Outside the box

Independent

Range of skills

Local

Personal and intimate services

Weakness:

No reputation

New company

Won't be trusted - yet

Small company - Unable to deal with large jobs due to short amount of creatives

Lack of capital - no money in bank etc

Opportunities:

Get into market

Increase market share

Expansion

Collaborating

Funding from government

Threat:

Competition

Economic climate

Demands not as high as we couldn't be

Recession - People not having money

6.   How much will the average customer spend with you?

                  How often will they spend that amount with you?

                  Will your sales fluctuate due to external forces ( e.g. seasons or cultural / sporting events)                

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5. How will you promote your business?

1.     How will you advertise your products / services?

Contextual Advertising, social networking, social media websites, events, leaflets, business cards, website, vehicle graphics, posters and a mail shot are, on a whole, the way we intend to promote and advertise out services. Word of the mouth, from promoting events and holding our own will be a primary way of advertising ourselves, we intend to create a ‘buzz’.

2.     What other marketing methods would be effective for you?

                  Personal Selling

                  Promotions

                  Public relations

                  Direct Marketing (Targeted marketing)

                  Internet

     

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6. Total set up costs

1.     Legal costs

SUMMARISE FINDINGS ABOUT INSURANCE AND LEGAL COSTS IN GENERAL – PROVIDE SPREADSHEETS

What legal costs might you incur in setting up your business, on protecting your intellectual property, registering with Companies House ( if appropriate) or using a solicitor to look at your contracts?             

2.     Resources

SPREADSHEET SHOWING CAPITAL EXPENDITURE, BILLS AND OVERHEADS SHEETS

                  How much Capital expenditure in the first year?

                  How much will you spend on materials and goods for sale for the first 6 months ( Direct Costs)

                  How much will be spent on bills and overheads for the first 6 months (Indirect costs)

                                         

3.     Marketing

SPREADSHEET OF COSTING / PROMOTING CUSTOMER

                  Cost of promoting your business for the first year

3.     How will you finance the business start up?          

GOVERNMENT FUNDING

                  Name a suitable source for the kind of funding you need.   

                        If it’s a grant – give evidence that your are eligible. You are NOT eligible for Prince’s Trust                 

7. How will you monitor your progress>

1.     Financial control

·       What systems will you use to monitor finances?

·       What methods will you use to monitor your position in the market?

Enterprise - Starting up costs

Enterprise - Thinking about VAT

VAT -

VAT - or Value Added Tax - is a tax charged by VAT-registered businesses on the supply of most goods and services. If you are or become VAT-registered, you must charge VAT where appropriate on the goods or service you sell. However, you can also reclaim any VAT you have paid when buying things for your business.

There are three rates of VAT. The most common is the standard rate of 20 per cent. If you want to know more about VAT rates, and charging and reclaiming VAT, watch our video How does VAT work?

Charging VAT affects the price of what you sell and therefore possibly your profits. It's important that you get your VAT calculations correct. If you are not sure how to add or subtract using percentages, try our tutorial Calculating VAT.

You also need to keep records to show how much VAT you have charged and paid. Record keeping is covered in our tutorial VAT and your business.

There's a lot more to learn about VAT, so why not try watching our videos Simplifying VAT and VAT registration and threshold information and look at our tutorial When sales and purchases take place for VAT purposes. You should also look at our tutorials on Setting up and managing a VAT account and Making VAT payments to HMRC to help you get started. Finally you will find a link to take you straight to online VAT registration with HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC).

Please note: Our learning products show ways of working out VAT that HMRC recommends. VAT rates can change, but if they do the calculation methods remain the same. You would need to use different numbers in the calculations, but this information would be available on the website.

Enterprise - Thinking about taxes

I've found some useful information on business link which I'm sure will come in handy when we need to think about taxes.

If you run a business, you will have to pay taxes of some kind - and to pay some of those taxes, you will have to use a particular tax calculation/payment process.

Exactly which taxes you pay and which processes you use will depend on a number of factors, such as your business' legal status, annual turnover and taxable profits. You can watch our video Welcome: setting up in business for a handy overview of what you need to do.

Whichever taxes and processes apply, it's vital that you keep full and accurate records of your income and expenses from the start.

The main business taxes are Income Tax, Corporation Tax and VAT. You may also need to think about National Insurance.

VAT may apply to your business if you trade solely within the UK. However, if you import goods from outside the European Union, you must also pay import VAT and any duty before the goods can be released. And there are VAT rules that apply if you export goods and services too. For an introduction to how VAT works see our video What is VAT?

The main business tax calculation/payment processes are:

• Self Assessment for the self-employed, business partners and business partnerships
• Corporation Tax - for limited companies and some organisations such as clubs, friendly societies, etc
• the Construction Industry Scheme (CIS) - but only if you operate in the construction industry
• PAYE (Pay As You Earn) - but only if you are an employer

You can learn more about Self Assessment and self-employed tax and processes in our video An introduction to registering for Self Assessment. You can learn more about National Insurance in our animated video National Insurance for the self-employed: the basics. To find out more about Corporation Tax see our animated video What is Corporation Tax? To get an overview of your tax responsibilities when you take on staff see our video How we got registered as an employer.

For an introduction to the Construction Industry Scheme see our animated video How the Construction Industry Scheme works.

Finally for a good overview of how other businesses coped with taxes when first starting up we have a wide range of video diaries from real businesses covering everything from the first steps through to the highs and lows of running your own business to taking stock one year on.

Enterprise - Costing of advertisements

UPLOAD SCREEN SHOTS OF MOO.COM ETC

Looking at printing costs:

'Target print' 

Advertising costs

Enterprise - Contextual Advertising

To define:


Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising for advertisements appearing on websites or other media, such as content displayed in mobile browsers. The advertisements themselves are selected and served by automated systems based on the content displayed to the user.

How contextual advertising works

A contextual advertising system scans the text of a website for keywords and returns advertisements to the webpage based on what the user is viewing. The advertisements may be displayed on the webpage or as pop-up ads. For example, if the user is viewing a website pertaining to sports and that website uses contextual advertising, the user may see advertisements for sports-related companies, such as memorabilia dealers or ticket sellers. Contextual advertising is also used by search engines to display advertisements on their search results pages based on the keywords in the user's query.

Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising in which the content of an ad is in direct correlation to the content of the web page the user is viewing. For example, if you are visiting a website concerning travelling in Europe and see that an ad pops up offering a special price on a flight to Italy, that’s contextual advertising. Contextual advertising is also called “In-Text” advertising or “In-Context” technology.

Apart from that when a visitor doesn't click on the ad in a go through time (a minimum time a user must click on the ad) the ad is automatically changed to next relevant ad showing the option below of going back to the previous ad.

Service providers

Google AdSense was the first major contextual advertising network. It works by providing webmasters with JavaScript code that, when inserted into webpages, displays relevant advertisements from the Google inventory of advertisers. The relevance is calculated by a separate Google bot, Mediabot, that indexes the content of a webpage. Recent technology/service providers have emerged with more sophisticated systems that use language-independent proximity pattern matching algorithm to increase matching accuracy.

Since the advent of AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, Microsoft adCenter, Advertising.com Sponsored Listings (formerly Quigo) and others have been gearing up to make similar offerings.

Impact

Contextual advertising has made a major impact on earnings of many websites. Because the advertisements are more targeted, they are more likely to be clicked, thus generating revenue for the owner of the website (and the server of the advertisement). A large part of Google's earnings is from its share of the contextual advertisements served on the millions of webpages running the AdSense program.

Contextual advertising has attracted some controversy through the use of techniques such as third-party hyperlinking, where a third-party installs software onto a user's computer that interacts with the web browser. Keywords on a webpage are displayed as hyperlinks that lead to advertisers.

Google AdSense