Market Research

If you are putting together a business plan for yourself, for a bank or investors, you need quality, specific data to benchmark your projections against the performance of other firms in your industry and market.

The best business plan data helps you compare your vision and experience against averages for operations like yours, identifying strengths and explaining how you plan to overcome any concerning trends in your industry and market area. In addition to an industry benchmark balance sheet, balance you will need an overview of your industry's performance in your market area. Multi-year trend information such as average sales, total industry market volume, failure rates and the specific performance of businesses like yours (average size for the industry, small business startups, etc.) provides an important component to your plan.

Key data helps tell your story, identify industry (and your own) strengths and weaknesses – and convinces lenders and investors that you know what you are talking about.

Most banks or investors require three solid years of your own numbers (or projections) against industry balance sheet benchmarks and financial ratios.

We have linked with bizminer to enable you to obtain their financial analysis and marketing research series.

This will enable you to develop separate trends and measures with industry-wide, small business and startup measures for your industry. They develop financial analysis reports for more lines of business (over 10,000) than any other provider. This means that the assumptions in your plan are truly based on the performance of businesses like yours.

Their marketing research reports (covering more than 16,000 lines of business) are available in both national and local versions, so you can match your type of business and market area to others in the same situation. That crucial information forms the competitive backdrop to your business plan. It also helps you create your own targets, and alerts you to obstacles that you might need to address as you tell your story.

In general, retail and service businesses 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 their US Marketing Plan Research series.

BizMiner Profiles help business planners do three things:

• They provide hard financial analysis on your specific line of business.
• They provide business plan data that helps you tell your story to a bank or investors.
• They help you understand what kind of performance to expect from an average firm, a small business or a startup in your line of business.

The key with using bizminer is to think about how much more money you could borrow and how much more money you could make, or save, if you had independent industry analysis.

We have searched the web and reviewed thousands of these services and bizminer is, by far, the best service you could have to change your business.