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.
| 
