Question

Develop detail business outline for food preservation company.

I. Summarize your business concept, define your company, how you will generate revenue and profit. Describe your product/service, what distinguishes your company from others and how much money you will need from financers. II. Explain your mission, objectives, purpose and what you want to accomplish. III. What industry are you and type of structure. IV. Describe your product/service. V. Provide data about your target market and goals. VI. Summarize qualifications of management personnel. VII. Outline strategy for identifying and contacting customers, providing customer services, setting prices, advertisement. VIII. Describe how product will be developed, costs and problems. IX. Provide an example of your operating plan. Identify operating facilities needed, equipment and personnel requirements. X. Need a schedule for company growth, development, staffing and when products will be ready for the market. XI. What risks and problems do you foresee with your business? XII. Outline the details of your budget: projections of income, expenses, costs for start-up, operations, in a 3-5 years cash flow analysis. XIII. What kind of exit strategy will you provide for investors to buy back their investment? Reference: Thill and Bovee, 14th Edition, p 343.

Answer 1

Executive Summary

What's For Dinner? is an exciting, new business with a unique approach to helping people enjoy home cooked meals with their families. Customers will come to our Plano, TX location and prepare 12 meals that they pre-select from a menu in a party atmosphere. In two hours, they will have a month's worth of meals to put in their freezer.

By focusing on our competitive edge (no direct competitors in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area), our customers, and their needs, What's For Dinner? will increase sales to a point that exceeds $1.3M in three years.

What's For Dinner? is owned jointly by Alan and Kim Kirby as an S Corporation. Alan and Kim have 15 years of experience in the food service and entertainment industries, as a party planner and personal chef, respectively. They know the kinds of food preparation available in the Collin County area. With two teenaged children, have experienced the frustration of trying to feed a whole family healthy food both cheaply and quickly. Alan's existing contacts with local social and community groups, and Kim's ongoing relationships with food distributors, specialty grocers, and high-end clients will all help to generate high sales from early in the first year.

What's For Dinner offers several advantages to its target market:

• Relatively inexpensive meal preparation: ~$15 for a four-person meal.
• Fun, social, party atmosphere.
• Convenient: eat your prepared meals in your home, when you want.
• Saves time: no shopping, no prep, no clean up.
• For seniors, special menus and transportation assistance make meals easy.
• And, best of all, not having to decide "What's For Dinner?"

The purpose of this plan is two-fold. The first is to acquire funding of $259,708. The second is to lay the foundations of the company's vision, philosophy, and strategy, to ensure that we know where we are going and how to get there.

Mission

What's For Dinner? is a specialized business that provides a variety of people with the opportunity to prepare health conscious, yet savory meals that can be frozen to take home and eat at a later time. The purpose of this process is to both optimize the time investment needed to prepare the quality of meals that What's For Dinner? will become known for, within the clients' current schedules, and also for them to practice the proper health conscious behavior that has become the target lifestyle of a health deficient society.

What's For Dinner? will provide a unique and distinctive service that will unite a party-like atmosphere with professional food preparation that will attract a growing repeat customer base. What's For Dinner? will allow families and busy professionals the ability to prepare a variety of meals quickly in a fun atmosphere, away from home, thus giving people more of what they are looking for - time.

Our goal is to be a self-sustaining corporate enterprise within 3 years from the company's inception to begin expanding our menu offerings within 3 months and its location offerings within 4 years. What's For Dinner? will employ 4 individuals full time within 3 years, and will hit net profit goals of $100,000 by the end of its second year of existence.

In short, we will be in the business of helping our customers to relieve their daily stresses of what to fix their families for dinner by providing them with a great menu choice of meals that they will prepare.

Keys to Success

The keys to success in this business are:

• Creating a high level of customer satisfaction in our service and products, which will lead to customer retention each month.
• Marketing: getting our name out to the public, primarily through an intensive marketing campaign driven by our customers (word of mouth) with a supplemental vehicle of standardized and conventional marketing tactics.
• Great product quality and variety that will be used to aid in customer retention and growth.
• Finances: as our customer base increases we will be better able to lower our supply costs by buying more in bulk through food service distributors.
• Variety of menus offered based on seasons, trends and customer preferences.
• Exceeding our customers' expectations by offering them a higher quality of food for a competitive price.
• What's For Dinner's website will be an efficient and convenient place for customers to register and pay for parties.

Objectives

The objectives for What's For Dinner? in the first three years of operation include:

1. To exceed customers' expectations for food service and food service products.
2. To increase the number of clients served by 25% per year through superior service.
3. To develop a sustainable start-up business that is profitable.
4. To achieve an after tax net profit of $134K by year three.
5. To achieve a net income of more than 10% of sales by the third year.

Company Summary

What's For Dinner? is a unique business where customers come to our Plano, TX location and prepare twelve pre-chosen meals that will be taken home and frozen until they are ready to cook and serve. All of the planning, shopping, food preparation and containers are provided with no worries to the customer. The meals will be prepared in a party like atmosphere where customers will have separate workstations to prepare their meals and have a good time with friends, both new and old.

Our goal is to provide our customers with home cooked meals that their families will enjoy, while saving them time and effort and relieve stress from that age-old question of What's For Dinner?

The scheduling aspect of our company will be combination of a standard walk-up scheduling procedure, a phone messaging service and an intensive highly-interactive e-commerce website that will allow the customer to not only schedule parties but also to pay online, using standard secure technology.

Start-up Summary

The start-up expenses include:

• Rent expenses include a deposit and rent for one month at $28.75 per square foot for 1,854 square feet, in the total amount of $5,182.
• Utilities expenses for one month.
• Insurance deposit and first month.
• Sales & Marketing expenses including stationery, brochures, outdoor signage.
• Website development.
• Office, kitchen and janitorial supply expenses.
• Leasehold improvements, including contractors fees and permits.

The required start-up assets of $50,000 include:

• Kitchen Equipment (long-term assets)
• Prep Tables (long-term assets)
• Cooking utensils
• Various Kitchen Utensils
• Computer and small business software

Please note that the long-term assets above will be depreciated using G.A.A.P. approved straight-line depreciation method.

The purpose of this business plan is to secure $259,708 in funding. This loan appears in the long-term liability row of the attached Start-up Funding table.

The following chart and table summarize the start-up assumptions.

Services

What's For Dinner? will provide its customers with twelve home cooked meals that they will freeze until customers are ready to serve them. These meals will be chosen from a set menu designed weekly by us and the meals will be prepared in our location. All of the planning, shopping, food preparation, recipe directions and containers will be provided to help make it as easy as possible for our customers to enjoy their time at our establishment.

Our customers will prepare their meals in a fun, party-like atmosphere where they can relax, meet new friends or spend time with old friends while preparing dinners for their families for the next month.

The Key benefits our customers will receive from using What's For Dinner? are:

• Spend less time in the kitchen
• Less money on groceries & eating out – it keeps you from being tempted to eat out
• Home style meals & better eating
• Able to sit down at the table together as a family – including conversation and socialization
• Clean up is easy, because prep is done outside the home, and all meals come in disposable containers
• Less time spent on grocery shopping
• In 2 hours you will have 12 dinners for you and your family
• We create the menus – order the ingredients – slice, dice, chop and prepare
• Social hour preparing dinners

Our menus and portion sizes are tailored for the group and individual customers. Seniors get added benefits, with diabetic, low-cholesterol, and low-sodium choices. Families can increase portion sizes for a small fee to accommodate more children or guests.

Market Analysis Summary

The Dallas area's meal preparation market is untapped. As a matter of fact, there is no other business of this kind in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. Though there are no exact replicas of our company there are some types of companies that we would have to consider to be indirect competitors. These include such companies and service professionals as caterers and those that will come to your home and prepare meals for you to freeze. What's For Dinner?, at this time, has few direct competitors, with exception to area restaurants and your basic home cooking. At the inception of What's For Dinner?, there will be no type of company like ours in the area, thus giving us the overwhelming competitive advantage of first entry.

The What's For Dinner? market is primarily in the Collin County area: Plano, Frisco, Allen and McKinney. We will be focusing on households in these areas that have more than one person. Primarily, those households whose income is over $50,000, with someone under the age of 18 living there. As a secondary target market, we will market to the elderly population in the aforementioned areas. Initially, the greater portion of our customers will be busy, working class people and the growing group of single-parent families, but it will be of great benefit now and in the future to market our services to the highest growing population demographic – senior citizens.  

MARKET ANALYSIS
		YEAR 1	YEAR 2	YEAR 3	YEAR 4	YEAR 5
Potential Customers	Growth						CAGR
Households with children	10%	73,864	81,250	89,375	98,312	108,144	10.00%
Households with no children	10%	58,404	64,244	70,668	77,735	85,509	10.00%
Seniors	12%	25,852	28,954	32,428	36,319	40,677	12.00%
Total	10.33%	158,120	174,448	192,471	212,366	234,330	10.33%

Strategy and Implementation Summary

What's For Dinner? will gradually gain market share in the four focal geographic markets (Plano, Frisco, Allen and McKinney) by leveraging its competitive edges. These edges are superior attention to detail in the local food service market, a revolutionary food-servicing outlook and excellent nutritional meals at competitive price. These advantages have been unavailable in this market for some time. We will market our services with a targeted advertising campaign and networking.

Competitive Edge

What's For Dinner? will begin with a critical competitive edge: we have no direct competitors in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. By being the first-mover and (for at least a while) the only service of our kind, we will have the initial market buzz that is normally reserved for the first company of its kind into a given market. Our positioning is very hard to match, but only if we maintain focus on our strategy, marketing, business development, and fulfillment of quality and customer service will we be able to continually grow and outpace the "copy-cat" businesses that are sure to follow our market lead. We are aware that the tendency to relax due to lack of competition could weaken our competitive edge. What's For Dinner? will be operated as if our direct competitors were conducting the same service business that we are in and we will be looking for additional enhancements to our operating procedures from day one.

In addition to our unique positioning, we offer the following advantages to our customers:

• High quality meals
• Relatively low prices
• Time saving meal preparation
• Reducing mess in customers' kitchens
• Reducing stress around meal prep
• Saving them from that perennial problem of deciding, "What's for Dinner?"

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Marketing Strategy

As a food service business, our main goal is to provide high quality food with excellent customer service.  Our challenge as a new company is to quickly establish a reputation for such quality among our potential markets. With this in mind, the initial focus of our marketing strategy will be to get our name and reputation out to the public to create "buzz." Creating brand recognition for our new concept will be the first measurable milestone in our marketing strategy.

This will be one of the most important factors when measuring success within the first couple of months after inception. The basis for our ideology is simple; the more people that hear our name and become familiar with our services, the more people will use it. The marketing campaign will involve a targeted advertising campaign, different specials to entice the customers to try our business and a very intense networking campaign. All of these tactics will be used to help gain a loyal clientele aimed at fostering our happy customer base.

At start-up, we will begin a focused advertising campaign toward target segments in our geographical area. We will update our advertising campaign regularly to fill in gaps based on follow-up research: do people recognize our name? Do they know what we do? What is their impression of our services' costs and quality?Marketing campaigns will work via:

• Local area newspapers that are viewed by our target market.
• Homeowner associations', churches' and specific groups' newsletters.
• Direct mail advertisements/flyers to our target market purchased through a direct mailing company with lists specifically of our target market.
• Various flyers and pamphlets that will be available at many shopping centers and grocery stores throughout the area.
• Yellow pages advertisement.
• Dynamic website.
• Registered keyword searches that will lead to our website.
• Various Radio advertisements.
• Various event sponsorships.

Coupled with the advertising campaign will be a systematic offering of discounted specials to attract more customers. This could be very important to potential customers because the cost of $175 for 12 meals is very appealing to families that have used our service before, but families may be skeptical to buy this much food and invest that much money in something they have never tried. For that reason, our business will offer periodic specials to families to help limit their fears and open their eyes to the wonderful atmosphere at What's For Dinner?

What's For Dinner? will also have a networking campaign that will start with the owner's contacts and friends attending our first months' meal prep parties. This will be the "word of mouth" campaign that will feature:

• Private parties with discounts for the host/hostess of the party. This will encourage them to invite 11 friends that will be introduced to our business and will be return customers.
• Special discounts to return customers when referring new customers.

Sales Strategy

In the food service business, as in any customer service intensive business, sales revenue is our lifeblood. The way in which we present ourselves to our customers and deal with the public will determine the success of our business. The food service industry is facilitated by repeat business and referrals. In order to continuously compete against other food providers, we need to enhance our repeat customer service business by making this our main sales focus. We cannot expect to have a satisfied customer by selling them one month's of meals and then never seeing them again. We must make our sales strategy revolve around making the customer's experience with us the best it possibly can, and further, making every effort to get our current customer base to visit us again. It is much more expensive to get new customers than to keep the customers you already have. Our customers cannot stop eating, but they could stop using our services. We will be selling our service to our current customers each time they come, in order to have repeat business and new business through their word of mouth.

These are just a few of the ways we will sell to our customers to gain repeat business and word of mouth advertising:

• High levels of customer service; friendly, comforting and entertaining
• Good variety of menus from which to choose
• The best quality of foods and ingredients
• Creating a fun and social atmosphere for our customers, so they want to return
• Reminders at each party to sign up for the next month's party, along with the next month's menu and samples
• A follow up and reminder program for our current customers that will be done through email and mail.
• Focus a specific portion of our advertising campaign on getting our repeat customers to come back and visit us
• Allow our best repeat customers to get special quantity specific discounts.
• Enlist a comprehensive and highly interactive e-commerce initiative to help to accommodate our customer's payment and scheduling options.

The What's For Dinner? website will serve as a productive and consistent selling tool. Our website will be set up to explain what we offer and the many benefits customers will receive for using our meal prep services. The website will help "close the sale;" customers will be able to register for the meal prep party they would like to attend and accepting payments online. This will be our main source of registrations for parties. The ease of use allowed by the Internet will be key to driving our customer pipeline. Our sales and marketing campaigns will help focus our customer traffic through our website, so that people can see how easy it will be to interact with our company. This element of efficiency will also help enhance our bottom line by allowing for a 24 hour customer service mechanism without having to keep a customer rep staffed all the time.

1 Sales Forecast

Through our research of other businesses like ours in Seattle, WA and Omaha, NE, we found that all of them quickly increased their sales over their first year. All of these researched companies went from their first month of 100 customers on average to over 1,000 customers within their first year of business. One company opened in Seattle against two other competitors and now has over 2,000 customers with three different locations.

We are optimistic that What's For Dinner? will grow and prosper just as these other companies have, but we want to set reasonable forecasts for growth. We have therefore taken a conservative approach in preparing our Sales Forecast Table.

The following table and chart give a run-down on forecasted sales. We have forecasted that sales will increase each month with the exception of the summer months, when vacations and other seasonal activities may reduce purchases. Once we get our first few customers, our sales will increase through customer retention, and gaining new customers through networking. We expect sales to grow incrementally over the first year, reaching profitability by the fifth month of operation.

After the first year of operation, we expect sales to continue increasing, from 10% the first year up to 25% by the third year. As sales increase, we will make modifications to our facility and hire new employees to share in the work. Our proposed location allows room for expansion. Based on our research, and the size of our potential market, we expect to reach close to one million dollars in sales by the end of 2005.

Our direct costs of sales listed here are inventory used up in sales, including the meal ingredients and additional supplies, such as themed-party decorations, containers, napkins, and so on. Fixed operating expenses are listed in the Profit and Loss.

SALES FORECAST
	YEAR 1	YEAR 2	YEAR 3
Sales
Party Fees	$857,674	$1,072,093	$1,340,116
Other Fees	$24,505	$30,631	$38,289
TOTAL SALES	$882,179	$1,102,724	$1,378,405
Direct Cost of Sales	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3
Ingredients	$612,624	$765,780	$957,225
Other Supplies	$44,109	$55,136	$68,920
Subtotal Direct Cost of Sales	$656,733	$820,917	$1,026,146

Management Summary

The What's For Dinner? management team will initially consist of the founders/owners themselves, Alan and Kim Kirby. We do not anticipate the need to hire anyone else on a full time basis during the first year, because all of the services that a normal small business needs will be outsourced. These services include the e-commerce infrastructure, accounting, marketing, and legal services. We do plan to employ one part-time employee from the beginning to help with cleaning and dishwashing.

Alan and Kim have 15 years of experience in the food service and entertainment industries, as a party planner and personal chef, respectively. Until the second year, Kim will continue to work part-time as a personal chef for several couples in Plano, doing the prep work and menu planning for What's for Dinner? in the mornings. Alan will host the majority of the parties, after having prepared test batches of every menu item with Kim. The owners anticipate possibly hiring local high-school students as sous-chefs in years 2 and 3; Kim's experience with local restaurants has shown that these students can often do quite well, paid only minimally in exchange for professional restaurant and food preparation training. Alan's existing contacts with local social and community groups, and Kim's ongoing relationships with food distributors, specialty grocers, and high-end clients will all help to generate high sales from early in the first year.

Throughout the first two years we will conduct an aggressive cost analysis as to what our capabilities are as owners and with what activities we need assistance.

Personnel Plan

The following table summarizes our personnel expenditures for the first three years, with compensation increasing from $34K the first year to about $60K in the third. We believe this plan is a fair compromise between fairness and expedience, and meets the commitment of our mission statement. The detailed monthly personnel plan for the first year is included in the appendices.

PERSONNEL PLAN
	YEAR 1	YEAR 2	YEAR 3
Alan Kirby	$24,000	$30,000	$40,000
Kim Kirby	$5,000	$7,500	$10,000
Part-time cleaner	$5,000	$7,500	$10,000
TOTAL PEOPLE	3	3	3
Total Payroll	$34,000	$45,000	$60,000

Financial Plan

What's For Dinner expects strong sales, based on research into our target market, similar businesses in other parts of the country, lack of direct competition, and the experience, reputations, and know-how of its owners/managers. By steadily repaying our long-term loan and holding down costs, we will generate a net profit midway through the first year and increase net worth dramatically by year 3. Our major fixed expenses are payroll and rent.

Important Assumptions

The financial plan depends on important assumptions, most of which are shown in the following table as annual assumptions. The monthly assumptions are included in the appendices.

Three of the more important underlying assumptions are:

• We assume a relatively strong economy, without major new recessions. Although an ailing economy would not allow us the growth that we anticipate, we believe that it would not drastically hurt the business because the service is economically feasible. The $175 session fee breaks down to $14.58 per meal - a deal hard to beat at even a fast-food restaurant for a family of four to six.
• We assume that our market needs will be seasonal, with a decrease in sales during the summer months.

GENERAL ASSUMPTIONS
	YEAR 1	YEAR 2	YEAR 3
Plan Month	1	2	3
Current Interest Rate	7.00%	7.00%	7.00%
Long-term Interest Rate	7.00%	7.00%	7.00%
Tax Rate	24.00%	24.00%	24.00%
Other	0	0

$10,095

Projected Profit and Loss

What's For Dinner?'s projected profit and loss is shown in the following table, with sales increasing from $10K the first month to close to $1.4M by the third year. We will reach profitability in the middle of our first year.

We are projecting very conservatively regarding cost of sales and gross margin. Our costs of sales are based on grocery store prices, which will decrease once we are to consistently able to buy our food in larger quantities from a food distributor. This will significantly lower our cost of sales, and increase our gross margin more than in this projection. We prefer to project conservatively so that we make sure we have enough cash.

The Sales and Marketing Expenses vary from the food preparation industry norms. Our Sales and Marketing Expenses will be to consistently maintain our advertising and promotions, while our biggest marketing will be word of mouth from our customers. We are budgeting for a high level of service from our website hosting company and payment processor, since the website is a key component of our Sales and Marketing Strategies.

The detailed monthly projections are included in the appendices.

PRO FORMA PROFIT AND LOSS
	YEAR 1	YEAR 2	YEAR 3
Sales	$882,179	$1,102,724	$1,378,405
Direct Cost of Sales	$656,733	$820,917	$1,026,146
Other Costs of Sales	$0	$0	$0
TOTAL COST OF SALES	$656,733	$820,917	$1,026,146
Gross Margin	$225,446	$281,807	$352,259
Gross Margin %	25.56%	25.56%	25.56%
Expenses
Payroll	$34,000	$45,000	$60,000
Sales and Marketing and Other Expenses	$3,000	$3,000	$3,000
Depreciation	$4,200	$4,200	$4,200
Rent	$53,304	$54,000	$54,500
Utilities	$13,160	$14,476	$15,924
Office Supplies	$1,200	$1,200	$1,200
Insurance	$3,000	$3,000	$3,000
Payroll Taxes	$0	$0	$0
Accountant	$3,000	$3,200	$3,500
Lawyer	$1,000	$1,100	$1,100
Bank Charges	$180	$180	$180
Website Payment Fees	$600	$700	$800
Website Hosting & Support	$1,500	$1,600	$1,650
Repairs and Maintenance	$3,000	$3,000	$3,000
Other	$0	$0	$0
Total Operating Expenses	$121,144	$134,656	$152,054
Profit Before Interest and Taxes	$104,302	$147,151	$200,205
EBITDA	$108,502	$151,351	$204,405
Interest Expense	$17,342	$15,861	$14,316
Taxes Incurred	$20,870	$31,510	$44,614
Net Profit	$66,089	$99,780	$141,276
Net Profit/Sales	7.49%	9.05%	10.25%

Projected Cash Flow

The following cash flow projections show the annual amounts only. Cash flow projections are critical to our success. The monthly cash flow is shown in the illustration, with one bar representing the cash flow per month, and the other the monthly cash balance. The annual cash flow figures are included here and the more important detailed monthly numbers are included in the appendices.

The balance sheet in the following table shows managed but sufficient growth of net worth, and a sufficiently healthy financial position. Our negative net worth, due to borrowed capital for start-up, makes a significant increase by the second year, and becomes positive in year three. It is common for start-up businesses to have a negative net worth their first few years.

Projected Balance Sheet

PRO FORMA BALANCE SHEET
	YEAR 1	YEAR 2	YEAR 3
Assets
Current Assets
Cash	$101,685	$82,187	$181,270
Inventory	$137,714	$172,142	$215,178
Other Current Assets	$8,000	$8,000	$8,000
TOTAL CURRENT ASSETS	$247,399	$262,329	$404,448
Long-term Assets
Long-term Assets	$42,000	$42,000	$42,000
Accumulated Depreciation	$4,200	$8,400	$12,600
TOTAL LONG-TERM ASSETS	$37,800	$33,600	$29,400
TOTAL ASSETS	$285,199	$295,929	$433,848
Liabilities and Capital	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3
Current Liabilities
Accounts Payable	$148,189	$81,220	$99,942
Current Borrowing	$0	$0	$0
Other Current Liabilities	$0	$0	$0
SUBTOTAL CURRENT LIABILITIES	$148,189	$81,220	$99,942
Long-term Liabilities	$237,628	$215,548	$193,468
TOTAL LIABILITIES	$385,817	$296,768	$293,410
Paid-in Capital	$30,000	$30,000	$30,000
Retained Earnings	($196,708)	($130,619)	($30,838)
Earnings	$66,089	$99,780	$141,276
TOTAL CAPITAL	($100,619)	($838)	$140,438
TOTAL LIABILITIES AND CAPITAL	$285,199	$295,929	$433,848
Net Worth	($100,619)	($838)	$140,438