Start Up Company Workshop-draft

“How Do You Put All The Puzzle Pieces Together To Successfully Start Your Own Company?”

Do you know the answers to these 114 questions that will define your new company and your future?

by Robert Lee Goodman, MBA and CEO of Start Up Company University

If you are starting a company, are you REALLY ready to get started? Are you REALLY ready to develop a  fully defined business plan?  Are you REALLY ready to pull the trigger and start spending money, hiring people and REALLY invest your time,  Do You Have All The Pieces Of YOUR Puzzle for Your New Company?energy and emotion in your vision for the next several years of YOUR life?

Worried that you don’t have the diverse background to understand ALL the various critical components of forming, starting, funding and operating your new company? Concerned that you will be embarrassed by not knowing the answers to the questions that venture capitalists, angel investors and bankers may ask you when you pitch your deal?

Starting a new company can often seem overwhelming.  It’s like putting all the pieces together for a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle – without seeing the box top!  Think how much easier it would be to have someone help you – someone who has seen that box top.

Start Up Company Workshop is specifically designed to help you identify all the unique pieces for your new company – and show you the fastest and easiest way to get the big picture -and then break down all the action item pieces you will need to assemble the components into your vision for your new company.

Take a look at the below questions that I cover with my Start Up Company Workshop clients. Each of these questions is like a puzzle piece.  If you don’t know the answers to some of these, you will have a hard time ever completing the puzzle.  If you already know the answers to all or even most of these, then you probably are ready to generate a meaningful business plan for realistic implementation. And, you may even be ready to own and operate your own company.

Let’s find out.

The Workshop Questions – A Pop Quiz for the Start Up CEO

The Start Up Company Workshop includes my individually consulting with you about YOUR company with the goal of us fully defining your vision – so that we can develop and refine your glimmers into a genuinely implementable plan of action with specific strategies and tactics.  To help meet that goal as comprehensively as possible, the Workshop includes us working together to answer as much as we can on all the following applicable areas for your company:

• Are your personal and new business goals REALLY congruent? Let’s make sure before you make a major investment of your time, energy, focus and money.
• What are the basic concepts of your company – from glimmer to goals?
• What are your ideal yet realistic major objectives for the company after you are in business for five year? What do you want MOST to have accomplished after five years?
• What are the company keys – for success, risk, business challenges, market differentiation and technology factors?
• What ARE you selling? Products, services, both? Now? Five years from now? Are they REALLY the best right here, right now, products or services for you to start with? How soon can you earn a dollar?
• What are your strategic and tactical foci for your marketing and sales:
  • What is YOUR calculated cost of acquisition for each of your typical customers?
  • Have you established an affordable marketing and advertising campaign within your budget constraints that matches your customer acquisition costs?
  • What are your SWOT?
  • Who are your competitors? (If your answer is “none”, you are NOT ready!)
  • What is your value proposition? Ignoring motherhood words, why WILL customers buy from you instead of their alternatives?
  • What are your sales channels? Who will close each sale? How will you motivate and compensate your sales force?
  • What are your strategies regarding ad agencies / creative content / advertising budget issues and costs – how will you REALLY rise above the noise level? Are you sure you don’t need this? Are you sure your budget is right?
  • What are your best strategies and tactics for attacking the market and generating both fast sales and reaching positive cash flow?
  • What are your forecasts for the products and services that will be sold? How many of each will be sold during each month for the first two years and yearly for the next 3 years?
  • What are your target price points and why? Are you too cheap? Are you too expensive? Are you sure?
  • What are your cost of goods? Are there better alternatives?
  • What is the most likely ramp up for sales of each product and service?
• What are your constraints to growth?
  • Personnel? Capital?
  • Product and service diversification?
  • Market demand?
  • Sales channels?
  • What would you do differently if you had $1 million more than you think you need? $5 million?
  • What would it take to increase your Year 5 revenues by a factor of 10? Are you sure?
• Do you know your W3 – Who? is going to do What? When?
  • Do you have the right Who?
  • Do you have a definite list of all the What?
  • Does the When match the timeline you need to capitalize on your ideas and the marketplace?
• Have you developed a realistic organizational structure?
  • Will it support your sales forecast?
  • Have you established job definitions and salary requirements for every position?
  • Are YOU the ideal CEO for your own company? Now? In five years?
  • How much are you going to pay YOU? Are you sure?
  • Have you laid out a K&T Chart mapping the credentials, experience and capabilities of the ideal candidate for each key position?
  • Do you have a realistic timeline for hiring each person? This includes hiring them at the right time so you don’t waste payroll – and properly reflecting the time required to interview, decide, offer, negotiate, hire and have them actually start working and being productive for you.
  • Have your capital needs and cash flow calculations taken into account all the hiring costs associated with using headhunters, Monster.com, etc.?
  • What, exactly, have you decided to do about stock options, founder’s equity, bonus pools and other incentives for key personnel?
  • Who will serve on your board of directors / board of advisors? Have you taken into account all the issues? Who are your candidates? What is their compensation?
• Have you fully defined realistic operating costs?
  • Do they reflect the direct and indirect implications of both the sales forecast and the organizational structure?
  • What kind of facilities will be required for the number of people working for the company? How many sq. ft. of space are required for offices? For warehousing? What rent per sq. ft.? What are the costs for utilities? Taxes? Insurance? How does all this change over the next five years?
  • Is your production internal or outsourced?
  • How much capital will be consumed by inventory?
  • What systems and procedures will be needed?
  • What are the detailed steps required for fulfillment?
  • Have you taken all three dozen kinds of typical operating costs into account? (MAJOR risk factors if you overlook the wrong costs.)
  • What are the industry-specific and company-specific operating costs you have beyond the usual three dozen line items?
• What are your start up capital requirements?
  • What will you have in start up costs – what dollars will you need to be spent in the first 30 days after kick off if you are going to do it “the right way?”
  • How much money will you need for everything? Are you sure? Do you know how much will be left in the bank account when you start generating positive monthly cash flow? What will you do if you start to run out of money to pay the bills?
  • How much reserves do you want to add to what you THINK you need for start up capital? How much do you need for reserves for you to be able to sleep at night since you KNOW that it ALWAYS takes longer and ALWAYS costs more?
• What is your fundraising strategy?
  • Equity or debt or self-funded?
  • If equity, what structure? What will you give up? What kind of ROI will your investors enjoy if everything goes right? Are you sure it’s enough? Are you giving away too little or too much? What happens if everything does NOT go right?
  • Do you fully understanding the laws regarding fundraising? Do you know the constraints of state and federal securities laws and the VERY onerous penalties for even a slight technical violation?
  • Investors – do you know how to find them? How to motivate them to write the check? What kind of communications you need to send them? What about their rights and your obligations?
  • Do you know the “deviled details” involved in raising the money?
  • Do you know how to start legal / stay legal?
  • What is your exit strategy? What if your investors want a different strategy?
  • What will your company be worth in five years?
• What are your major milestones for the next five years – to get from where you are now to where you want to be? Will those milestones accomplish all the five year objectives you established?
• Does your business model REALLY make sense – for you, for your family. for your team, for your investors? Is the risk / reward ratio good enough for YOU to adequately receive the ROI YOU deserve for all the investment of time, energy, money and life it will take to get you there?

If you haven’t started or run a company, or run very many companies, you might not know the answers to these kinds of questions – or knew some of the questions even existed. Don’t feel badly about it. We all have our own areas of expertise that we’ve developed over the years of our own personal history. For me, these ARE the kind of questions that I’ve spent the last three decades answering. And where I fought many of the major dragon battles – when I hadn’t known the answers!

Don’t go it alone. Benefit from my experience answering this same multitude of questions, and slaying these dragons, for my own companies and for 2,000 other companies and their CEOs. Do you really want to face ALL those dragons by yourself?

Whether you are a single person running your own dot com out of your bedroom – or have plans for multiple branch offices in multiple countries employing hundreds of people, you NEED to know the answers to the above questions – and you should know them before you even start. If you have already started, then get the answers to all the above BEFORE you get blindsided by the lethal dragons that WILL come from having no answers.

Sign up ASAP for The Start Up Company Workshop.

What’s Included in The Start Up Company Workshop It’s one thing to read the above questions – but the real POWER of the Start Up Company Workshop is that, together, WE brainstorm each of these issues and MORE – and discuss how each question REALLY relates to YOUR company, YOUR future, YOUR specific dragons. This is where YOU will personally benefit from my three decades of experience gained from working one on one with thousands of companies and their CEOs. The Start Up Company Workshop includes:

• 12 hours of individual telephone consulting with Robert Lee Goodman – focused on all of the above kinds of issues that are applicable for YOUR company. I do not delegate this. You benefit directly from my experience.
• Sessions will be for a single 2 hour teleconference each week for 6 weeks.
• All telephone consulting sessions will be via a teleconference bridge line so you can include up to five people on the phone call. Optionally, and at no extra charge, we can also include a webcast of our discussions and brainstorming with up to 10 additional participants. Since we will be discussing critically confidential plans for YOUR business, only those invited by you will be able to join the call or webcast. Our teleconferencing can be just you – or others in your family or others on your team that you want to have participate. That way, you can benefit from the joint collaboration of your other trusted advisors. Both the teleconference bridge and the webcast are pass code protected. However, if you prefer even tighter security, we can forego the webcast. If you prefer even more security, we can have a standard two way phone call without the teleconferencing bridge. It is strictly your decision. My only requirement is that only those directly associated with your own company participate.
• All six telephone consulting sessions will be recorded in MP3 audio format so that you have all the calls in an easy-to-download format. Play back our sessions as often as you want on your computer or iPod. These recordings are strictly confidential and they will not be shared with others by Ceo Resource. Again, my only requirement is that only those directly associated with your own company receive the audio files.
• Formatted transcripts of each recorded session are available as Word documents as an option for $200 per hour of audio. Having the transcripts of our discussions makes it easy to add narrative to your financial projections to end up with a comprehensive business plan.
• Financial Projections for YOUR company with up to three drafts – Twenty plus pages that include five years of detailed financial projections, with tables and charts, in both Microsoft Word and Excel spreadsheet formats. Projections include: Start up capital requirements, revenue forecasts, profit and loss, break-even analysis, cash flow, balance sheet, ratio analysis and future valuation analysis. I normally charge $800 for these same projections but they are included FREE with your Start Up Company Workshop. These projections will be for YOUR company based on what we cover in the Workshop.
• Special Bonus – for no extra charge:
  

  The Business Plan Documents Audio Course

  If all you want to currently focus on is your business plan, then this is the package for you.

  The Business Plan Documents Audio Course, part of the Funding Foreplay Series of course, includes the business plan document and Modules 1, 4a and 4b of the audio training. It also includes the Business Plan Planning Worksheet with its 150 questions to guide you in developing the detailed answers you will need for a meaningful, implementable business plan. It also includes the Financial Assumptions Worksheet that will help you develop a realistic business model that will help you account for cash flow projections and how much capital you will need to start your new company.

• 

  The Business Plan Documents Audio Course normally sells for $497. But you get it absolutely free when you subscribe to the Start Up Company Workshop. And, since everything is 100% digital delivery, you can have them all in your hands in the next ten minutes, depending on your Internet speed.

The Power of Our Brainstorming

The brainstorming between us about YOUR company is the magic ingredient here that you can’t get from a book…or even briefly reading through the list. It comes for us, together, brainstorming about YOUR specific business…YOUR specific market niche…YOUR specific dragons that will try to stand in the way of YOUR success….and the detailed strategic and tactical decisions you will make about YOUR company based on the results of The Start Up Company Workshop.

Here’s What Else You Will Be Getting

Epiphanies.

My goal with everything I offer, everything I do, with Start Up Company University and Start Up Company Workshop is to give you what I call Epiphanies for Implementation. Just one epiphany, just one insight, just one single idea, just one “Ah ha…” can be worth thousands, tens of thousand, hundreds of thousands of dollars for you and your new company.

• These can be offensive epiphanies such as increasing revenues or new product ideas…or finding your funding even quicker.
• These can be defensive epiphanies such as cheaper cost of goods, lower expenses from operations, slaying start up company dragons, avoiding securities law violation and jail time.

Look for those epiphanies in everything you do, in all the training you take, all the consulting you use – whether with me or with someone else. It is the power of these incremental epiphanies that make continuing education like this course so helpful – especially for those students, those mentees, who pay close attention and are constantly thinking, “How can I use any part of this specific part to improve or accelerate what I am doing? How can I use it to keep from making an expensive or critical mistake?”

Usually, you will find a lot more than just one epiphany – especially in a course like this – if you can simultaneously listen and participate both convergently AND divergently.

• Divergently – consider any and all ways an idea or thought might expand the scope of what you currently thinking.
• Convergently – consider any and all ways an idea or thought might tightly apply to what you are already doing and planning, to make it better, faster or more profitable.

My goal with Funding Foreplay, with my Start Up Mentoring & Consulting, with my Start Up Company Workshop…is to generate as many epiphanies as I can for every client. But, as I said, it requires your divergent and convergent participation!

My intuition is that you will see overwhelming benefits from all that you learn, and all the epiphanies you gain, from the Start Up Company Workshop….total benefits, when you add them all up, that are worth MANY times the amount you invested in the tuition for this course.

My hope is that all of these benefits will give you a GREAT ROI on your investment…. and the ideas and documents here GREATLY increase your probability of not only surviving – but thriving with your new company!

Tuition

• Standard Service: The investment and tuition for this 12 hour, six week strategic and tactical Start Up Company Workshop for your new company is only $4,600. Click reserve your space now – and make your new company, and the vision you have for it and your future, a reality.
• Priority Service: You can expedite your planning with Priority Service – For Priority Service, we will invest two hour sessions twice per week to get it done in only 3 weeks. The investment and tuition for this Priority Service is only $9,200. *
• Top Priority Service: If your timeline is critical, you can REALLY expedite your planning with Top Priority Service – Get it all done in one week! Intensive three hour sessions over four days – all in one week. The investment and tuition for Top Priority Service is only $13,800. *
• On Site Service – Get it all done in two days at your location! We will invest together, a highly focused, intense two days of personal one on one face time AT YOUR LOCATION that will be dedicated to answering the Workshop’s questions for your company’s strategy and tactics. The investment and tuition for this on site mentoring is $21,400 for continental USA locations and $39,250 for international locations, with either plus first class travel costs. *
• Included FREE with ALL Service Levels – Audio MP3s of all 12 hours of our telephone sessions plus over 20 pages of five years of financial projections for YOUR company are included for FREE. Plus, you get the $497 Business Plan Documents Audio Course for no extra cost and the $800 Five Year Financial Projections for your company – a total of $1,297 in free bonuses.
• Optional – Follow on mentoring after 12 hours, if requested, will be available at my standard, priority or top priority billing rates, depending on your needs.

Note: * There are a VERY limited number of slots available for this kind of individualized service and slots may or may not be currently available. If you would like to benefit from this unique and valuable service, please email me now by clicking Start Up Company Workshop to let me know your needs and timetable and I will respond with my availability.

Get Started With Start Up Company Workshop – Right Here – Right Now

You can almost taste what it will be like to finally have your own company – and what it will mean to you and your own future – when your company not only survives but thrives with success.

So, what does it take to get your new company started and to make it a success?

THAT’S the purpose of the Start Up Company Workshop – to give you the insights to design your own business model, your business plan, your own future – so all of it matches what you want your typical day in your life to be – five years from today.Do You Have All The Pieces Of YOUR Puzzle for Your New Company?

Finally! You have a totally unique, one-of-a-kind solution to knowing what it takes for you to start your company and really be ready for success.

Don’t miss out on this great offer. Click reserve your space now – don’t let your new company vision slip between your fingers and become another unfulfilled dream. Click reserve your space now – and make your new company, and the vision you have for it and your future, a reality.

Wishing you stellar success for your start up company,

Thanks again!

Robert Lee Goodman, MBA
Ceo & Chief ImpleMentor

PS: As you can see, the Start Up Company Workshop is a one-of-a-kind course that covers everything you need for your new company to properly plan for success. Click reserve your space now.

PPS: Need a more affordable approach to starting your company and finding investor funding? Then, check out four module, The Funding Foreplay Audio Course – with over five hours of audio.

PPPS: Don’t need to go all the way? Just want the Business Plan Documents Audio Course that is included free with Start Up Company Workshop? Then, check out our a la carte page for subset courses to the full version of Funding Foreplay – and other special offers.

PPPPS: Want to taste test the $97 Module 1 Audio from Funding Foreplay for free? Click Module 1 Audio Taste Test to get the coupon code.