Business Plan
3.1 Objectives
CODE Technologies has identified three types of objectives that will serve as challenging but attainable goals for the organization.
3.2 Business Objectives
- To become the premier vendor in the new and evolving Personal Locator Device industry.
- To reach profitability within one year of the company's launch.
- To develop additional profit centers such as programming, training, seminars, ancillary equipment, etc. within the first two years.
3.3 Financial Objectives
- Increase product sales to several million dollars annually by the end of the second year.
- Bring gross margin up and maintain that high level by the third year.
- Improve inventory turnover on an ongoing basis, until "just-in-time" inventory is standard by the third year.
3.4 Marketing Objectives
- Focus on target marketing to increase market penetration and domination.
- Expand target markets with controlled growth.
- Establish brand awareness for the CODE Technologies' name and products.
- Position ourselves as the leading Personal Locator Device company in the world.
3.5 Keys to Success
The keys to success in this business are:
- Product quality and efficacy in real-life situations.
- Utilizing next-generation technology in order to improve upon current systems, while differentiating ourselves from our competition.
- Marketing: either dealing with channel issues and/or barriers to entry, or solving problems with major advertising and promotion budgets in order to penetrate our target markets.
- Management: products delivered on time, costs controlled, marketing budgets managed. There is a temptation to increase growth at the expense of profits; we will keep a close eye on this temptation in order to live up to our plan.
- Sustaining controlled growth in order to manage start-up costs more efficiently.
To maintain these key factors,CODE Technologies' needs include start-up funding, partnering with value-added investor/partners, aggressive marketing, quality sales professionals, accomplished C-Level management, product branding, increasing reach into target markets, affiliating with the right channel partners, competitive intelligence and appropriate use of evolving technologies.
3.6 Start-up Summary
Our plan begins with a two month start-up period during which we will focus primarily on setting up our offices and developing our system designs, but also including significant initial marketing work. Our start-up expenses for these first months will be used for further product development, legal costs, payroll, marketing and typical expenses associated with opening our first office. The founders will provide the first round financing to launch the company, initiate a small production run of our product, and initiate further product development, while marketing and pre-selling.
In addition, we will need another investor/partner to provide funds to cover the cash necessary to see us through our first year in business, as we begin to make and sell our products. We plan to fund future growth from sales revenues.
Initially, we will be leasing a relatively small office space for administrative functions and an electronics bench lab in order to keep our first year expenses to a minimum, as we continue product development while marketing and pre-selling our product prior to production. We will consider a larger office space only when we have outgrown our current facility, dependent on sales, budgets and personnel needs.
