How to write a Business Plan of commercial activity to understand if your project is sustainable?

If you are thinking of opening a 101CAFFE’ store, it is natural to ask yourself the following questions:

• Which business model to choose?
• How much do I have to invoice to make the business sustainable?

We will respond together during the free webinar offered by 101CAFFE’ thanks to Marco Zannini in charge of 101CAFFE’ stores’ development in Italy and abroad. At the end of the article is available the link to see the webinar.

Why is it necessary to create a Business Plan to start a business?

The business plan allows us to evaluate the financial needs of our project and understand if we have the initial money capital to start. The objective of a Business Plan is to forecast future costs and revenues for a period of at least 3 years, to understand how long our business will reach “the breakeven point“, is the moment in which revenues will totally cover costs and the moment from which you can really get profit from our business. It is an excellent tool to present our project in detail to others, such as potential financiers, as well as to identify banking partners who can support the financial needs that emerged from the analysis.

How to predict a store’s revenues in a realistic way?

To determine the revenues and therefore our shop turnover, we must, first of all, consider the location of our store and the expected “customers flow“, i.e. the number of customers we expect to enter our store.

In 101CAFFE, we love to say that the Business Plan to be really effective must be “localized“. It means that in order to have the most realistic forecasts possible on which to base our business decisions we base our analysis on real data that we obtain from the analysis of the actual revenues of 101CAFFE’ stores already started, at the same position and geographical location. 101CAFFE’ is in fact a network of over 120 franchise shops and this allows us to have at our disposal all shops sales data to be constantly analyzed with the support of sophisticated tools, identifying in this way from time to time the ideal location to start a new business

By 101CAFFE’ the analysis of the expected flows is essential to understand how much staff we will need and the relative costs, to avoid losing potential sales due to lack of sales staff and organizing work shifts based on when we expect to have greater flows.

What costs should we consider in our store’s Business Plan?

In a business plan, it is important to report the cost forecast for our future business in a realistic way. Here are the main ones:

• rent
• staff Price
• utilities (eg: electricity, gas, Internet subscription, etc.)
• raw material/goods
• transport costs
• general costs (e.g. POS commissions, advertising and marketing costs, stationery material, etc.).
• as for Franchising, royalties due to headquarters (Franchisor)

Costs to be considered in a Business Plan also include financial costs incurred when starting your business for the furnishings and renovation of the store. These costs are almost never predictable and often reserve surprises, for example when premises renovations are required and were not initially planned.

Therefore attention to the choice of the place, checking municipal regulations and necessary requirements based to avoid unpleasant surprises.

If you want to learn more about this topic, please sign up for 101CAFFE’ Webinar, we will do many practical examples together and you can ask all questions you like on the topics covered, by writing to [email protected]