Monthly Archives: December 2015

How To “Winterize” Your Business For Success in 2016

How To “Winterize” Your Business For Success in 2016

Businesses, just like homes, require winterization in order to save money, increase efficiency, and keep things running smoothly in the cold months ahead.

Every business from app development to accounting needs to be prepared for when business is slow.

Here are 4 tips to prepare your business for the big freeze, and have you thriving in 2016.

Furnace | The Heater of The Business

Behind every business, there’s a heating system, a powerhouse of a team, supplying a warmth of knowledge and resources. It’s true, teams are like furnaces; they need to be reliable, dependable, and have the ability to start and deliver “heat” regardless of season or circumstance.

Winter is the perfect opportunity to check in with team members to review how energy/time are being “spent,” to ensure each team member is heating up to their full potential, while in alignment for the common good of the business.

The fate of your company depends largely on your team. Evaluate and examine what inspires, motivates, and increases the heat for your team members. Perhaps it’s a weekly yoga session on-site? A monthly education talk? Working remotely once per month?

Flip on the power switch, and get your team fired up for success.

Storm Windows & Doors | The Protector Of The Business

It’s fair to say that outside “temperatures” like the stock market, banking institutions, and technology, influence the internal temperature of a business.

Is your business protected and adjusting to the current and future market temperatures, or is your business frozen in time?

In times of “freezing” temperatures (whether in funding, manufacturing, or building a team) add an increased layer of insulation to your business by researching, documenting, and analyzing the following:

Profitability
Revenue
Active Customers
Registered users
Engagement
Partnerships/clients
Traffic

The best protection for your business is knowing and understanding your business model from the inside out.

Ceiling Fans | The Reverse Engineer of The Business

Most people think of ceiling fans only on hot summer nights when they want to be cool.
However, ceiling fans also come with a handy reverse switch that changes the direction of the blades into clockwise rotation. A clockwise rotation reverses those cool breezes into warm circulation air.

Smart entrepreneurs know the power in reverse engineering success.

The four keys are:
Determine the most basic level of the goal.
Ensure that you are committed.
Identify as many steps as possible that are required to reach the goal.

Take action.

Emergency Kit | Tools for Business Survival

The road to success for your business is full of unexpected twists, turns, and various terrains.
No one enjoys getting stranded in a cold or dark home, but when you have a well-equipped emergency kit prepared, the situation becomes more bearable.

A business survival kit should include the following 3 items:
A strong Entrepreneurial network
An air-tight business plan
A strategic financial plan

Cheers to the continued success of your business in 2016 regardless of the season!

If you have a question about your Startup business idea or you’d like to discuss our business plan writing services, feel free to contact us for a free consultation!

Want to Join The Startup Garage For FREE at Launch Festival in San Francisco?

Want to Join The Startup Garage For FREE at Launch Festival in San Francisco?

The Launch Festival in San Francisco is March 2-4th 2016.

The Event promises to be the greatest startup conference in the world, with 15,000 attendees, 4 stages, and 250 top notch speakers.

All with the mission to help founders build, scale, and secure funding.

“This whole festival is a celebration of entrepreneurship,” said angel investor Jason Calacanis, who has organized Launch Festival events for eight years now.

The Startup Garage loves what Launch Festival is doing and have heard countless success stories of previous attendees. “This is very good for us start-ups to meet both potential customers, potential partners and potential investors. And it’s also getting the media exposure, being on stage,” said Dr. Alexander Borve, co-founder and CEO of First Derm

We excited to offer you our friends and founders FREE passes to the event, as a way to support and inspire innovation. Simple Go to launchfestival.com/thestartupgarage to claim your free pass.

Ready to not just attend but also take the stage?
If you’d like to debut your Startup Idea on stage in front of their 15,000 founders, entrepreneurs, investors, and tech enthusiasts?
Go to launchfestival.com/competition to apply for the LAUNCH competition.

The winner receives a $200k investment from Jason Calacanis and a slot in the LAUNCH Incubator.

They will also be holding the LAUNCH Hackathon (with 15K hackers and $1M+ in prizes) on February 26-28. You can apply HERE. 250 teams of four will spend 48 hours creating a company, with the top seven making it to the main stage of the LAUNCH Festival on Friday where they will be given two minutes to show their creations before a grilling from our judges!

San Francisco, the city by the bay, is an entrepreneurial hotspot, this monumental 3 day event is sure to put some stretch marks on your brain and business.

If you’ll be attending please connect with us @Startup_garage on Twitter!

Tweet “See you at #LaunchFestival SF @Startup_garage”

We’d love to say hello in person.

How To Understand Customer Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition Costs?

How To Understand Customer Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition Costs?

The Key to Profitability for your business

Understanding customer lifetime value and customer acquisition costs.

It comes as no surprise that a company must earn more revenue over the lifetime of any given customer (referred to as Customer Lifetime Value or CLTV) than it costs to acquire the customer (referred to as Customer Acquisition Cost or CAC).

While there are additional overhead and operating expenses that affect profitability, the first step in building a profitable business is to implement a scalable business model where your Customer Acquisition Cost is lower than your Customer Lifetime Value.

In theory, this seems rather obvious. However, putting this concept into practice can be difficult as your CLTV and CAC aren’t always extremely apparent. Additionally, it takes seasoned marketers and business leaders who understand how retention rates, sales & marketing channels, and business models affect

CLTV and CAC.

In this blog I’ll be discussing the factors that affect CLTV and CAC as well as strategies for increasing CLTV and reducing CAC. While much of what’s presented below is generally true across most industries, there are certainly caveats for every industry and business model.

Customer Lifetime Value

Before we discuss strategies for increasing CLTV, let’s wrap our heads around what CLTV is and how it is calculated. In its simplest form, CLTV is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. CLTV is calculated by forecasting the average customer lifetime (the number of months the customer purchases your product), the average monthly spend of your customers, and the average monthly cost of distributing your products.

As a result, you can increase your CLTV by:

1) increasing the average monthly spend
2) increasing the average customer lifetime
3) decreasing the cost of distributing your product.

Increasing Average Monthly Spend Per Customer

The most immediate way to increase your average monthly spend is to increase your price. However, an increase in price will often lead to either a reduction in conversion rates (the number of total customers) or a reduction in retention rates (the number of repeat purchases from a given customer).

You don’t want to increase your average monthly spend only to decrease the total number of customers or the average customer lifetime.

You can also increase the average monthly spend through upselling and cross-selling techniques. Think of Amazon suggesting additional products and services bought by other customers looking at the same item. Additionally, you can implement increase average monthly spend by implementing loyalty programs, improving conversion rates through website optimization, and streamlining the sales process.

Increasing Average Customer Lifetime

CLTV can also be increased by improving retention rates, or the percentage of customers that remain customers over time. Companies with low retention rates are required to draw the majority of their profits from just one purchase per customer while companies with high retention rates benefit from spreading their CLTV over numerous purchases.

Retention rates can be increased by improving customer satisfaction through strategies such as customer service and support centers, sending periodic discounts and promotions, offering loyalty programs, and enhancing the overall customer experience.

Decreasing the Cost of Distribution and Fulfillment

Every business’ cost structure will vary but some of the more common ways to decrease the cost of distribution and fulfillment include: purchasing inventory in larger amounts, utilizing cheaper vendors and suppliers, substituting lower cost materials, decreasing base salaries and increasing commissions, utilizing independent reps over in-house reps, and reducing waste.

Customer Acquisition Cost

Developing a business model that results in a low CAC and that is scalable is difficult and where many startup businesses fail. In a world of data overload, it is challenging to attract and successfully sell products and services to people that have never heard of you. Every product and service is different, but for most companies the customer goes through several stages before making a purchase.

First, they have to become aware of your product or service through PR, advertisements, word of mouth, social media, reviews and blogs, etc. Next, they often need to be courted by sales reps and go through some sort of on boarding process.

This process from start to finish can be costly. Naturally, you have options as to how you allocate your marketing and customer acquisition dollars. Strategies such as SEO are typically low cost but usually don’t offer a strong degree of control, targeting, and results. Unlike strategies such as direct sales which are typically very costly but come with a strong degree of control, targeting, and results.

It is important for businesses to research standards in their industry and then benchmark themselves against those standards in order to pick the appropriate channel mix for their business. Additionally, companies can get creative with low cost channels that will help to reduce the average CAC across all channels.

For example, referral and word of mouth programs (such as business that offer one month free for every 10 friends referred) are a great way to acquire new customers at very low costs. While you cannot rely on these strategies exclusively, they will help reduce the average CAC across all strategies.

Optimizing the CAC and CLTV ratio is crucial to the success of any business. The earlier the business can figure out the right mix the sooner they can begin scaling in a profitable way.

Here at The Startup Garage, we help entrepreneurs devise the appropriate business models and sales and marketing strategies that will enable them to scale a profitable business. Contact us to learn more.

Ready to win over $10,000 in Prizes for your Brilliant Business Idea?

Ready to win over $10,000 in Prizes for your Brilliant Business Idea?

The Startup Garage is excited to co-sponsor in “The Ideator December Challenge.”
A challenge designed to bring your business idea into conception.

Submissions currently open now until Dec 13, 2015 at 5pm (PST) entering is easy and done completely virtually.

Enter here today >>>December Challenge Idea Competition

The winner will be walking with $10,00 plus advisor board access, key mentorships, investor relationships, and specialized tools and resources from challenge sponsors:

SalesForce.Org
box.Org
Google
Pledge 1%
Crunchbase
Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center
BandofAngels
LegalZoom
Perkinscoie
Listhunt
SplashU

All ideas at any stage are welcome, this challenge is designed to bring your idea to life!
Judges are looking for the biggest idea with the best-defined roadmap to success.

The Top 5 idea will be notified on December 14th and selected to pitch in the finals on December 15th at 5pm PST.

5 questions to answer when entering to optimize your pitch are:

How big of a problem does the product solve?
How well does the product solve the problem?
How well do the docs, if any, support the idea?
How has collaboration helped the idea?
Do the goals and tasks adequately outline a roadmap to success?

Remember to structure your pitch in a colorful story with a beginning, middle, and end.
Let your personality shine through without being too salesy, vague, or abstract.

Ideator was created to foster global innovation and entrepreneurship, while also making them easier.
The Startup Garage Team, know’s it’s ideas like yours that continue to shift the landscape of business innovation.

We look forward to hearing your ideas and helping launch them to the world!