Tag: demographics

  • Business Plans for Newcomers – Part 1

    I cannot tell you how many times, I have heard of newcomers turned down for loans simply because they could not produce a business plan. In our lending systems, as covered in a past blog, it is customary to ask for a business plan. In many cases, lenders will not even look at your business…

  • Demographics for Small Business: market segmentation and counting customers

    The last couple of entries have focused on stories of entrepreneurs who have either not cared about customers or who believed that the entire world was a prospective client base. While these strategies may work for some entrepreneurs, generally speaking, we need to have some understanding of the size of the market and what we…

  • The Customer is always right….Except when he isn’t…

    As part of my continuing series on markets and customers, I would like to tell you about another entrepreneur who was determined to change his customer. Unlike Bob from the last blog who was content to live with his books, this entrepreneur, Luis, has been fighting to convince customers that he was right and they…

  • Demographics Part II: The Battle Between the Customer and the Entrepreneur

    I promised in the last blog post to guide you through the demographic research component of your business plan. Before we get into it, just understand that knowing demographics is really nothing more than thinking about your customers and every business must have customers. The Story of Sylvan’s Foremost Bookstore I would like to tell…

  • Demographics and Your Business Plan

    The term for some of you may conjure up images of university classrooms and painful modelling excercises. For others, the term might imply some kind if research to do with population, but most certainly nothing to do with your business plan. What if I told you that demographics should form the basis of your ENTIRE…