When assembling information for your start-up, a key piece is the people, the team you build that you think is best suited to make your business successful. If you are looking for traditional funding from a financial institution, they will look very closely at the experience and background of this team. It is to your benefit to build the best team you can, even if you do not seek financing. One of the biggest mistakes people make is hire people at the beginning that cannot deliver necessary skills. Be very careful.

Your job this week is to identify the personnel necessary to manage this endeavor. Start by thinking about what kinds of expertise will be necessary to run this business; what basic knowledge will managers need to have. Obviously we will need a general manager; what kinds of expertise must this person have; we will need a financial/operations director, what kind of expertise will this person need; we will need a sales/marketing director; what kind of expertise will this person need. Having said this, many businesses begin with only the owner filling all these positions, it is a form of bootstrapping. Or, often, start-ups include family members providing some of the necessary services. You can decide the best approach you think best fits this business.

Your post this week is to suggest a title for the positions you believe we need as essential to the operation; then write a job description for each of these positions. Include the information base they each must posses and the kinds of experiences that will make your business successful. At a minimum, you will need the three positions listed above. If, however, you decide one person will fill all these duties then you still need to identify the duties along with a description for each. I will give you a hint how to accomplish this in an easy manner; Google the above mentioned job titles with "job descriptions"; review the descriptions you find and tailor the description as you think might fit.

Then:

One of the final pieces you address when planning your business is the cost structure. If we were building a traditional business plan I would require three pro-forma financial documents; the balance sheet, the income statement, and a statement of cash flows. Keep in mind all of these would be your best guesses based on the research you have assembled. Keep in mind, as a start-up most of your numbers are best guesses.

Use the Internet to determine what kinds of equipment are necessary to make our cleaning solution. Include the cost of each piece of equipment you identify, add a line for salaries for the positions described above and then include a line for overhead (that includes rent/utilities/insurance) take your best guess (if you are going to locate in Omaha, just Google office rent in Omaha for a base price, when you look at them you can see what general utility costs are associated-use Zillow or some other real estate website). And, remember, you will need some form of container in which to sell the product (if we had more time we would like at container design and more specific marketing). You can use what other companies do as your guidelines. One thing you quickly learn when starting a business is that the cost of all new equipment (while nice to have) costs a great deal more than used or auction equipment. So, as you look for equipment, give thought to looking at auction sites; you might give thought to industry production auctions sites.

This is once again, best presented in a matrix or spreadsheet format.

Not to worry, we are not going to assemble formal financial documents. Once you have collected your information (in your matrix/chart) we are going to build a basic line item start-up budget. What this means is you simply make a list on the left-hand side of the page of everything you think you will need to start our business, then directly across to the right list the associated cost including a total at the end of the column. I am not asking you to build a complete budget; if you were anticipating actually starting the business I would have you include everything from rent/purchase of the production site, all associated human resource costs, all insurance costs, etc. We will simply focus on the production piece so be as complete as you can.

Then giving consideration to the price of your product (using information gathered from competitors and you interviews with potential customers); state the price per unit under your total costs; then divide your costs by the price; this will give you the number of units of a product you must sell to break even. Next, anticipate how much money you want to make beyond break even; add this number to total costs assembled and again divide by price; this will tell you how many units of product you must sell to break even and provide the profit you (as the owner) want.