Business plan record store

Tema	Anglų kalba
Tipas	Referatas
Aprašymas	The job is to develop a business plan for a small or medium size business. The objective of this exercise is to gain some practice in developing such plans and to use some of the tools available to assist in decision-making. The job that I chose was to look into if it is feasible to start a record store where the power of modern computers is utilized to keep the costs down. All prices in the report are based on my experience and common sense along with internet research. Numbers relating to the market are primarily based upon my feeling of how strong the Icelandic music industry is and how well an idea like this could work in that environment. They are presented in Icelandic Krona but the ratio between Litas and Kronas is approx. 1/25 Lt/Kr.
Patalpinta	2005-05-07
Parsisiuntė	1393
	Parsisiųsti47 KB

Išsamus aprašymas

Speciality
The new thing that this store has is minimal inventory. Most probably many have said this before but they all still work under the old idea that all the records have to physically be in the store when the customers want to buy them.
By taking the model of Apple's iTunes Store and moving it out of the home and onto the streets we can achieve a much lower inventory than is possible with a traditional musicstore. All the music would be stored on computer drives in full quality and when the customer wants to buy an album he simply requests it from the salesman who burns the album on a cd which the customer then takes with him. With this comes a much higher computer cost but that is more than balanced out by less inventory and less requirements for the store's size plus we get the added bonus of a potentially strong online presence. The stock-reducing feature of this store can be described so that no cd´s will be bought from the publishers except those that have already been sold. It would work similar to when one orders a cd from a traditional music store. The process then is that they put in an order for that particular cd which is then sent to them in the next shipment. Since they already can sell it when it comes to the store no cost of stock needs to be accredited to that particular cd and it will not degrade in value, as it remains unsold in the store.
Market
In all probability it will be easier to get smaller independent labels to accept this new arrangement since they are often less concerned about piracy and illegal distribution of their music. When Apple introduced its online record store with the possibility of burning song to cd it may have broken the ice for big publishers who may see this opportunity for what it really is, a big chance for them to regain some control over music distribution.
According to the financial calculations presented in Appendix C we need to sell 22 cd's per day 30 days a month to get just above the break even point. That should be a reachable goal as we see with the following logic. For a store in central Reykjavik we can assume that the market size is 1800 customers. That is 10% of the population between 15 and 30. So in order to reach the breakeven point every customer needs to buy 4.4 cd’s per year, a goal that is easily within reach considering usual spending habits of young people in Iceland. A threat to this is of course the Internet and illegal downloads of music. Market size is furthermore considered under three circumstances, low, medium and high with the sales numbers 10, 40 and 100 respectively. The probability for each demand is 0.6, 0.3 and 0.1. A great factor in why low market size is thought to be most probable is the Internet and the still growing popularity of illegal downloads.
Setup
For a breakdown and projection of Setup cost see Appendix A.
The setup for such a store is more like what one would expect from an ISP rather than a record store because servers and large data storage facilities will be prominent factors of the startup cost. Another aspect is the cost expected to be needed to ensure proper license agreements with publishers. That amount is expected to be needed for travel expenses and other costs excluding legal expenses that will arise from negotiating with the publishers about this new form of sales. Legal expenses are marked as a special cost category because of the difference in tax issues between these two factors in Iceland.
Special programs will be needed in the modern store while traditional stock and bookkeeping software can be used in the traditional store. Among this special software is cd burning software, server maintenance and control as well as possible software to report sales of cd´s to the publishers but that will depend on the deals made with them, i.e. if they want secure data directly from the computer system without human interaction or if they simply want a report based on honesty for their billing purposes.
In the financial calculation it has been assumed that just about all startup expenses will be covered by loans and that those loans will be fully repaid in three years. This is done to provide a horizon for the comparison.
Operating Cost
Operating cost projections are presented in Appendix B
Operating cost for the two stores is calculated without considering inflation because it is not customary to consider inflation in such calculations. It is assumed that any change in costs will be carried directly into the prices and therefor effectively negating all consequences.
The expected sale used in Replenishment of stock is 10% of the stock. This is below the breakeven point but since the breakeven analysis with NPV uses the sales as a variable this has no effect on that. The main objective with the operating cost sheet is to get a rough idea of what forms the operating expenses and approximate the amount.
Legal expenses and publishing are assumed to be evenly distributed over the period while in fact they would be discrete and uneven amounts. For this preliminary analysis the even distribution is accurate enough.
Payments of loans are expected to be every three months and the interest rate is 6% per year. The payments are assumed to be equal payments.
Break Even Analysis
When NPV is calculated it is assumed that the business is worthless at the end of three years and therefor we get no return at the end of that period.
Interest rate is set to approximately 25% per year or exactly 2% per month. This interest rate is our interest demand, that is the interest we expect to be able to get if we invest differently.
When establishing the Break Even point NPV analysis is used with the Goal seek option in Excel. The NPV is set to 0 and Goal seek adjusts the sales to find the corresponding amount. This is different from finding the breakeven for individual months or the sum of the period in general because this takes into account the possible earning of the money if it was invested differently.
The Break Even analysis is presented in Appendix C.
Results
After examining the numbers we see that the modern store has a definite advantage over the traditional approach. By arranging the decision matrix and using the Maximax or MiniMax methods to determine the best possibility we get the same results, the modern store has better potential than the traditional one with regards to the NPV calculations. Furthermore if we use Expected Return, that is multiply the probabilities and return and then taking the maximum of that we get the same result. In the market section we saw a logical induction for the market share reaching and probably overtaking the breakeven point of 22cd's for modern store. The breakeven for a traditional is 59cd's and that amount we can not expect without a high demand which is considered improbable.



Recommendations
It is necessary before making any commitments regarding the store to first look for further information about the Apple deal. That information might be found on Internet rumor pages or magazines and newspapers covering the iTunes store. What we need to find out is any conditions that publishers put forth and the problems encountered on the way as well as how much Apple needs to pay the publishers for every song they sell, that should establish a baseline for the prices because it is unlikely that a small store like this would get a better deal than an industry giant with a phenomenal track record.
A market analysis needs to be conducted. It can be as simple as sitting outside a competing record store and counting the number of people coming out of it with a bag in their hand or it can be a full third party analysis of the market. But making some kind of market research is important for further establishing the estimates of market size.
With respect to the expected market size it is needed to determine the amount of cd writing equipment is needed. This is a variable with no counterpart in the traditional store but the potential of being quite expensive depending on the expectations of the stores client with regard to speed of service. It is necessary to examine many possible solutions ranging from cheap personal cd writers to more advanced professional equipment. Another such issue is the servers that store the music. They need to be able to store large amounts of data and need to serve all the data to the cd writers when it is requested. That should actually not be a big problem since modern servers have a very high bandwidth.
Another issue that needs to be considered is the financial aspect. It is not very wise to finance the preparation expenses with loans, one should rather try to get venture capital or finance it in other ways. A loan can be a big burden to bear if it turns out that publishers are not willing to allow this form of store but the venture capital would simply be lost without much consequence. With venture capital the control of the store is in lost to some extent but that could be more feasible than to be stuck with payments of a loan that generated zero income.

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