Founder and CEO at Joorney – Business Plan Expert for Foreign Investors, CEOs, Advisors, and Attorneys
We see a lot of prospects and customers having all sorts of different price vs experience expectations from business plans and I wanted to create a document that could highlight why some business plan experiences are more expensive than others.
If you want to stop reading here – I’ll just give you a brief answer – the main difference is the quality of storytelling throughout the document. A business plan that is not custom tells absolutely no story ($500), a business plan that’s $1,500 should tell a solid story that will get the attention of the reader and get you through certain goals, but a $10,000 business plan becomes a work of art that.
The $500 Business Plan Experience
Joorney does not offer services at this price
This one should not really exist because it does not really serve the customers that go for it but being mindful of budgets it’s important to know where you are investing your time and money.
Who goes for that?
People that go for this usually are idea stage startup projects, very small SBA loan applications (<$50K), or people that just don’t see the value of a full-blown business plan.
What kind of service do you get?
For $500 either you’ve found a cheap freelancer or website that sells you the world or you’ve used a business plan software for 8months at $20/month and had someone quickly check on your work.
What does the deliverable look like?
If you went for a freelancer or cheap website, you are going to get a template where the level of customization to your business and person is extremely limited.
Usually, you won’t see that any story is being told or any connecting points throughout the document, just a list of generalized facts.
Most of the work, revisions, and updates will be done by you, and analysis of your market or industry will be done with extremely limited resources. From experience, it ends up being a 10-15 page documents with small paragraphs about everything about your type of business and quick projections.
What’s the result?
If you are going after a very small loan or presenting this to family – it can maybe do the trick, but don’t expect this business plan to teach you anything about your business, industry, market, or even be presentable to potential investors. If you had been able to get this done quickly and move on with your process I would say it’s a good choice but in a lot of cases, it takes people months to put it together and a lot of frustration along the way.
If you truly have budget issues I would then strongly recommend connecting with www.score.org or www.americassbdc.com which can help with free consulting and support.
The $1,500 Business Plan Experience
Joorney does help with that
For this price – what you should expect is a very professional and customized presentation of your current business that will achieve your funding or presentation objectives.
A story will be told that highlights the arguments of why the third party reading the business plan should trust you with their approval.
Who goes for that?
People that get this service usually are after SBA or bank loan for 500K or less, making an initial presentation of your business to a personally known investor for 200K or less, getting an investor visa, making a presentation of your company to a landlord or strategic partner.
What kind of service do you get?
For $1500 you should be able to start working with professionals – under the $1,500 amount – and unless you are a professional with dozens of plans a year or able to get a big discount from a good provider- I would be surprised if you got good quality.
At $1500 you’ll find a small company that will assign a consultant to you or you’ll work with a larger company like ours that will assign a team of experts. The difference you’ll get from Joorney compared to a small firm is responsiveness, speed of service, and efficiency of processes. For quality, if you are working with professionals like us, I’d like to assume that you’ll be satisfied with the end product.
The main differences lie in how much the person you work with cares about your project- you’ll be able to witness the quality of working with a professional company during the onboarding process, having a well thought out questionnaire, having the same day (or next day) response time on emails, an initial call with your project manager, dedicated questions about your business, 48hours for revisions once the 1st draft has been delivered and professional communications throughout the entire experience.
It’s funny because people online will switch from one company to the other for a $50 to $100 difference in price, but if they fully realized the value of getting same day response to emails only they would invest this amount in a heartbeat.
It seems like the efficiency of communication should be a given, but you’ll find that only a very well-organized operation can provide that comfort on a consistent basis and that’s one of the reasons why people trust us.
What does the deliverable look like?
The deliverable will be custom-written to the third party and have every part necessary to address the objective at hand. Most likely you’ll find the following sections:
An executive summary,
product and services presentation,
team presentation,
industry analysis,
market analysis,
competition,
pricing,
marketing,
objective related section,
and financial projections and timeline.
The deliverable will either be a presentation in PowerPoint or a word document that is about 20-30 pages and will be supported by $2,000 worth of market and industry research. That’s where you start seeing your investment back.
What’s the result?
The content will be connected throughout each part and you should find that arguments are made to underline the goal of the document and a story is being told – it might not be a work of art but it’s a solid and insightful story and it gets the job done.
What you should not expect from a $1,500 business plan.
First of all, a $1,500 won’t include a financial model
A Financial Model is a dynamic tool to update financial projections in real-time, with many variables and great details. The financial model is the absolute must to keep your business plan updated at all times, refresh your story in 6/12/or 24 months from now.
The model is the centerpiece to telling an amazing and delightfully interconnected story between the complexities of your business model, the market conditions surrounding it, your operational world, and financial expectations.
A financial model by itself can range starts at $5,000 and can be worth more depending on its complexity.
A $1,500 business plan may provide clarity on your strategy but will not offer extra strategic insights or consulting on how to optimize your business.
At this price, you should expect the document to satisfy the counterparty you are presenting it to, you should expect the plan to give you tons of information about your industry and market but the business plan will not provide extra strategic advice on how to improve your model or your business. If you think about it – a $1,500 business plan takes around 40 hours to collect, research, digest information, and put together professionally and at 1500$ you are paying the company $35.00 per hour.
A $1,500 business plan won’t optimize the raise of $1,000,000 of funding
At this level of funding, an investor would expect a set of different documents – you can still go with this $1,500 business plan to an investor to capture their interest but they will still ask you for the $10,000 business plan experience which I am going to describe now.
Joorney Business Plan Experience
$1,500
We are here to answer any questions you may have.
Reach out to us and one of our consultants will be in touch with you immediately.
This is the ultimate white glove experience where whatever is in your mind about your project will be analyzed, put into numbers and analysis, and strategized properly into a great piece of storytelling, complemented with amazing market insights, and challenged with precise benchmarking.
Who goes for that?
Companies and people that have objectives of capital raise, strategy, or debt funding with a large stake at hand such as >$500K. Typically our clients that go for that experience are already sure they want the most they can get out of the business plan experience and we know that because they want a Financial Model rather than projections, which indicates they really want to get into the nitty-gritty of the numbers.
What kind of service do you get?
For $10,000 you should get a financial model, an investor business plan and a pitch deck, and a lot of insight. If the objective is strategic the plan and deck will be used for internal communications purposes.
Consulting time during projects like these ranges from 7-12 hours depending on projects but you can expect to have 3-4 long sessions where every concern you want to share about your business can be discussed and every interest research or analytical piece we find about your business will be given a platform.
At that price, you should get out of the experience feeling extremely confident for your final objective, and honestly you’d be getting the same kind of service a firm like Deloitte or KPMG would provide to their clients.
At Joorney, you’ll be in contact with our Advisory team that has supported companies and entrepreneurs through transactions from $500K to $250Million. Our Head of Advisory, Matt Wolf, will be the direct point of contact.
What does the deliverable look like?
The final deliverable should have:
A financial model that is dynamic and that allows you to play with the key variables that may evolve within your business model.
A business plan that can have the format of a PowerPoint or word based on your needs and preferences. This document will allow understanding the story, the strategy, and the entire rationale behind the numbers.
A pitch deck that will capture the essence of the business plan story and turn it into a very visual 10 slides to be presented, or sent as a teaser for those who need to be convinced faster.
With these tools, it’s like going to war with your airforce, navy, and forces on the ground, whatever the situation you are faced with you’ll have the tools to address it.
What’s the result?
The result here should be explained with some examples.
We see clients come to us saying – I met a few investors and they like my idea and now they asked me for a model and an updated presentation.
Some clients also have very poor documentation while actively looking for investors and not generating interest.
The result of this $10,000 experience, is that your venture will be judged in its best version by investors, capital, banks, capital and that you’ll improve the chances of success by being ready for any additional info they may want from you.
So whatever complementary information they ask, you should have it within the deliverables that we provided and what that does is create a lot more probability for you to close a deal because you can immediately continue the conversation when interest is generated instead of pausing for weeks or months to get your ducks in a row.
Every business plan experiences listed above is made for very specific profiles and business situations and I hope this has created some clarity into where you or your clients may fit.
Joorney Ultimate White Glove Experience
$10,000
We are here to answer any questions you may have.
Reach out to us and one of our consultants will be in touch with you immediately.
