Energy Conservation Business Plan

Green Power’s business strategy recognizes and will leverage the fact that a lot of business will be transacted through networking and word-of-mouth referrals. With this in mind, Green Power will work diligently to build alliances with architects who can co-brand their services with Green Power thereby increasing Green Power’s potential qualified customers.

Green Power will rely on its competitive edge of adopting a cost effective environmental solution so in addition to meeting environmental concerns of the customer, Green Power’s services will save the customer money over time.The marketing strategy will highlight both environmental attributes as well as economic ones.The marketing campaign will recognize the existence of two distinct market customers. Lastly, the sales strategy will offer a compelling economic analysis of how the customer can save money by adopting Green Power’s designs.

Competitive Edge

Green Power will use its competitive edge of economic justification to turn potential customers into qualified sales customers.  While some of the other similar companies often highlight the positive environmental impact that their designs offer, Green Power will also offer economic justifications for their designs. This is an important competitive edge as it provides evidence that the customer can save money in the long term and make a positive impact on the environment. Providing a cost benefit analysis for the green design is important because it makes the potential market larger, moving from people that want to do good for the environment to people that also want to save money. By offering an environmental solution that saves the person or business money creates a compelling reason to adopt the suggestions. There are too few people that will act only for environmental reasons, but when you save people money, there are far more people interested.

Marketing Strategy

The marketing strategy is based on developing an awareness regarding Green Power’s services to both architects and the end use consumers. Green Power will strongly use networking as a means to develop relationships with many of the city’s architects. Although Burlington is a reasonably-sized city, the architect community is fairly close knit. If one wanted, it is easy to develop active relationships with many of the different architects in Burlington. By developing these relationships, Green Power will allow the firms to become familiar with not only the services offered by Green Power, but also the personalities involved, recognizing that much of business is transacted by who you know. Advertisements will be placed in the local architect newsletter.

To reach the end user customers, Green Power will use Advertisements in the local paper as well as within the yellow pages. As a means of increasing visibility of Green Power, GP will participate in several community-based seminars that serve as a free source of information for the citizens of Burlington. Green Power believes that participating in the seminars will be an effective way of meeting many of the potential customers and allowing them to become familiar with Green Power expertise.

Sales Strategy

The sales strategy implicitly and explicitly takes into account the philosophy that the reason that many of the people are attracted to Green Power is because of its personal environmental ethics. The sales strategy will leverage this desire with the fact that environmental decisions can have positive economic impacts in the long term. Therefore the sales strategy will leverage the competitive edge of economic justification as the method for turning sales leads into customers. For this strategy to be effective, Green Power will present customers case studies and quantifiable data proving economic justification.

Sales Forecast

Green Power has adopted a conservative sales forecast for the business plan. By adopting a conservative prediction, it is easier to hit sales goals and increase the likelihood that the business plan is relevant to the business. If the sales forecasts was wildly off, it casts doubt on the application of the plan for the business.

Sales will be slow for the first several months, a function of Green Power being a start-up organization. As Green Power increases their customer pool and more architects become familiar with GP’s services, business will grow. Growth will be forecasted and preferenced as steady. The steadier it is, the easier it will be to deal with the incremental growth in work. Please view the following table and charts for a graphical representation on monthly and yearly sales.

Cost of sales for a consulting company are negligible, however, cost of architects sales will be 20%, since we will pay commissions to the architects for referrals.

Milestones

Green Power has identified several milestones as a way of setting achievable goals. Performance is likely to be improved through the quest of reaching the goals. This phenomenon is well documented and is used in large corporations such as GE’s Seven Sigma Program as well as many state’s benchmarked-based assessment testing systems. Green Power has identified the following milestones:

• Business plan completion;
• 10th customer;
• Revenues exceeding $50,000;
• Profitability.