Business Plan Perspective

Since I never had the aspirations to begin my own business, I could never understand the importance of needing to take specific business plan classes, which is exactly what I had to do in order to complete my Master’s degree for Entertainment Business. It may sound logical that if one is getting a degree in business that they further have plans to start their own business, however, as someone who takes their job as an office manager and personal assistant quite seriously, I simply wanted to have the greatest amount of knowledge in my arsenal as possible to make me a valuable employee. I wasn’t sure how I was going to use the business plan knowledge and spent my time attempting to come up with a fictional company based off the final project I used to for film degree, and a real life scenario from my previous job and the documentary that we had been working on.

However, the further I got along in the business plan I realized that it was very similar to putting together project proposals, except instead of focusing on one project for the company, you were focusing on the company as a whole. I had put together several project proposals and several funding packets that had many of the same aspects to them and I realized that was going to be how and why this courses helped me so much in the long run.

Even if I never do follow through and open a business, being able to logically put together all of the information about a company, or singular project, is vital. It shows potential investors that you have all your cards in order; that you know exactly what you are doing, what you hope to do, how you will make money, and what you will then do with your profit. They want to make sure they are investing in someone who can help get them their money back and then some, there will be no point in going to someone with a business plan if you cannot tell them how much you will be spending, how much you project to earn, and how you will be earning it. Despite that no company is ever a solid thing, and both the location and economic climate of the area have influences, you need to put some amount of planning into it.

It wouldn’t be smart to open an ice cream shop in Alaska (though I’m sure there are some) however; it would be smart to work with snow mobile repairs in the same area. Knowing your target audience and what you want to do with your business shows investors that you are ready and willing to make money. Your business plan helps get you there.

All of the knowledge that I accrued in the class will be vital, whether I reference it for future funding packets or venture to use it while making my own business plan but I think the most important things I learned were about finances, even if I was a bit shaky on them. I’ve always had the ability to work within a budget and handle money in that respect, but in order to project how much something as vast a company would cost, and then make based off what I was assuming was a fictional product, was quite difficult for me. Even if I didn’t get the numbers quite right, it helped show me the type of planning that goes into working with the finances of opening your own business and I know it will be invaluable information for me in the future.

Business Experts

Spotlight On: Akira Hirai.

Hirai is the founder, CEO, and managing director of the business consulting company Cayenne Consulting – “business plan consultants with venture capital experience” – where he is currently working. He has had experience in the business industry for over 20 years now, after earning his BA in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University, and working in such places as New York City, Phoenix, and now Orange County, California.

Hirai started Cayenne back in early 2001 with what he says was a very simple mission, aimed toward venture capitalists, “Help entrepreneurs get their act together before they talk to investors.” The world of business can be both time consuming and confusing, therefore, Cayenne was started as an objective third party with a laundry list of services they provide such as strategy development, market research and analysis, competitor research and analysis, business plan preparation, and financial analysis and forecasting. This frees up the client’s time to focus on the rest of the areas that are going to matter most to investors. Cayenne acts as a partner taking on the tedious tasks for the client so they are left to help build a stronger market for themselves that will help investors notice them.

Before Cayenne, Hirai was already well versed in the world of business and had held several prestigious jobs – and founded two more companies. In the Silicon Valley area he kick started MyRaptor.com and ID Networks before he started focusing on the world of venture capital. Before this he had worked his way up through the ranks over four years to become Vice President of the prestigious Salomon Brothers in New York. He has also held several other job titles that include financial risk management consultant, software engineer, and advertising sales manager. He is a man who has had his hand in the world of business for many years now, and someone to be trusted with advice in creating new companies.

Resources for Akira Hirai:

http://www.caycon.com/business-plan-consultants.php

http://www.caycon.com/about-cayenne-consulting.php

http://www.linkedin.com/in/akirahirai

Spotlight On: Carolyn Kepcher.

Kepcher is most highly recognized as appearing on the NBC television show The Apprentice, not as a contestant, but as Donald Trump’s right hand woman and assistant who helped make all the final decisions about who was to be fired. She held this position because of her almost ten years of experience acting as the Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer, and General Manager for the Trump National Golf Club.

Kepcher started out her business career selling Avon products door-to-door and working as a restaurant manager in Manhattan while she earned her marketing degree from Mercy College. Eventually she found herself in the position of a sales and marketing director for a New York City golf club, which was eventually to be auctioned off. The man who bought the property was none other than Donald Trump. Impressed with her ideas about how he could best use his newly acquired golf course, he hired Kepcher in 1994 as the director of his sales and marketing. After four years in this position, when the current general manager was fired from Trump’s organization, Kepcher landed her the job that would eventually take her to overseeing the National Golf Club.

In 2006 her time working with Trump came to an end as she too was fired, based on Trump’s ideas that her “newfound celebrity status had kept her too busy with speaking engagements and endorsements to focus on her responsibilities for the Trump organization” which he reported to The New York Post. Not letting this stop her at all, she thoroughly developed the idea for her company Carolyn & Co. where she became the CEO. In 2008 she turned to MasterPlans in order to be able to help launch the company’s first campaign with WorkHerWay, which was described as the “ultimate online resource for the working woman” and provided a broad array of services to be able to cater to business minded women who many not always get the best care at other companies. However this campaign has since run its course and the website is no longer available for information.

In addition to founding her company, Kepcher has a wide array of skills and jobs behind her. In 2004 she wrote the business book Carolyn 101 which made it all the way to number two on the New York Best Seller List. She even had plans with Microsoft where they would be able to make an Apprentice-like television show focused on small-business ventures where she acted as one of the three judges. However the show never proved to get off the ground.

She wrote extensive business career columns for the New York Daily News, was a contributor for FOX Business, and has been used as a consultant on various programs such as The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Today Show. Currently she serves on the board of the Back Nine Network and uses her savvy business knowledge as a consultant for the golf industry where she is still highly regarded as an expert.

Resources on Carolyn Kepcher:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_Kepcher

http://www.speaking.com/speakers/carolyn-kepcher.php

http://www.masterplans.com/clients.php#kepcher

http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Carolyn%20Kepcher  

Spotlight On: Shama Kabani and The Marketing Zen Group

What do you do when you are on the cusp of emerging technology? Not many have caught onto it yet, but you know it’s going to be big. Well if you’re like Shama Kabani, then you build a company and turn this new form of exciting technology into a million dollar business. That’s exactly what she did between 2008 and 2009 when she became the Founder and CEO of The Marketing Zen Group.

While earning her Masters at the University of Texas, she wrote her thesis paper on the impacts of social media, focusing mostly on Twitter. Today this seems like a standard paper topic for any student studying communications, but Shama took a chance on this site in the days when it was new. This was a big gamble when it came to her career because the demand for social media had simply not evolved yet. She often says, “I remember writing my thesis for graduate school on Twitter when the social network had only a few thousand users. I knew then that it would be a powerful force in the new media world. When I speak, I joke with the audience that it was my favorite thing long before it was Oprah’s or Ashton Kutcher’s.”

The hot demand for social media and experts who know how to most greatly utilize these tools to enhance your business seem commonplace in today’s workforce, yet it was Shama and The Marketing Zen Group who helped pave the way. They officially became a million dollar business in 2011, and Shama herself has had several prestigious awards bestowed on her in the business industry. In addition to being featured in magazines such as Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Entrepreneur, her honors include:

·      Being featured as one of Yahoo! Finance’s “Seven Self-Made Immigrant Millionaires”  (2012)

·      Being one of Business Week’s “Top 25 Under 25 Entrepreneurs in North America” (2011)

·      Winning the Technology Titan Emerging Company CEO award (2009)

·      Being dubbed “The Zen Master of Marketing” by Entrepreneur magazine (2011) and often being referred to as “Master Millennial of the Universe” and an “online marketing shaman” by FastCompany.com

·      Accomplished author with her book The Zen of Social Media Marketing, which is due to be in its 3^rd edition January of 2013

So what exactly is it that The Marketing Zen Group does? They are a full service firm that helps provide online marketing and digital PR so that businesses may be better able to utilize the Internet. This means a site that’s more easy to search for, social media pages to help fans and customers stay informed about that’s happening with your business, and much more. Some of the services they have listed that they perform are: social media marketing, search engine optimization, website design and conversion, content marketing, blog design and development, as well as providing training, consultation, and seminars. You also have the option of using them to handle your entire online presence, or they can lend their services for just one area you have difficulty in.

Just because it was a blossoming industry with no real foothold in the business world at the time, Shama did not let that stop her from developing her company. Now social media and digital marketing are some of the cornerstones of a good PR campaign, and it’s only been a few short years. Some of the advice that she gave Yahoo! Finance was, "If you have an idea, put it out there and then figure out how to improve it. Look beyond the bottom line and toward the bigger impact." This is sound advice for any budding business mogul, or anyone looking to make a name for themselves in this ever-changing industry.

To find more information about Shama you can visit her website http://www.shama.tv/ where, like any savvy social media user, she has ample and immediately recognizable links to her YouTube page, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn so that you can always stay connected to her. To learn more about The Marketing Zen group, or become one of their clients, please check out http://www.marketingzen.com/  

How to Make Money in the Film Industry

When it comes to the realm of going digital, film seems to have a disadvantage.  We are living in a time when most people realize that having your content available on the web is absolutely mandatory. Having it available for free is almost just as vital. However, when it comes to things like the films and television shows that you regularly like to watch, you may be spending much less money than you realize.

For the world of music, it’s becoming almost second nature for artists to release the albums, or at least several songs off of their albums for free. People can then go to iTunes and purchase any remainder of the album they wish, or more often than not, they will seek out the rest of the songs elsewhere on the Internet also for free. But artists can still make revenue by offering other things. You can’t download merchandise, and who doesn’t want a t-shirt with their favorite band’s name on it? And concert tickets still need to be purchase. More and more bands are doing more touring these days in an effort to keep revenue up, and are offering special incentive packets to fans for a little bit extra money. While mega-artist tickets, whose price value is already quite expensive, are finding themselves asking even more now. So even if music is being gobbled up for free, there are still ways to make money.

When it comes to the world of books, you would be very hard pressed to find a place where you can just download books for free like you can music. And people don’t seem to have a problem purchasing their books for digital readers such as Kindle or Nook. And comic books have yet to really embrace being fully virtual, so their physical sales are still in good spirits.

But for the film industry it’s hard to actually find ways to make money. If people aren’t going to the theater, merchandising can only go so far, and even then it only works for certain films and franchises. Episodes may be rented or purchased at sites like Amazon Instant Watch. And there are paid options like Netflix or Hulu Plus, but you are still only paying a fraction of the cost (and for more content.) The film world as a whole has to seek out more creative ways to boost revenue and not let digital freebie’s completely run them into the ground.

 While the provided chart, courtesy of The Numbers, shows an increase in revenue this is only because of the increase in cost of the movie tickets. You can actually see that the number of tickets purchased has gone down and in order to keep things even, the cost of attending a theatre showing has had to increase drastically.

As Adam Davidson, a columnist with the New York Times, pointed out, two reasons why the film industry has such a hard time with making money lately are as follows:

1.) It is a guessing game. Even when researching trends with moviegoers, it’s hard to truly know why people saw a movie, why a film did so well, and what people want to see in the future. Just because super hero movies seem to be doing well a particular time, does that mean that people like seeing them at that time of the year? Or do people see them simply because that’s what’s available and considered to be “summer blockbuster” material? And it’s very easy to get overly saturated and irritate people with too much of a particular kind of movie in the theaters at once. Or a particular gimmick (think 3-D.)

2.) Everyone wants to believe they were the reason the movie was successful. It’s true that Hollywood is filled with a lot of egos. But it’s hard to every be able to cash in on what makes a film successful when everyone is thanking themselves for it. Was it the acting? Directing? Lighting? Or a multitude of reasons that made a certain film come together and really shine? Not knowing what to forecast for the future is part of what makes the film industry ping-pong with its success.

In order to truly take advantage of making money in today’s market, the film industry will have to seek out new solutions for making money digitally, and also be able to get good reasons under their thumb for just what is making them money. We are in a time when studios can’t afford flops, and definitely more than one in a row.

Is Television Hurting Politics?

The powers of television and social media are more prevalent than ever, but with the impending presidential election, do they do more harm than good? Presidents and presidential candidates are no strangers to utilizing all the power at their disposal to aid in their campaigns and their images, so it was no surprise that when the invention of television cam out, that this was added to their arsenal as well.

In the past weeks we have seen two presidential debates come and go, and both had a lot to say about the images of those involved, the most outstanding being Vice-President Joe Biden with his large smile and animated gestures. Many say that this was show boating in order to throw off his opponent, and ended up being the most discussed topic about the debate rather than the issues themselves. It even spawned a joke Twitter account called SmilingJoeBiden. We seem to be living in an age where these are the things that pick up the most attention from viewers, especially those in the younger generations. It is almost as though they keep themselves informed through television in order to find the next funny thing to joke about on the Internet.

While television has had its advantages with presidential hopefuls, such as the iconic debate between Kennedy and Nixon, has its power begun to fade? The most obvious advantage is that television allows us to be able to see our president and the opposing candidate. We can see their mannerisms, how they react under pressure, how polite they are or if they are the type of person to barrel into a conversation or debate when it pleases them. These are all subtle indications of character which can help the American people feel more confident in choosing who they feel would be best to run the country. And yet, television can turn entire debates into a mockery, when people begin to talk about what someone was wearing as opposed to their stance on foreign policy.

It is more than obvious that the political system will never go back to the way it once was, and both television and social media have created a vital part of politics that we cannot do away with now. But when the issues begin to be overshadowed, there should be new ways to help combat this, or new protocols to deal with conduct when on television. It should be used as a fruitful tool and not a gimmick for attention.