Aramanda
Solutions
Enterprise
Business Planning
June 01, 2006
10 Steps to a Business Plan
1. Use a Printed 8 1/2" x 11" Format. Use a loose-leaf binder to package the plan and to facilitate any revisions.
2. Begin with a cover sheet that includes the name, location and telephone number of the business and the name of the person who wrote the business plan.
3. Keep it short and crisp without compromising the description of the venture. Include a one- or two-page executive summary with an overview of the most important issues in the plan - including the business's niche, marketing, management experience and finances.
4. Organize it with a table of contents that shows logically arranged sections and appendices
5. Identify a target market in the plan. Indicate whether the market is growing, steady or shrinking. Provide extensive details about competitors, including their strengths, weaknesses, estimated market share and other details. Include your pricing strategy. Finally, explain how you plan to promote the business.
6. Explain the benefits of your product or service to the user or customer. Describe how it is unique and its appeal to customers. Include information about your business's location, current and future space requirements and area
demographics.
7. Show that you have an effective management team. Detail the backgrounds of executives, their qualifications, the need for additional management talent and how the owner plans to attract new personnel.
8. Focus the plan toward the future. Attempt to develop forecasts of industry trends over the next three to five years.
9. Highlight current and potential problems and demonstrate how they will be overcome. This will enhance your credibility.
10. Develop a financial plan that includes a capital equipment list, a balance sheet, income statements for three years (or pro-forma income projections for a new business), cash flow statements, break-even analysis and loan applications.
IPO-No
July 01, 2006
Regulatory reforms and skittish investors have combined to make it harder for companies to make initial public offerings. A regulatory crackdown on stock research in 2003 gave investment banks less incentive to employ stock analysts, whose reports tend to trigger buying and selling. Those who remain focus mostly on larger companies because investors tend to be more interested in those firms. A small company going public isn't likely to garner much attention, which limits its appeal among investors. Companies that consider going public face new costs and challenges as a result of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley law, which makes board members and executives more accountable for the accuracy of company books.
Accentia BioPharmaceuticals (Nasdaq-ABPI)
Tampa
2005 Sales: $25.2 million
1-Year Sales Growth: (-2.9%)
Chairman: Francis O'Donnell Jr.
Website: accentia.net
Accentia BioPharmaceuticals was formed to acquire companies and products that deliver specialty drugs to patients with respiratory conditions, cancer and chronic pain using patented delivery technologies. The company has about 10 products on the market, including antihistamines and a potential vaccine for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The company also offers biologic manufacturing services, has developed a line of cell-production instruments and is pursuing licensing late-stage development products.
AmComp (Nasdaq-AMCP)
North Palm Beach
2005 Sales: $267.3 million
1-Year Sales Growth: 41.7%
CEO: Fred R. Lowe
Website: amcomp.com
AmComp is a holding company for firms that underwrite workers' comp insurance. It also provides numerous related services such as loss prevention advice and claims-handling strategies. AmComp has been through a few name changes and maintains subsidiaries under five wholly owned entities, including Pinnacle Administrative, AmServ ...
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The Long Boom: An Amazing Economic Expansion Turns 25
October 31, 2007
If the toxic cocktail of a mortgage meltdown, a credit crunch, and surging oil prices should sicken the American economy enough to cause a recession—an actual shrinkage of our gross domestic product—it would be a pretty uncommon experience for many Americans. Over the past 25 years, the United States has enjoyed a marvelous stretch of almost uninterrupted economic growth.
In fact, November marks a wonderful double anniversary. The current six-year economic expansion dates from November of 2001, while the long economic boom dates from November 1982. (Both dates come from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which defines a recession as a "significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.")
Consider this: Since 1982, according to the NBER, the economy has suffered two recessions—in 1990-91 and in 2001—for a total of 16 months. By contrast, in the previous 25 years, the economy suffered six economic downturns for a painful total of 67 months. Even worse, the 1973-75 and 1981-82 recessions were two of the nastiest of the 20th century. Is it any wonder that the stock market basically went nowhere from 1966 to 1982, with such big hurdles to overcome? The Dow Jones industrial average hovered right around 1000 for more than a decade and a half. But since August 1982, when it bottomed at 776, the Dow has risen almost 1,700 percent. That ascent reflects an economy that has nearly tripled from $5.2 trillion in 1982, adjusted for inflation, to $13.9 trillion today.
So what explains this extended period of growth and prosperity? What are the ingredients that make up this winning economic recipe, ones Americans might want to keep in mind so that the long boom goes for another 25 years? What, in short, worked?
To a great extent, surprisingly, there is not a lot of debate about this, at least concerning the broad strokes of economic success. "We did something really radical," says Lawrence Lindsey, a former director of the National Economic Council for President Bush. "We decided to let markets work." Deregulation, free trade, and tax cuts were all just different facets of the same basic idea: a bit less government, a bit more markets.
Now Lindsey is Republican and an adviser to the presidential campaign of Fred Thompson. But check out what Paul London, a former senior policy adviser at Bill Clinton's Commerce Department from 1993 to 2000, has to say about the long boom: "The key to the last 25 years is the opening up of all sorts of sections of the economy to increased competition."
Indeed, you would have to venture pretty far to the political extremes to find people who want to return the top marginal tax rate to 91 percent, where it was before the Kennedy tax cuts of 1963, or who want to nationalize broad sections of the economy. Adds London, "I think the key to growth is the flexibility you get with increased competition. You want to make sure we don't have the reconstitution of something like a telephone monopoly."
Liberal economist Robert Atkinson attributes the big increase in productivity in the 1990s to a free and unfettered Web. "The decision by American government to not overregulate the Internet like the Europeans have...
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Recession linked to more than 10,000 suicides
June 12, 2014
The Great Recession that began in 2007 appears to have taken more than a financial toll. New research suggests that the economic downturn could be linked with more than 10,000 suicides across North America and Europe.
The study found that between 2008 and 2010, rates of suicide surged in the European Union, Canada and the United States. The increase was four times higher among men than women, according to the report published in the current issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry.
"There has been a substantial rise in suicides during the recession, greater than we would have anticipated based on previous trends," lead author Dr. Aaron Reeves, of Oxford University's department of sociology, said in a university news release.
In conducting the study, researchers from the University of Oxford and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine examined information on suicides from the World Health Organization. The data included 24 countries in the European Union as well as Canada and the United States.
The investigators found a reversal in the decline in suicides in the European Union that coincided with the beginning of the economic crisis in 2007. By 2009, suicides had increased by 6.5 percent.
Meanwhile, suicides in Canada rose by 4.5 percent between 2007 and 2010. In the United States there was an increase of 4.8 percent during this time period, the study found.
According to the study authors, these figures are "conservative" estimates. They said that the actual number of suicides since the recession hit are likely much greater than expected.
During a recession, some key risk factors for suicide may include job loss, home repossession and debt. Most suicides involve people with clinical depression, the report noted.
The researchers pointed out that prescription rates for antidepressants increased significantly in some countries during the recent recession. For example, in the United Kingdom, there was an 11 percent increase in such prescriptions between 2003 and 2007. By 2010, prescription rates for antidepressants rose 19 percent.
However, Reeves and colleagues explained that differences in suicide rates between countries affected by the same recession suggest that suicides during an economic slowdown are avoidable.
Countries that implement employment assistance programs may be able to reduce suicide risks, the researchers noted. They estimated that for every $100 per person spent on programs offering help to the unemployed, the risk of suicide falls by 0.4 percent.
"A critical question for policy and psychiatric practice is whether suicide rises are inevitable. This study shows that rising suicides have not been observed everywhere so while recessions will continue to hurt, they don't always cause self-harm," Reeves explained in the news release.
"A range of interventions, from return-to-work programs through to antidepressant prescriptions, may reduce the risk of suicide during future economic downturns," he concluded.
However, according to study co-author David Stuckler, "suicides are just the tip of the iceberg."
Stuckler, a professor from the University of Oxford, explained in the news release that "these data reveal a looming mental health crisis in Europe and North America. In these hard economic times, this research suggests it is critical to look for ways of protecting those who are likely to be hardest hit."