Single founder, non-tech start-up service venture. Bold new service with a clear path to profitability within a 2 years. Who to talk to?

It is hard to give specific advice without specific information.

Many of the pointers I see can be applied to non-tech startups. In the end, it is about knowing your customer's needs, partnering with those who complement your strengths and weaknesses, listening and evaluating feedback, getting to market efficiently and effectively, and always be innovating.

Feel free to book a call and we can discuss more in confidence.
-Shaun

Well don't get discouraged. Though books like Hooked by Nir Eyal are very web focuses, it all boils down to human psychology. You are providing something of value to someone, customer development remains the same, staff motivation remains the same, good marketing remains the same.

It would be hard to think there was no web or tech component to this business, even if it were just your CRM, email client etc. I assume as your question mentions capital expenditure you mean who to talk to, in order to secure that? In my experience it would be quite difficult (unless you are self financing to get a lot of capital invested), mainly because bank loans to a single founders are hard to come by.

So breaking it down - it appears there is demand, assuming this other company has validated your idea.

Do you have potential customers, or letters of intent from potential customers. If not it couldn't hurt to warm them up and assess their needs when building your business case.

If it's serviced base then I assume you will need to staff up? In which case it might be worth ear marking key hires. If your company will achieve 'runaway success' then actually staffing, company culture and scaling becomes quite difficult. There should be no reason to leave this up to chance, hiring mediocre people especially in small companies gets mediocre results.

Without any more detail it is probably hard to troubleshoot this any further.

Always available to discuss further if you wish.

It sounds like you are seeking capital (as you state that you will need at least $25M) or seeking advice on who to talk with in order to raise capital.

I think that this will be a relatively hard venture to raise capital for. In that range - and given that it is non-tech probably you should talk to private equity funds with experience in related fields.

My guess is you will have a hard time to get equity or debt financing without collateral for that amount starting from standing still. Unless you have a history of success or a rich uncle.

There are many different funding sources (government, private angels, VC's, banks, crowdfunding) - there may be very few are available for something like you initially describe.

Capital intensive - and also a service business.

I have people you I can connect you to if the len makes sense . Check out ideafather.com and you'll see the level of folks I've worked with and then let's arrange a call.

There is no business that cannot be start on a shoestring, so the first thing I would be doing is testing the market with a real website offering a real product. I can explain how I would do that when we talk.

One question I have is, is this a product or service that you are really excited about doing or are you strictly looking at it from a dollar sign viewpoint. Why I say that is you will like most of us who have done a start-up hit some really tough decisions and if you don't like what your doing you decrease your chances of making it substantially.

Call me and let's walk down some various options to get this off the ground with the resources you have first. Let's also not blow your whole nest egg on any one venture so you can live another day if things go south.

Call me and let's see what's possible.....Ken Queen IncomeForBabyBoomers.com

Of the hundreds of thousands of business ventures that entrepreneurs launch every year, many never get off the ground. A six-year-old condiment company has attracted loyal customers but has achieved less than $500,000 in sales. The company’s gross margins cannot cover its overhead or provide adequate incomes for the founder and the family members who participate in the business. Another young company, profitable and growing rapidly, imports novelty products from the Far East and sells them to large U.S.

But the company’s spectacular growth has forced him to reinvest most of his profits to finance the business’s growing inventories and receivables. Furthermore, the company’s profitability has attracted competitors and tempted customers to deal directly with the Asian suppliers. If the founder does not do something soon, the business will evaporate. Entrepreneurs must continually ask themselves what business they want to be in and what capabilities they would like to develop.

Similarly, the organizational weaknesses and imperfections that entrepreneurs confront every day would cause the managers of a mature company to panic. Many young enterprises simultaneously lack coherent strategies, competitive strengths, talented employees, adequate controls, and clear reporting relationships. The problems entrepreneurs confront every day would overwhelm most managers. Entrepreneurs cannot expect the sort of guidance and comfort that an authoritative child-rearing book can offer parents.

Each of those companies has its own story to tell about the development of strategy and organizational structures and about the evolution of the founder’s role in the enterprise. Every company has its own story to tell about the development of systems and strategy. Entrepreneurs must make a bewildering number of decisions, and they must make the decisions that are right for them. The framework I present here and the accompanying rules of thumb will help entrepreneurs analyse the situations in which they find themselves, establish priorities among the opportunities and problems they face, and make rational decisions about the future.

Instead, it helps entrepreneurs pose useful questions, identify important issues, and evaluate solutions. The framework applies whether the enterprise is a small printing shop trying to stay in business or a catalogue retailer seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. The first step clarifies entrepreneurs’ current goals, the second evaluates their strategies for attaining those goals, and the third helps them assess their capacity to execute their strategies. The hierarchical organization of the questions requires entrepreneurs to confront the basic, big-picture issues before they think about refinements and details.
Ask your self the following questions:
1. What risks and sacrifices does such an enterprise demand?
For instance, entrepreneurs may have to advertise to build a brand name. To build depth in their organizations, entrepreneurs may have to trust inexperienced employees to make crucial decisions. As one entrepreneur observes, “When you start, you just do it, like the Nike ad says. Entrepreneurs who operate small-scale, or lifestyle, ventures face different risks and stresses.

Talented people usually avoid companies that offer no stock options and only limited opportunities for personal growth, so the entrepreneur’s long hours may never end. Because personal franchises are difficult to sell and often require the owner’s daily presence, founders may become locked into their businesses. “I’m always running, running, running,” complains one entrepreneur, whose business earns him half a million dollars per year. I would like to sell the business, but who wants to buy a company with no infrastructure or employees?”.

2. Can I accept those risks and sacrifices?
Entrepreneurs must reconcile what they want with what they are willing to risk. To set meaningful goals, entrepreneurs must reconcile what they want with what they are willing to risk. Entrepreneurs would do well to follow Alsop’s example by thinking explicitly about what they are and are not willing to risk. When entrepreneurs have aligned their personal and their business goals, they must then make sure that they have the right strategy. Many entrepreneurs start businesses to seize short-term opportunities without thinking about long-term strategy. Successful entrepreneurs, however, soon make the transition from a tactical to a strategic orientation so that they can begin to build crucial capabilities and resources.

3. Is the strategy well defined?
A company’s strategy will fail all other tests if it doesn’t provide a clear direction for the enterprise. Even solo entrepreneurs can benefit from a defined strategy. An entrepreneur who wants to build a sustainable company must formulate a bolder and more explicit strategy. The strategy should integrate the entrepreneur’s aspirations with specific long-term policies about the needs the company will serve, its geographic reach, its technological capabilities, and other strategic considerations. To help attract people and resources, the strategy must embody the entrepreneur’s vision of where the company is going instead of where it is. The strategy must also provide a framework for making the decisions and setting the policies that will take the company there. A new company’s strategy must embody the founder’s vision of where the company is going, not where it is. The strategy articulated by the founders of Sun Microsystems, for instance, helped them make smart decisions as they developed the company. They must also preclude activities and investments that, although they seem attractive, would deplete the company’s resources. A strategy that is so broadly stated that it permits a company to do anything is tantamount to no strategy at all. Defining the venture as a high-performance outdoor-gear company provides a much more useful focus. Once entrepreneurs have formulated clear strategies, they must determine whether those strategies will allow the ventures to be profitable and to grow to a desirable size.

3. Can the strategy generate sufficient profits and growth?
When a new venture is faltering, entrepreneurs must address basic economic issues. For instance, many people are attracted to personal service businesses, such as laundries and tax-preparation services, because they can start and operate those businesses just by working hard. But the factors that make it easy for entrepreneurs to launch such businesses often prevent them from attaining their long-term goals. Businesses based on an entrepreneur’s willingness to work hard usually confront other equally determined competitors. Furthermore, it is difficult to make such companies large enough to support employees and infrastructure. Besides, if employees can do what the founder does, they have little incentive to stay with the venture. Founders of such companies often cannot have the lifestyle they want, no matter how talented they are. Entrepreneurs who are stuck in ventures that are unprofitable and cannot grow satisfactorily must take radical action. One alternative to radical action is to stick with the failing venture and hope for the big order that’s just around the corner or the greater fool who will buy the business.

4. Is the strategy sustainable?
The next issue entrepreneurs must confront is whether their strategies can serve the enterprise over the long term. They have to abandon the me-too approach in favor of a new, more durable business model. Or they may be able to sell their high-growth businesses for handsome prices in spite of the dubious long-term prospects. The company developed one of the first stand-alone word processors, and as the market for the machines exploded, Vydec rocketed to $90 million in revenues in its sixth year, with nearly 1,000 employees in the United States and Europe. They happily accepted an offer from Exxon to buy the company for more than $100 million. Entrepreneurs in rapidly growing companies often don’t consider exit strategies seriously. Encouraged by short-term success, they continue to reinvest profits in unsustainable businesses until all they have left is memories of better days. Entrepreneurs who start ventures not by catching a wave but by creating their own wave face a different set of challenges in crafting a sustainable strategy. Cash-strapped entrepreneurs usually focus first on building and exploiting a few sources of uniqueness and use standard, readily available elements in the rest of the business. For instance, competitors can easily knock off an entrepreneur’s innovative product. A business with an attractive product line, well-integrated manufacturing and logistics, close relationships with distributors, a culture of responsiveness to customers, and the capability to produce a continuing stream of product innovations is not easy to copy. It is easy to knock off an innovative product, but an innovative business system is much harder to replicate. Entrepreneurs who build desirable franchises must quickly find ways to broaden their competitive capabilities. Intuit realized, however, that competitors could also make their products easy to use, so the company took advantage of its early lead to invest in a variety of strengths. Intuit enhanced its position with distributors by introducing a family of products for small businesses, including QuickBooks, an accounting program. It brought sophisticated marketing techniques to an industry that “viewed customer calls as interruptions to the sacred art of programming,” according to the company’s founder and chairman, Scott Cook.

5. Are my goals for growth too conservative or too aggressive?
After defining or redefining the business and verifying its basic soundness, an entrepreneur should determine whether plans for its growth are appropriate. Setting the right pace is as important to a young business as it is to a novice bicyclist.
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath