How Do I Start a Tea Business Plan
How do I start a business plan? Welcome to marketing food online. It is Damian. And in this video, I'm going to walk you through the eight steps to creating a master T business plan, the ultimate tea business plan tutorial. I'm going to walk you through the eight sections of a business plan for your tea business. Now keep in mind that I highly recommend you open an online tea business instead of a brick and mortar one. And I'll get to that a little bit later in the video as to why, but let's dive into these eight specific steps and get started right now.
All right. So, welcome back to marketing food online in this video. As I mentioned in the introduction, guys, I'm going to break down for you all of the steps that are needed for a great business plan for your tea business. The sale of tea online is skyrocketing and is not going to slow down anytime soon. So if you're looking to create an online tea business, then these eight steps are going to help you tremendously. Now, keep in mind, why are you writing a business plan? Over 12 years ago, when I started my food entrepreneurship with my wife, we actually sat down and wrote a business plan. After opening a business, we had a brick and mortar Italian bakery, and I realized that having one before I opened the bakery would probably have been a better decision, but every day is a learning day when you are an entrepreneur.
How Do I Start a Tea Business Plan
So what I learned is that a business plan has a lot of benefits, not only for securing funds and getting investors and people interested in your product and your business, but honestly, for you, for your understanding within your own mind, how are you going to lay out this business and what do I need to do to create it? How much money will I need? What exactly do I want to sell? And so on. So the eight steps are the eight parts to a great tee business planner; one, the executive summary; two, company description; three, your concept and the idea of your T four management and ownership structure. Five Step Five is going to be employees and staffing needs. You're going to need them, whether you're online or even a brick and mortar store. You're going to need employees. Step six, marketing and competitor analysis, and step seven, advertising and marketing, which, of course, even with your online team business, you need to have that as well.
And lastly, step eight is your financials. All right. So step one, your tea business plan's executive summary, So what Damien is is an executive summary. So, in essence, you're going to create a summary, an overview of all of the information that's actually contained in your tea business plan. What this is going to do is allow the investor, the banking institution, or whoever it is that you're looking to get a loan from, or potential investors, who might be angel investors, who want to invest large amounts of money in your business, to get a really good understanding and a grasp overall of the vision you have for your tea business. Now, in order to make a business plan truly effective, you need to honestly have about one to four pages. You don't really want to go too much further than that, because after that, it becomes a book and nobody wants to sit down and spend all day reading your business plan.
How Do I Start a Tea Business Plan
They want to scan through it, see the specifics, and then move on from there. All right. So what is in the executive summary, the number one business concept? What is the concept of your business? Number two is your business mission statement. So what is your company going to be about? Are you going to potentially raise money to even help people in certain communities, or if you're going to donate a certain percentage to a cause or something on top of just running your business, is there going to be a reason? What's the mission for you actually doing this and creating this from scratch? You also want to have a realistic timeline. When do you want to launch your online tee business or your brick and mortar T store? Okay, Now you also want to have your target location and how much the building costs are going to cost. As far as the warehouse, if you're just going to be an online business, fulfilling orders, are you going to be a brick and mortar?
How Do I Start a Tea Business Plan
Well, how much is the rent? And all of that, you want to kind of encompass that too. And of course, later down the line, when we get into the other parts of the business plan, you're going to spell that information out a little bit more in detail. Next up, you want to have a brief market analysis of the T market, understand how it sells online, understand how it may sell within the community or the area region of the country you live in. And you want to also write down what makes your tea business unique. Is there a certain type of tea that you're going to carry? Are you going to do blended tees? Aside from your expected cost, business goals, and financial projections for your tea business, what will make you stand out from the competition?So what are you going to assume that it's going to be made over 6, 10, 12 months, or even two or three years?
What are the expected costs? What do you forecast as far as annual rental renewals of license permits, and everything that's involved with the expected expenses needs to be in that summary executive summary? All right. So what are some tips to making a really effective executive summary? Number one, be to the point, get to the point. You want to make it short and sweet, make sure it encompasses all of the gist, the really fine points of all of the other parts of the business plan, and know who you're presenting your business plan to. Okay, So if you're looking to create a business plan from the perspective of the reader and that happens to be a banking executive or an investor, look at it from their perspective. What are they going to want to see and look at? Okay, Then also, lastly, just be yourself. You want to project your image, you want to project your brand, and what vision do you have?
How Do I Start a Tea Business Plan
Don't try to duplicate other tea businesses or come up with a concept that's already out there because it's going to be kind of boring and redundant and there's nothing new about it. All right. So let's get into the nitty gritty. So part two is your tea business description. So what is your tea business concept? Okay, What makes your tea business unique online? What sort of items will you have when you offer through your website, through Amazon, or through wherever it is that you're going to be selling in the line? Okay, Who is your target audience? Understand who is actually drinking tea. Understand what type of tea they're drinking, understand the demographic as far as age, is it more women or more men, understand these things because that helps you relay that in your business plan. So also, how is your business going to function day to-day?
Okay, Meaning, how are you going to operate it? Do you have an idea of when you're going to open and when you're going to close, when you're going to fulfill orders, when you're going to ship them? The day-to-day logistics of the operation should be understood beforehand. And if you don't know for sure, then try to research it and find out how people fulfill orders online with tea. How do they sell it? When do they market it? How much time do they spend doing that? Number three. So what is your tee business concept, and what tees are you going to offer? So in this section, you want to create something almost like a menu. If you will have a selection of tees, are you going to be doing loose leaf tees? Are you going to be bagging your own tee blends? Are you going to offer loose leaf tea in bulk? Are you going to offer other products such as pots, teapots, kettles, and other things that go along with creating and making tea? Are you going to have mache tea?
How Do I Start a Tea Business Plan
Are you going to do powder teas? What is it exactly that you're going to offer? And what's the concept behind it? That is section three, section four, management and ownership structure. So if you're going to start this endeavor on your own and it happens to be an online team business, which is a great idea, And I recommend you do this because much of it can be done with either yourself as a sole proprietorship or maybe one additional person as a partnership. But you need to spell that out in this section. Let the person who is reading this business plan understand who is going to be running the show. Is it going to be a full staff of people? Is it simply going to be a group of managers or people within the company other than yourself, and also let them know that you are going to be a sole proprietor? Are you going to have a partnership or an LLC?
How Do I Start a Tea Business Plan
Now, the ownership structure when it comes to sole proprietorship is you and you alone, but there are a lot of pluses. And then there are a slew of drawbacks.As a sole proprietor, legally speaking, you personally will be responsible for every decision you make in the business. Partnerships kind of lessen that. You and the other person. And I recommend you create a partnership agreement when you start to have more than one person, because everyone needs to understand what the responsibilities are, financial responsibilities, and anything legal that they're going to be held responsible for. If they're going to be in a partnership with you, partnerships are great, but I would limit them to just two people. When you start, don't complicate it by having numerous people having a stake in the company or ownership in the company. It becomes very, very challenging or is in an LLC.
This is a very simple way to create a limited liability corporation in which the liability is offset. If I were to start a T business online, then I personally wouldn't be held responsible. If somebody sued the business, got sick, or had hospital bills, the LLC itself as a business entity would absorb all of that. Not me personally. All right, then section five. So basically, your employment and your staffing. So your employees: are you going to hire employees? If so, how many do you think you're going to need to get started? If you're going to have a warehouse where you're simply going to warehouse and stockpile a bunch of tea and then sell it online, you're going to need people to pull the product, scan it, and take it out of your inventory. So the system puts it into a box, and all the logistics, as far as a shipping label and shipping the product, everything that goes along with that.
So keep that in mind that under section five, you want to clearly spell out how many people you're going to need to at least get started on the project. Hey, you know what? In six to seven months, we want to look at 10 to 12 employees because we're going to grow by 20%. 30% is what we're expected to do. All of this is going to give you a roadmap to understand how many people you need to hire and the number of employees you will need. All right, section six, part six, market analysis. So when you want to find out who exactly is drinking the tea, you want to find out what the most popular type of tea is. Now there are tons of variations of tea that are out there in the marketplace. What is their income level? What is the target demographic as far as their age and their gender? What part of the country do they live in that they drink the most tea in or certain types of tea that may be drunk in certain types of countries? Different states have different appetites for tea.
What are they drinking? How much money do they typically spend when they're actually assuming tees? These are things that you need to understand when it comes to market analysis and also competitive analysis. What other tee business is out there? Do you understand what they sell and the price points? Can you be competitive with their pricing? Also, understand what kind of quantities they are selling. Do they sell a tremendous amount of what they do in a large amount of business? You have to understand who your competitors are and what the competitive analysis would be when you start to break it down.
Step seven, marketing and advertising strategies, So you need to understand social media. Now you don't have to be a rocket scientist and understand it 100% to the point, but you need to understand how it can impact your sales and the different types of marketing campaigns. You can run on social media, having a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, even Pinterest, as a matter of fact, or even LinkedIn. All of these combined can get you a huge reach in demographics and people who are interested specifically in you. When you do this, be sure to set up these counts before you launch your website. Because if you start your website, you want to make sure that you create some local buzz. You want to create some social media buzz around the product or your website that you're selling the T on, and then launch your actual website with the product.
Okay, So be sure to build up some buzz and have a presence because as you begin to create content and post it on social media, you're going to draw people to your website at that point. And that is the direction you need to go. But keep in mind, if you're not very familiar with social media, Google, some fantastic books that are out there in the marketplace. I'll even have some links down below this video for some marketing books that you can check out on Amazon or even eBay, but it's very simple and easy to implement. You don't have to overthink it or overly it. Social media marketing could be simple. Just understand how it works and then how you can use it to create your business awareness. All right, lastly is step eight, the financial data. This is going to be one of the most important sections within your tee business plan.
Why, because this will encompass all of the information about your finances and such, it's going to give a banker, a lending institution, or a creditor the opportunity to really see how much you're going to need. And how much do you already have when you're starting something like a tee business? You don't need to have an astronomical amount of equipment, believe it or not, nor do you have to have a lot of space to do this, but they're going to want to know how much capital you have on hand and a breakdown of your actual startup costs. How much is that lease? Like if you're renting a place for a commercial kitchen, or if you're renting a commercial facility to fulfill orders for your team business, how much is that lease? How much is the rent, licensing fees, and permits? How much money do you expect your business to spend on a daily or weekly basis on payroll or packaging, on machinery and equipment sales forecasting, based on any previous information that you might have and a list of reoccurring expenses, overhead labor, and the cost of the T itself, and such
So these are the things that you need to have in your financial data information. So be sure that you kind of really brainstorm all of these different parameters and expenses, and then put them down. Now, if you're not really good at or familiar with writing a business plan, and if you're here at the end of the video, check down below. There are actually a few websites that will help you write a business plan. Some of them even have free templates. You can check out that free resource down below as well. So if that wraps up pretty much everything you need to know about writing a business plan, If you have questions about this, or comments, please let us know down below. If you started a business and you have some experience, please do share it with the rest of our subscribers and be sure to subscribe. And I'll see you guys in our next video.