Farm and Food Business & Marketing Plan Series

In any farm and food business, there are a myriad of decisions to make and strategies to market your products, and it is not straight forward. If you are interested in obtaining outside funding, providing a complete business plan is essential to gain lenders confidence in your ability to achieve what you set out to do. Financial Projections and a thorough Marking Plan can be challenged to develop without a background in these skills. Though this series, participants will learn how to write a completed Business Plan and Marketing Plan and have the option for it to be reviewed by the instructors with feedback. Students who take advantage of this opportunity can come out of the series of workshops with a Business Plan ready to submit to Funders. (Banks, Institutions, Grants) Part 1 - Writing Your Business Plan In this court you will review the structure of a business plan and provided with an outline binder to assist you in writing your business plan. This class will cover the narrative section of your business plan. This session will move quickly, so be prepared to write notes and phrases to develop into sentences and paragraphs between classes. Part 2 - Writing Your Business Plan After completing your narrative, this course will move on to your financial statement projections, including a one-year sales forecast, a 12-month and 3-year cash flow, and a personnel schedule. You will learn how to produce the three main financial position statements, Profit and Loss, Balance sheet and Cash Flow, and review general Good Accounting Practices. Bring any previous sales data and market cost analysis with you for this course discussion. Part 3 - Writing Your Marketing Plan This session will help you create a marketing plan that fits perfectly within your overall business plan. The course will review how to properly brand your farming business to appeal to your best audience, website design that will attract your ideal client, how to use social media for maximum exposure, how to preform research for the best ways to promote your farming products and services, how to identify what your customers want, so that you can give it to them easier and faster, and how to find hidden assets within your organization to fund your marketing and advertising strategies Each session is two-hours and builds off of the previous lesson in this series. Our facilitators are Charlene Finerty, of Plans and Profits, LLC (Part 1 & 2) and Edison Guzman, CEO of Prosperity Marketing, LLC, (Part 3) Each session will break down important elements of your business to assist you in creating a thorough and complete business plan that is ready to submit for funding, or simply run a successful enterprise.