I want to talk about micro production. For background, consumer products over the last 6 decades have largely been built on mass scale, producing as much of it as possible on a mass scale, which drives economies of scale down and drives costs down to serve mass markets. That has worked up until the [...]
I want to do a quick post here on marketing in words and the power of words. For my pet business we've had a newsletter a monthly newsletter for a long time. It's both in digital version and in print version. We've always named it newsletter and it goes out once a month. But [...]
I want to use this post to run through how I encapsulate all key information for a product production run into a Google Sheet. You can use Excel, but I prefer Sheets as it is easier to use when cross-linking, as I explain in this post. You can access the template used in this [...]
The ultimate goal in any company... ...is to acquire AND retain customers where costs to acquire and retain are less than expenses, which leads to profits. Boiled down to this single statement, then the most important variable in the finances is the marketing spend. Even if your other expenses are high or way out of [...]
This post answers this question I received on Quora: Does the manufacturer of robotic kits for kids have a potential to enter markets overseas by offering a 50% discount on MSRP to importers? Will the importer have enough space to markup the price before CE retailers markups his own purchasing price? The answer is unknown [...]
The best way to think about this is a profit and loss statement, starting with revenue at the top and net income at the bottom. A customer flows from the top, acquired through marketing spend, and everything in between to deliver that product to them, with profit left over, and all the key metrics [...]
If you ever plan to take on investment or bring on co-founders, employees, advisors, consultants or partners and you want to share equity with any of these stakeholders, you need to have a capitalization schedule. The cap schedule helps you plan out how the equity in your company gets distributed, to whom, when and at [...]
I have not done any hard core research into the success or growth track of companies following a successful Kickstarter, Indigogo or other crowdfund campaign. But anecdotally, this is what I have observed. And this is definitely what I see in many startups, even ones that do not go the Kickstarter/crowdfund route. Take a look [...]
Tradespend is the amount that a manufacturer/vendor spends to promote a product in-store. Typical in-store promotion vehicles include discounts/coupons and supporting ads in a retailer's circular. However, in the industry, tradespend is the term used to describe all the costs associated with selling to a retailer. Here is a general list of [...]
Working from SRP (Suggested Retail Price) backwards, I see the following for FMCG profit margins: Anchor price/SRP: Start with SRP to your most expensive channel - which represents your top-most anchor price. The markup from you as vendor to retailer is 50-60% to the specialty/top priced retailers. For non-specialty channels - like drug, mass, grocery, club, [...]
