My Business Plan

I was looking over my entire composting facility yesterday and thinking it over and I realized there was one glaring thing drastically wrong. I have to have a business plan. Every business out there has to have a business plan in order to succeed big or small, including my composting business. While I did write one a long time ago, it did not seriously examine my market, and it did not seriously examine my break-even point in realistic terms, and it did not give enough details on how to make breaking even happen. Furthermore, updates I needed to make on it did not happen. After coming up with some calculations, which you can see below, I found, furthermore something even more disturbing, the real cost of producing and selling worm castings if I were to factor in the time it takes now to make them, and the cost of selling on an open market stand. I would have to sell at $26/pound in order to break even on my costs, and make some sort of "profit." I'm still selling at my $2/pound because that's the price my competitors sell at. Obviously, $26/pound is ridiculously high and needs to change. That's what made me realize how vitally important a comprehensive, 20 page business plan is. This has even made me stall on writing about the types of methane digestion facilities. After all, what's the point of expanding to such heights when I don't even have an exact plan on how to make composting happen on a small scale. That's not to say that things can or shouldn't change after writing the plan, but something that puts all the ideas together into a readable, concise format is vitally important.

My goal is to bring this cost down to $10 a pound by December 15, 2011. How exactly that will be done is going to be what my 20 page business plan is about. That business plan will appear online... hopefully tomorrow. That's my goal! :)

Cost of compost per pound under current conditions

Packaging labels	~0.10/lb
Salvaging packaging	~0.10/lb
Time ~6 hrs/wk (transportation, shredding paper, pulverizing food waste, supervising bin) @ 52 wks/yr=(312 hrs/yr) $8/hr/ ~150 lbs finished compost/yr	~16.64/ lb
Harvesting castings ~ 3 min/1 lb $8/hr $8/20 lbs	~0.40/lb
Selling in a booth outside Home Depot etc. $150/day	$3/lb
Transportation of stuff/setting up 6 hours/day 3 days to sell compost (6 hrsX3= 18hrsX $8/150 lbs)	$0.96/lb
Selling at booth 8 hours/day 3 days to sell compost 24 hoursX $8=$192 192/150lbs=	$1.28/lb
Total costs per package	$22.48/lb
Fixed costs needed to pay off	~$1/lb
Needed for any profits/proceeds	$26/lb