Good example of why boston research paper

#211905869 – Expanding Your Business

Boston will make a great location for our second store for the following reasons. The city has a very rich history both technologically and education-wise. This meets the vision of our business which is to sell rare books both online and offline. This is the case for the following reasons. To begin with, the city of Boston is home to over 50 highly acclaimed colleges and universities including Ivy League universities Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition to this, Massachusetts in general is home to some of the best performing public schools.
This will be advantageous to the business in two key ways; first in terms of a market base for our books. Our core business is the sale of rare books and in addition to corporate and individual clientele, students constitute a majority of our client bases. In addition, having a store in city with as many schools as Boston will enable us to cut down on our inventory costs effectively eliminating resources spent in shipping paperback books to our clients in the area from our New York warehouse. Secondly in terms of meeting our personnel needs. We mentioned earlier that the business recognizes the availability of talent in colleges hence it will create an internship and mentorship program. Through this program, the company will hire 3-6 interns who will be trained then retained as employees after 6 months from the many Boston based colleges and universities. In addition to this, our mentorship program will enable us to give back to the community through this initiative offering opportunities and guidance to graduates.
Boston also provides for an ideal environment for incubating technological start-up. The city has rich technological history that spans four centuries and consequently is home to the famed Route 128. Such an environment is known to be conducive for technological startups because it is pro innovation. Innovation in the city of Boston is driven by the close knit relationship among entrepreneurs, academia, the public and the private sector players. This environment will also enable to have access to debt funding which is one of the ways we resorted to capitalize our business.

Plan for Securing Debt Financing Sources

During this expansion phase of our business our main capitalization strategy will be through debt financing. We will identify an appropriate lending institution most preferably a bank to finance the rollout of our Boston store. Debt financing as a source of capitalization was reached at because none of the shareholders was willing to part with their stock for the purposes of equity financing. To this effect, the plan for securing the repayable debt will be as follows.
First as earlier mentioned, we will have to identify an appropriate lending institution. Some of the factors that we will use to hinge our decision of selecting a lending institution will include favorable interest rates and flexible repayment period, belief in our vision and the availability of investment advisors to help us understand and navigate the Boston business environment. The loan facility we will secure will be on a long-term basis to give the store enough time to takeoff and spread the repayment in manageable instalments.
Secondly, after selecting an ideal lending institution we will rely on the financial history of our New York outfit to secure the loan. The fact that the store has been existence for a couple of years and has audited financial records will come in handy. Our financial history will first of all justify the viability of our business model. This is not the first time we are venturing in the sale of books both online and offline as indicated by our financial history. This will play a big role in boosting the lending institution’s confidence in us and our ability to repay the loan.
Third, we will enlist the services of a credit bureau to construct our individual credit history as partners as well as our collective history as an outfit. This would be for the purposes of ensuring that we have good credit history that will ultimately increase our chances of securing debt. We will therefore attach our credit history to the loan application forms. In addition to this, we will also seek letters of recommendations from our former lending institutions from New York to further establish credibility of borrowing history and our credit worthiness.
Finally, for the purposes of securing the debt financing, it will be required of shareholders to either provide some form of collateral for the loan or to put some equity financing up to the tune of 10% of the total cost of rolling out our second store in Boston. Having some form equity financing for the expansion will ensure that our business is at synchrony as far as the equity to debt ratio is concerned. In addition, the availability of collateral for our loan will serve to ensure that the lending institution is convinced of our capacity to repay the loan which will in turn win us favorable repayment terms.

Our Guerilla Marketing Strategy

We will resort on social media as our guerilla marketing strategy to roll out and to market our Boston bookstore. This decision was informed by the fact that in addition to already having some experience in digital matters, of all options available social media presents the most pocket friendly option. Our social media guerilla marketing strategy will be as follows.
We will begin by branding. This will include setting up the basic social media channels such as a website and popular social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. It is currently estimated that FaceBook has over 1. 15 billion users while Twitter and Google+ have 500 million profiles. This presents a great opportunity for our business as it seeks to grow beyond its current geographical location. Since we already have an ecommerce website thanks to New York bookstore, we will not need to build another one for the Boston outfit. Instead because our product offering will be pretty similar, we will use the same website but include a geo-tagging feature so that our New York and Boston clientele can access what is relevant to their purchasing habits.
Secondly, we will dedicate some of the resources we would have used to develop the website to set up a corporate blog for our bookstore. It must be mentioned that though the focus will be on the Boston bookstore roll out and marketing, the blog will be used from time to time to push our New York interests too. Our blog of choice will be hosted by Blogger for the purposes of search engine optimization on Google which is the world’s largest search engine. Having a blog will also enable us to collect email addresses for our database for the purposes of email marketing as well as distributing our newsletter.
The core purpose of the blog will be to market the authors whose books we stock both online and in our physical store. This will be accomplished through interviewing the authors of the books we are selling and showcasing their story on our blog to allow our potential customers to connect with them on a platform they are most comfortable with. In addition to this, we will have a section on the blog purely dedicated to book reviews from acclaimed reviewers on a weekly basis. We will also get book bloggers to review our select book offerings on their personal blogs to increase our market penetration.
Finally, we will use the power of Facebook and Twitter to push traffic towards our corporate blog and ecommerce site. We will have an average of ten tweets per day on our Twitter handle and three posts a day on our Facebook fan page. In addition to pushing traffic, we will use our social networks to engage with industry opinion shapers on social to increase our visibility as a brand and to build credibility and trust about our product offering. To achieve this, we will have to do rely on both organic content and paid for social media advertisement especially on Facebook. We will run online campaigns on Twitter and Facebook that will give our clients an opportunity to win fantastic prizes from the store. We will host some of our fans for an online trivia and use the opportunity to promote reading among our fans.
We will also send our text messages to the client on our database on a regular basis. We will send them notifications about our enticing offers on new products at the store. Whenever we host fairs or book readings, we will draw our audience to these events via text messages.
Given that the store will be located in an area that has a high population of young people, it is best to assume that most of them have smart phones. Blue tooth proximity marketing is one of the latest marketing methods that involves getting people to download promotional and marketing materials if they fall within a company’s blue tooth range. This direct method of marketing will used during the launch of the book store and major book reading. It is expected that this build the company’s reputation considerably.

Financial Plan

Expansion Capitalization
Cash Flow Projections

References

Kawasaki, G. (2013). Guerrilla Marketing for Authors (and Marketers). Retrieved November 28, 2014, from https://www. outmarket. com/guerrilla-marketing-for-authors-and-marketers/
U. S. Small Business Administration. (2014). Borrowing Money for Your Business. Retrieved November 29, 2014, from https://www. sba. gov/content/borrowing-money
Wilson, J. C., & Gibson, S. (2010). Guerrilla Social Media Marketing: 100+ Weapons to Grow Your Online Influence, Attract Customers, and Drive Profits (Guerrilla Marketing). Enterpreneur press.