How To Write a Business Plan Part 11 – Your Barriers to Entry Slide Business Podcast
Summary
Part 11 of How to Write Your Business Plan where we build your Barriers to Entry or Moat Slide.
What barriers to entry have you created for your business? What moat do you have? What barriers are you going to create? Also…
I talk about the one barrier entrepreneurs almost always count on as their main moat that can get you in trouble.
We’ve covered your elevator pitch, problem, solution, product, market size, business model, traction, and competition slides for your business plan. Now build your barrier to entry slide.
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A full summary of the How to Build Your Barriers to Entry Slide podcast episode is below
Hello, friends. Welcome to another episode of Build a Business Success Secrets Podcast.
I am your host, Brandon C. White and today we are on part 11 of our series on how to write a business plan in 13 slides.
As a very quick review in part one, we went over the overview of each of the 13 slides.
Part two, we went over your how to elevator pitch and how to build it.
Part three, we did your elevator pitch and talked about the three mistakes to avoid one building it.
In part four, we went over your problem slide.
In part five, we went over your solution slide.
Part six, we talked about your product and how it is the answer, the solution.
In part seven, we went over the market opportunity.
In part eight, we talked about your business model.
In part nine, we talked about your traction and your goals.
In part 10, we talked about your competition and what questions to answer and track about them.
And in part 11 today we’re talking about your moat.
Let’s not waste another second and get to it away right today we’re talking about your moat or your barriers, to entry.
So what barriers to entry or moat do you have?
Let me ask you some questions to start thinking about what they are.
Do you have intellectual property? Do you have capital to protect your intellectual property, even mawr important? Does your industry require certification? That’s a barrier to entry. If so, how long do they take? Do you have them? How long is it going to take you to get them? An example of that is the government.
If you work in the government and you work in a place that require certifications, you can see your competition coming, which allows you to react.
So that’s a barrier to entry. Can you get certifications that separate you from the rest of the people that you are competing with, your with your product or service?
Do you have key distribution partners, which allow you to distribute your product ahead of your competition? Do you have placement in those? If you’re in retail, do you have any cat placement? Do you have line of sight placement? Do you have multiple areas within a retail partner to display and sell your product?
If so, how long are your contracts? Can you extend those contracts to make them longer keeping out your competition from those places. And which ones do you need to get or which ones do you want to get?
What are your goals? Where do you wanna be? Where the top five places that you want to sell your product or service?
SEO search engine optimization. Do you place in the top three in multiple keywords? That is a huge competitive advantage. If your keyword phrase gets 10,000 searches a month and you’re in the top three, you are going to get a significant amount of traffic each month.
That costs you zero. Now it’s not really zero because it takes you time and effort to get there. But once you get there, it’s a lot easier to maintain your spot and you’re gonna get tons of free traffic.
In the first online business that I built, I had about $500,000 worth of SEO traffic coming to me a month for free. That means to get the placements where I was, if you were to pay to be in those top three places, it would cost you on a pay per click basis about $500,000.
So this is a huge barrier to entry.
And if you don’t have it, which ones do you want to get? And carve out that moat from your competition? Because if they’re on page to page three, page four Oh, boy, what a competitive advantage you have.
Are you simply just doing it better? Meaning Do you have superior customer service? Are you servicing your customer better?
Here, let me give an example. I just had an experience with Audimute and they sell products that you put up in your studio or your home office in my case, and it mutes the sound so that the sound for my podcast sounds better.
And I had heard about them on another podcast, and I checked them out and it looked like they had great products and on a section of the site. It said that if you filled out a description of your area and sent a picture that a customer service person would call you back and give you personalized recommendations now, we all know we’ve seen these offers before, but do they really work?
So I put it in and it was on a Saturday and come Monday morning, I get a call from Rick from Audimute, and he gives me incredible recommendations customized to my room based on my picture.
And I could tell he had spent some time understanding what the room was and going through their products and saying, Hey, look, you have a mirror here. That is your sliding closet door. You want to cover that with this canvas that we have, And then on this wall, where you have a white board, you probably wanna cover that.
And you know what? I did not even price competition for their products. This guy, I couldn’t believe it Monday morning. I mean, how often does the promise happen that we see? But people don’t deliver on it, and I get a customized person.
And look, I’m not ordering $20,000 worth of Audimute products. I’m ordering under $1,000 maybe. I forget what my final bill was. I actually kept adding things because Rick was kind enough to get on the phone several times, and I think I wound up getting like, $700 worth of stuff that I need that’s gonna make this sound even better.
But my point is, Audimute is delivering at such a high quality of customer service, and their products do look decent. But he didn’t have to sell me on their functions and features because I could read all of that.
It mutes the disciples and this that and all. They’re all this geek stuff but delivered so well on the experience that I just didn’t even prices because it was it was worth so much to me. What is that worth?
So can you to carve out a moat like Audimute did. Can you do something similar? Can you deliver such a good quality experience for your customer in whatever regard that you pick that it just creates a moat that just so hard for your competition to be?
There’s a quote out there that says, ‘Customers who have an enjoyable experience will never ask how much did it cost’ something to that extent, and that’s the truth.
So that is a a way that you can carve out and moat without even having a ton of money. So let me give you a few other things to think about.
Types of IP that you might have. Do you have a trademark? These would be marks, logos, slogans? You copyright some of your material. That would be if you have software, songs or movies or website contact, trade secrets or even better than no one can reverse engineer them because they’re just a trade secret.
People like Gortex do this. They don’t patent Gortex because then someone could reverse engineer it. Coca Cola, their recipe isn’t a registered trademark where they disclose it. No one’s ever been able to get it right.
Do you have contracts that just keep out the competition because you have some special deal distribution, whatever that is. Manufacturing.
Do you have a patent? Now? I will say one thing on patents Don’t rest on the patent because patents that are important in all of these types of IP are very good things to have. But you need to remember that you may have that patent, but can you protect that patent? Because it could be millions of dollars.
I know a person, a colleague that had an incredible patent. He went head to head with a big company. It lasted seven years. Millions of dollars ruined his life because he just miserable.
So, yes, all that sort of thing is important, But don’t rest on it. Carve it. Carve out yourself a different moat now for your side.
You want to itemize all of these things and not only what you have today, but what you want to go get. And, as importantly, dates by when you want to have this established some places to look if you’re talking about IP and go to the U S. Patent Office at uspto.gov out U S government spends a ton of taxpayer money building this incredible resource is on the USPTO website.
You can do your own searches, configure out how to do that. You actually get some really good ideas. Sometimes I just go in there and search some topics and see what’s out there that gives me ideas.
I’m not copying those things because they’re obviously they’re patent copyright, but they they’ll spark your creative juices, and you get yourself a patent lawyer. Lawyers are always good. Once you get to a place where you want to get that final stage, so figure out what your current moat items are or barriers to entry. And then which ones you’re going to create in the future and put dates deadlines? Or guess what? You will never get there. And at least even if you, you might exceed that date in expectations or you might fall a little bit short. But without that, you have nothing to shoot or so get to work. Build your slide. You can be creative. Try not to put a ton of text if you can put images all the better and get your barrier to entry moat slide built. Well, that wasn’t bad at all, right? Pretty cool. I get excited about that because when you can create barriers to entry that are really hard for your computer to get in, it just gives you this super power to keep you ahead of it. And the one that I really do love the most is you could probably tell is SEO. Because it’s really worked well for me. So something that is feasible for you to dio and doesn’t take a lot of money to make happen in our next part of our Siris. On how to write a business plan we will be going over your financials, and I get super excited because this is really where we start to understand our business. And, as importantly, we get to see how much money we can make. And while we love to solve problems for our customers, we are in business to make money. Otherwise, we’re either have a hobby or we’re building a nonprofit, and that’s not what we’re doing here at Build a business. We are in business to make money and in the financials are going to show us how much money we can make. So get ready for that after you have built your moat or barriers to entry slide.
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Remember, you’re just one business plan away. I am rooting for your success we’ll see you soon.
