One of the things that seems to frustrate most new
businesses, especially nonprofits, is the "imaginary budget," also
known as the projected budget, an exercise required by most lenders and
grantors.
Of all the sections of a business or strategic plan, this is
the most one often ignored or done badly.
Having looked at too many start-up budgets to count, I find
that most people tend to pick a desired revenue number and make the budget
arbitrarily fit that figure.
I see a lot of grant requests from new nonprofits that
begin "We need $1.3 million dollars this year to accomplish our goals." In reality,
that's what they will need a few years down the road, not now.
That leads to things like allowances for a $20,000 website,
$1 million buildings and marketing budgets that would be the envy of a lot of
Fortune 1000 companies.
Budgets like this turn off donors, grantors and bankers.
They advertise that the person or organization hasn't done their due diligence,
or that they have no concept of financial development and management.
That's a bad place for you to start.
A beginning budget isn't going to look anything like your
eventual goal.
You have to start with where you are, not where you want to
be in the future, and then build up to your desired goal.
Let's inject a modicum of realism into the process.
Let's take the $20,000 website. There is no doubt that you
can sink that much money into developing a website, but do you really need it
in your first year? I would submit that given all the hosting companies that
want to capture your business, you can probably get one that will suffice for
the first year or two free or nearly free, and many of them don't require any
coding knowledge at all. Even if you
need to process payments or donations at the start, most of the major players
offer e-commerce packages for under $50.00 a month, sometimes substantially
under.
Investors and supporters know that too, so your line item of
$20K for a website simply tells them that you won't be spending that money on
your core business or program.
Good budgets start with realistic planning. You may
eventually want to feed 10,000 hungry people or sell 100,000 handbags, but you
aren't going to do it today, next week, or this year.
Take the time to find out what things actually cost. I well remember getting a budget for a
charity wanting to provide a safe after-school environment that allowed $10/day
for a single snack for each child. A quick check of the national averages
showed that the range was from $.60 to $1.50/day, making it impossible for me
to sell the $10 snack to any grantor.
Your dream may be to have a 20-room building for sheltering
domestic violence victims, but you may have to budget for vouchers at a motel
in the beginning.
The other side of any budget is the revenue side, and your
base revenue target is dependent on your break-even cost.
If your initial costs are out of line, then your revenue
target will also be out of line.
I once got a request to construct an investor-grade proposal
from someone with one of those ideas to manufacture something that makes you
say "Wow! Why hasn't anybody thought of this before?"
The marketing and manufacturing process side of the proposal
was well done, but when it came to manufacturing costs the client had made some
very unrealistic assumptions. That resulted in his costs of manufacture being
some 2.5 times higher than he could cover with his targeted selling price.
That impacted the whole proposal. Now instead of a product with a cost that was
easily manageable by almost anyone, his target market shrank to upper-middle
class and above customers, shrinking his projected sales figures and thus his
revenues, by more than half.
If you don't know how to fact-check costs, or simply don't
have the patience to do it, hire someone that can do it for you.
In conclusion, budgets aren't sexy or inspiring, but doing
them right will pay off big in the long run. The first thing you need to sell is yourself or your organization, and good budgets make good first impressions.
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