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Consider enlisting a business consulting service through Venture Plans to make your company’s growth a reality.

Consumer Products

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Arleo Dordar

Arleo Dordar

Partner, LA

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Founder’s Journey to Capital

Are you a founder seeking capital investment in the near or long term? Consider enlisting a business consulting service through Venture Plans to make your company’s growth a reality.

It’s a good time to be a founder. In 2020 we saw U.S. startups raising a record level of investment, with a strong IPO market and record amounts poured into venture capital (VC) firms for investment. Startups that had successful investment rounds include Zenoti (building enterprise software for salons, spas, yoga studios), with an enviable Series D raise of more than $160 million and valuation of more than $1 billion, Stackline (an e-commerce intelligence platform), which raised $50 million from Goldman Sachs Growth Equity amidst booming e-commerce sales, and AbSci (synthetic biology startup expanding ‘Protein Printing’ tech), which has raised $100 million to date.

Why Hire a Senior Financial Business Consultant?

It’s unlikely that these companies raised such large amounts of capital on their own. Raising capital is an extremely involved and complex process, with many steps before, during, and after that require careful planning, review, and due diligence. Missteps can result in anything from the disappointment of not passing investor’s muster because of lack of polish, to soured deals, bankruptcy, or even lawsuits from investors or the SEC.

Hiring a business consultant for strategy and business plans is like hiring a team of six people with years of experience in combined positions – all in one consultant. Consultants often have experience with senior-level marketing and financial advisory and are often experienced CEOs themselves, with a history of successful exits. Consultants are able to offer turnkey solutions to revenue growth, raising capital, sustainability plans, and trade secrets that can boost enterprise-level corporations as well as small and mid-sized companies.

With such high stakes, it’s likely that these and other founders relied on outside advice in preparing their companies for investor scrutiny, structuring their deals, or in compiling the necessary legal and financial documents to do business. When busy founders are rightfully focused on running their company, business consultants can play a critical role behind the scenes to ensure that the company has done the necessary prep work to a) raise capital and b) keep that capital clear of regulatory or other hurdles, and eventually deliver great value. Prolonged capital raises are actually damaging to operations and valuations, so having airtight business plans and certification before beginning is key.

Outside consultants offer deep expertise in specific processes that are key to a business's financial success but are unrelated to the company’s core mission and thus may be outside of the skill set of founders or their full-time employees. Consultants also provide a fresh perspective on the company and its operations, offering objective advice on a company’s business plan, internal structure, marketing materials, or even its basic value proposition. They also have the benefit of being contracted to work on discrete projects, with clear upfront costs and terminability. The cherry on top is that business consultants like those at Venture Plans often have large networks of other founders and investors who can be tapped for support or for a second look at the project.

What Types of Services Should You Look For?

Helpful consulting services commonly include the writing or review of business plans, drafting of legal documents and other legal consulting via a licensed attorney, preparation of financing documents such as budget and projected annual costs/profits, and growth timeline.

Other common services relate to the certification process, which any competent individual investor or VC firm will insist on before making a capital commitment and which must be conducted through a FINRA registered broker. This includes filing necessary forms for capital-raising activities, as well as registration of the company’s stock certificate and filing of annual reports with the Secretary of State where your company is incorporated. Consultants will also conduct thorough due diligence for every aspect of a business, including tax, liability, outstanding debt, accounting, and upcoming growth due diligence.

In a unique value addition, Venture Plans also offers digital consulting. Digital consulting involves evaluating a company’s digital needs and opportunities to incorporate more advanced digital tools into their operations. For example, a digital consultant can help with data analytics implementation, custom software design and build, automation of services through artificial intelligence, custom application development, product prototypes, or backlog feature implementation. These updates are increasingly common across industries and save companies money and time while improving the quality of their services and customer experience.

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April 10, 2023 | 20 min read

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Talking Numbers: Costs to Expect for Standard Services

Business consulting services are not cheap, so if you are still debating whether you want to go all-in on your company, or if you have enough free time to do the legwork to prepare such fundamental documents yourself, you may want to hold off. But if you are short on time, are serious about your startup, and are ready to take the next step, you should strongly consider working with a (vetted and trustworthy) business consultant or consulting firm.

It’s key to understand that, like anything of value, consulting services aren’t free - and they shouldn’t be. If a company or individual is offering you assistance free of charge, you have reason to be skeptical. Depending on the types of services your company needs, and the extent of work that will be carried out by you versus the consultant, retainers can range widely.

But the initial spend on these services will likely pay itself off. A competent business consultant will help ensure that your company, and your team, is adequately prepared to put its best foot forward to investors and secure the investment it deserves. And if you don’t have a clear and convincing business plan, orderly financials, and the necessary legal and financial documents ready to go, it will be difficult if not impossible to convince an investor to gamble their hard-earned cash on your company. Finally, dotting i’s and crossing t’s before your initial capital-raising activities increases the likelihood of avoiding pitfalls down the line, such as poorly thought-out long-term growth plans, bad books and lawsuits, or messy financials that can hold back a future merger or acquisition.

Business Plans

Companies are often more than meets the eye, and while founders may think they have a “simple” business, once consultants get into the weeds and explore details, it often becomes clear that it’s complex.

With a business plan consultant, expect a smooth and comprehensive experience from start to finish. Consultants are like six employees in one – experienced professionals, often former CEOs, who have led company restructures and bring serious management and financial skills to the table. They can identify turnkey solutions to operational problems, growth challenges, and long and short-term financial forecasting for your company. The final product will be a business plan that is reliable, built for growth, appealing to investors, and uniquely yours.

Certification and Financing

In order to certify a company to raise capital through private placement, a private equity round, or through a merger or acquisition, consultants must conduct a thorough review of the company from top to bottom and prepare certain filings for the government. For instance, a business consultant must backtrack through months or years of the company’s financial records, crunch some serious numbers, and analyze and present this information in harmony with the company’s future goals. They’ll also fix irregularities, anomalies, holes, and other bugs they come across. This process takes two to six months and may spur other auxiliary fixes.

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Typical startup legal services can include preparation of Form C offering Statement, drafting of private placement memorandum, structuring of securities purchases, review of materials posted on the funding portal for legal accuracy, the creation and filing of stock certificates, filing for patents, trademarks, and copyrights, preparing subscription agreements, drafting of employee and vendor contracts, as well as ancillary agreements, merger and acquisition advising, post-closing assistance, and more.

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OUR CLIENT WORDS

See how we’ve helped our clients achieve their business goals.

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Venture plans wrote an outstanding business plan creating an operation model, and marketing strategy on how to scale our multi chain coffee shop in Century City Los Angeles.

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Jack K. - Boulon D' Amour

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Working with Arleo has been an exciting journey! His driven mindset and passionate pursuit of a innovative fitness solution for trainers is second to none. Despite his life long experience in the sports training and fitness industry, he is always eager to learn and improve with everyone while maintaining constructive leadership.

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They are experienced in cognitive computing, automation, ICO, big data, and artificial intelligence.

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About Us

At Venture Plans, our mission is to help companies across all sectors transform and grow sustainably. We bring a sophisticated team of industry-specific consultants with deep expertise in financial and legal advisory and digital innovation directly to you. Our executive-level consultants are Ivy League-trained and results-oriented. We enable the best possible outcomes through value-based methodologies that succinctly capture the maximum value of your principals, intellectual property, business performance, markets, and outlook.

At Venture Plans, we support high-tech firms with an emphasis on growth, marketing, and go-to-market strategy that engages financial institutions and private equity. We encourage our clients to avoid cookie-cutter strategic planning. Instead, we provide a tailored strategy precisely crafted to meet your individual needs. Venture Plans has helped our clients thrive in an array of spaces including hospitality, real estate, SaaS & technology, professional services, health care, cannabis, and more. Our firm has access to industry-leading tools, databases, and analysis software which enables us to provide market research data that is accurate and updated in real-time. Using our bench of experts, marketing best practices, and data-backed insights, we can help shape your business strategies and digitally transform your operations to accelerate top-line growth.

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Trustworthy Consulting

Venture Plans provides founders with excellent business services in a variety of areas. Venture Plans founder Arleo Dordar has expertise in startups and can carefully guide founders down the exciting path to successfully raising capital and igniting growth. His extensive experience includes helping to scale, structure, organize, and create sustainability plans for 4500+ companies in over 150 industries globally that have resulted in over $350 million in investments. Arleo has also worked with companies on restructuring strategy, project management plans, revenue growth implementation, execution, financing, automation, and digital transformation.

As any founder knows, it’s key to look down the pipe and anticipate upcoming trends in the market. Through gathering and analyzing big data, Arleo helps companies understand these trends and act proactively on insights, recommendations, and financial forecasting. The Venture Plan team helps founders make smart improvements based on qualitative and quantitative metrics. Arleo and the Venture Plans team pride themselves on their ability to engage in top-level discussions with startups and small and mid-size companies, and they use the information gathered in these meetings to increase each company’s operational efficiency, sales, marketing and branding in order to reach financing objectives. The team helps founders and companies get #ReadyToRaise.

As any founder knows, it’s key to look down the pipe and anticipate upcoming trends in the market. Through gathering and analyzing big data, Arleo helps companies understand these trends and act proactively on insights, recommendations, and financial forecasting. The Venture Plan team helps founders make smart improvements based on qualitative and quantitative metrics. Arleo and the Venture Plans team pride themselves on their ability to engage in top-level discussions with startups and small and mid-size companies, and they use the information gathered in these meetings to increase each company’s operational efficiency, sales, marketing and branding in order to reach financing objectives. The team helps founders and companies get #ReadyToRaise.

Sample Title

As any founder knows, it’s key to look down the pipe and anticipate upcoming trends in the market. Through gathering and analyzing big data, Arleo helps companies understand these trends and act proactively on insights, recommendations, and financial forecasting. The Venture Plan team helps founders make smart improvements based on qualitative and quantitative metrics. Arleo and the Venture Plans team pride themselves on their ability to engage in top-level discussions with startups and small and mid-size companies, and they use the information gathered in these meetings to increase each company’s operational efficiency, sales, marketing and branding in order to reach financing objectives. The team helps founders and companies get #ReadyToRaise.

Sample Title

As any founder knows, it’s key to look down the pipe and anticipate upcoming trends in the market. Through gathering and analyzing big data, Arleo helps companies understand these trends and act proactively on insights, recommendations, and financial forecasting. The Venture Plan team helps founders make smart improvements based on qualitative and quantitative metrics. Arleo and the Venture Plans team pride themselves on their ability to engage in top-level discussions with startups and small and mid-size companies, and they use the information gathered in these meetings to increase each company’s operational efficiency, sales, marketing and branding in order to reach financing objectives. The team helps founders and companies get #ReadyToRaise.

Sample Title

As any founder knows, it’s key to look down the pipe and anticipate upcoming trends in the market. Through gathering and analyzing big data, Arleo helps companies understand these trends and act proactively on insights, recommendations, and financial forecasting. The Venture Plan team helps founders make smart improvements based on qualitative and quantitative metrics. Arleo and the Venture Plans team pride themselves on their ability to engage in top-level discussions with startups and small and mid-size companies, and they use the information gathered in these meetings to increase each company’s operational efficiency, sales, marketing and branding in order to reach financing objectives. The team helps founders and companies get #ReadyToRaise.

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