Business Plan


Before we get to Face Book for business, Global commodity distribution, financial and CRM software, bank and big business integration I will focus this business plan simply on phase 1, money generated from business to business bookings in the mid to high end boutique travel industry. When this is achieved the rest will follow.

I have created a detailed spreadsheet that tracks the first 30 months of business and factors profit to 60 Months

Investment needed. $3M
Profitable in 13 months.
Month 30 $5,000,000 profit
Month 48 $65,000,000 profit
Month 60 $150,000,000 profit

This is a low forecast, Expenses are higher than necessary to allow research and expansion in other sectors and profits are lower that I expect for the sake of caution, as will be illustrated soon.

Before I get into specifics I’d like you to consider Amex, merchants pay Amex about 3.5% every time they make a sale. Like Amex, Sienna will have many merchants that pay about 10% each time they provide goods or accommodation to their clients
 
The basics of what we are doing are finding areas where travel companies have client interest but no website presence and little experience.

Once we have identified a suitable company we offer to expand their website to offer a comprehensive selection of venues and peripherals at discounted rates for them to offer to their clients.

Whist we are targeting tour operators not travel agents an example you may equate to would be to for us to add a South American section to the Virgin Holidays website, under the presumption that some virgin clients would be interested in going to Rio for instance.

Now I’m sure there’s a list of reasons why this would not appeal to Virgin Holidays but to Tour operators that do not have $100,000’s of dollars to spend on the research, development and representation, the concept has seen a 100% approval rate from our polls in the industry.

At a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars I have developed this concept made the demo, the concept works, now we need to make the real thing, this will take about 5 months, then we will start linking to websites.

With a five months heads up, our team of reps will generate a queue of interested companies. Once linked these companies will make online bookings,  get direct enquiries, or will include there new venues or flights in multi leg holidays, either way each time a booking is made we get paid, a lot... on average 10% of the value of the entire booking.

So how many extra bookings will these companies make each year? How did I reach the figure that is the pillar of the expected $150,000,000 5 year return? A hundred, a thousand maybe, well actually for the sake of caution I have estimated only 3 holiday bookings a year!

At the begging of the 2009/2010 South African holiday season I instructed my Cape Villas sales staff simply to ask their clients if they would also like to book a Game Lodge. Three clients said yes and we made about $10,000 each, we found when we booked them the game lodge we also booked their connecting flights and connecting hotels, instead of just accommodation provider we became a full tour operator. This was achieved without any web presence or experience.

It goes to pass that surely if we had a large web presence we would have done better, our website visitors would enquire directly for new offerings, and our existing clients will consider us more experienced and knowledgeable.

Cape Villas is not a big company, barley turning $500,000 a year. In the immediate catchment group of companies we would like to integrate with there must be at least 5,000 that make greater turnover, many a far greater turnover, and this does not account for big business.

Given the tools Sienna provides to think these companies would not equal Cape Villas 09/10 performance seems ridiculous and I’m sure it is, they will do better for sure, some much better.... but for the sake of under promising and over delivering this  is the figure I have used.

Just to clarify, we are not relying on these companies making safari holiday bookings; this is just the working demo that we have created. Given, our data in putters, researchers, consultants, a GDS feed and data contributing affiliates we will quickly have a concise global portfolio.

Example, by tacking Sienna’s feed an Ibiza based villa rental company could now offer Ibiza hotels, flights and Car Hire and a comprehensive presence in Majorca, Tenerife and Spain.

I hope I have made my point, and I hope you feel that my baseline per company earnings figure of $30,000 a year is easily achievable. If you do then this should be a no brainer, the rest of the math is sound. The only question you should be asking is “how seriously do we take this” with 300 Virgin companies, many worth billions $150,000,000 is a mere pittance, a drop in the ocean.
Read the rest of my proposal and I hope you can believe, as I do that the mid to high end boutique tour operator market is only a 100th maybe just a 1000th of Sienna’s potential, and that’s a lot of money, an evolution in economics even, so please I’d appreciate Virgins full attention.
 
Would more money and a team of Virgin’s best and brightest speed things up, sure it will and of course I’d like that but good management and HR aside, I can do this for $3M
 

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