Developing an effective but long-run business plan is one of the most common problems that beverage companies need to face. You cannot implement any work regardless of the scale without a detailed plan, and so does running a beverage business. Despite the impossibility of using one particular formula for every business model in the beverage industry, this article will give you a helpful guide to kick off your problem. From all our enthusiasm with long-life industrial experiences, we would like to identify the importance of a beverage company business plan and build up a typical template with easy steps. Moreover, we will also try to clarify a good sample in the beverage industry in order to illustrate its effectiveness.
Now, let’s get started!
Why is the beverage company business plan essential?
Give you a clearer picture of the beverage company
One cannot start a successful beverage business without a sound plan.
By acknowledging the strengths and weaknesses of your business, you can monitor the beverage strategy running in the right direction. In an adequate beverage business plan, you would be required to state three questions below:
- Where are you now?
- What do you want?
- How can you achieve this goal?
The very first step:
Understanding yourself,
Then, identifying your goal and the way to reach it. Thanks to this detailed information, your beverage company must have been ready for any following coming strategies, lying in the identification of development opportunities and positioning.
Be a compelling introduction to your potential investors
Apart from being the internal resource for development, a standard beverage business plan should also satisfy the need of outsiders. To be more specific, a company plan is considered a necessary document for all the stakeholders, particularly the investors.
Because of the importance of doing the correct answer for your homework at school, the business plan is a wise method to express your knowledge about the beverage industry.
In this way, your company can improve the brand’s credibility, giving the reliability for them to cooperate with you. Sincerely, you can position yourself to be a directed business with the potential to progress.
Avoid big mistakes or unexpected problems
According to a Small Business Administration study, more than half of beverage companies go bankrupt and cannot overcome the fifth birthday party. Surprisingly, the main factor resulting in this situation is caused by inappropriate elements in the business plan.
Some typical issues points are:
- Intense rivalry
- No market need
- Lack of money
- Pricing
- Unqualified employees
Thanks to a professional beverage business plan, you will grab the chance to delete these obstacles above actively. Once you have the procedure, you can forecast the unexpected situation and prepare the backup plan.
Be the guiding star for all decisions from lighthearted to serious
Beverage company plans contain many functions and different purposes as well. Meanwhile, the primary role of them is to help the owners make better decisions. Entrepreneurship is constantly coping with making decisions, walking step by step to develop their business both horizontal and vertical.
The beverage company plan allows your company to determine the answer to what should be done first? What is in priority? What are dos, not dos, and what is the emergency among various problems?
Follow these guidelines, you will no longer have the headache of finding the most optimal solution for your beverage development from micro to macro.
The template to create a comprehensive beverage business plan in 7 steps
Planning the beverage company plan is not difficult if you have the available template. Let’s carry out a comprehensive beverage plan with 7 steps below.
Step 1: Executive Summary
In terms of length, the executive summary should be no more than one page. Although it appears on the first page of your beverage business plan, you had better write this section last, after you get the most precise understanding of your beverage business model.
Looking at the details:
It describes the summary of your business idea. They are recommended to consist of your business concepts and business model. Besides, you also need to state your main product lines with their target customer respectively.
As a result, the client of your business plan can obtain a short introduction that contain essential information about your company.
And one more, don’t forget to provide your company overview including location, found year and facilities.
Step 2: Beverage Industry Overview
The industry overview provides you the opportunity to express your knowledge about the beverage business. By getting a summary of your company field and identifying your position in the market, your company can easily find the vacancy to attack and earn more profit.
Apart from many valuable chances, you can acknowledge your threats and weaknesses for some needed modifications.
Step 3: Overview of your beverage business
After completing the beverage industry’s summary, you should continue building your company business plan by clarifying yourself. Investigating the company objectives, future achievements, and SWOT analysis are unmissed parts to identify your current position in the beverage market.
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Business History
This room will deserve the personal story about your beverage business, from start to present. It should be flexible in selecting the worthy information of yours.
If you are a senior in the beverage industry, focusing on experience and case studies is the best idea.
However, it’s not suitable once being a junior.
In this case, you prefer to introduce your enthusiastic team members and their passion for the industry to push up the partner’s truth. Another part is the startup summary, which has a specific number of loans, investments, assets and expenses.
It is no doubt that exploring the beverage company history is the fastest way to gain the first image of one company in terms of development and level of credibility.
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Objectives, mission, and vision
The objective I want to mention here is also called the goal of your beverage business. It should be measurable and specific as much as possible. Remarkably, there are three inevitable categories in a sufficient objective. They are sales revenue, profit margin and net profit together with detailed goal numbers or percentages.
Here, the mission is to inform your customers what your company’s value proposition is and what you bring to your customer.
Last but not least, at this point, the vision statement is also essential. A company cannot move forward without a clarified vision. It will report your aspiration in the future by identifying one particular position in the beverage industry. Becoming top 10 of your region’s most significant beverage business is not an impaired vision after a 10-year running business.
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SWOT analysis
It is a general subjective study about all the internal and external factors that affect the development of your beverage company. Thanks to this research, you can identify your position in the market, focusing not only on growing the available advantages but also on some actions to improve disadvantages.
- Internal factors: strengths and weaknesses
- External factors: opportunities and threats
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Ownership Structure
Your customers and partners will look for some information like this: who is the owner of this beverage business, or Are there any outstanding stakeholders or other people involved? Besides, the impacts of them as well.
Step 4: Beverage Products
From this stage of company business plan templates, it will exploit into deeper about what you publish to the market by giving specific product features. Stating this information can improve the customer’s engagement by understanding your drink and its benefits.
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Product description
This category is the room for describing your beverage product features, and providing the necessary information about your drink. In this way, clients will be aware that your product can solve their problems effectively in the most optimal way. Product description needs to make up the good ingredients, various flavors and multiple benefits of your drink.
As a result, your beverage brings customers closer to the company.
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The competitive advantage of your product
Among a vast number of beverage portfolios, competitive advantage plays a crucial role in retaining and developing your product position in the market. It makes you different and outstanding from others.
To be more specific, your beverage will be published to market at a lower price than your rivals. These factors allow you to improve a productive entity for generating more sales revenue and a superior profit margin.
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Sales Literature
Sale Literature states the method that you intend to use for raising the sales volume. It can be advertising, doing marketing or republic relationships with your customer community. You should be concerned about some common channels: leaflets, flyers, social media, newspapers, or advertising.
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Sourcing
Holding a drink in their hands, the customers must have no idea about manufacturing and other production processes behind them. They’re raising doubt of the beverage’s quality.
To blow out this problem, your company needs to public more information about the sources of your products, illustrating they are clear and original with high quality from the beginning.
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Future product
Once your beverage products have developed to a certain level, building a plan for your drink is necessary to upscale your business. Apart from broadening the market, adding more flavors is another best choice.
For example, if you are distributing fruit juice, why don’t you try to jump into the fruit milk segment, which has the similarity in target customers and product’s characteristics as well.
If preparing carefully for the future, your drink can get higher opportunities to lead the game, be active with the new changes and establish an intense basement for the development of your beverage company.
Step 5: Marketing Strategy
Marketing will capture customers’ attention, raising their awareness of the unique benefits that your beverage brings to them. Therefore, when building the marketing strategy, you are required to describe the detail of your target market segments, your competition and your system with milestones to complete.
Here are some critical topics that unmissed in marketing strategy:
- Target customer profile analysis: identify your customers. Who are they? You can make a typical avatar for each group of clients according to their demographic, geographic, sociological and behavioral basement.
- The positioning strategy: here, you need to make clear the USP (unique selling point) of your beverage and answer the question: Why should they buy your products? Why is it unique?
- Marketing objectives and goals: statement of specific expected results.
- The marketing mix (4P: People, Product, Promotion, Place).
- Promotional plan: bring financial or non-financial gifts for customers.
- Communication planning: internal and external communication with your customers and partners.
- Evaluation and adjustment: look back and take action if needed.
Step 6: Operational Plan
Have you wondered:
“Company business plans are strategic. The operational plan is daily activities. How do they relate to each other?”
The operating plan is simply daily activities to ensure the effective running business, including manufacturing and managing. Thereby, it actually becomes more accessible when following an available plan, which will provide the most transparent picture of how your business works and the involvement of human resources.
- Human Resource Plan: To ensure the effectiveness of daily work, you need resources, and humans are one of the essential elements contributing to your success. The number of employees, their experts and the distribution of what work should be done are the necessary basic needs.
- Supply and Inventory Management: Who are your suppliers? Do you buy the raw materials and produce them by yourself or purchase the market-ready products and deliver them to the final customers? What are the payment terms? Where will you store your product?
- Production and Distribution: You’d better inform the volume and distribution channels with regulations to ensure quality and quantity.
Step 7: Financial Planning
With this part, you need to call for help from an accountant in your beverage company. Financial planning consists of at least three years worth of financial statements, the cash flow, and balance sheet accuracy.
In particular, financial planning tells the clients about the developing situation of your beverage company, seeing the gradual growth, stability or negative earnings. We want to finance growth mainly through cash flow.
We recognized that this means we will have to grow slowly. The most important indicator is to control and minimize inventory that will have to be stored.
Friendly note: Here are seven common steps in building a beverage company business plan. Remember that DO NOT skip any step since each piece is essential. However, you should make some appropriate changes in each stage, focus on your orientation and modify your specific beverage business situation flexibly to gain the best application.
A sample business plan for beverage companies
Are you overwhelmed with the theory?
The best learning method:
“Learning from the practical success of others.”
Now we provide an exceptional case of MK Beverage that has successfully applied to this model. You can get further information from this practical beverage company, learn lessons from them and follow their achievements.
Why do we take MK Beverage as a typical example? They follow strictly their completed beverage company business plan to get outstanding results:
Executive summary example
MK Beverage company, as the name suggests, is running the business in the beverage industry. It was established in 2015 in New Castle, Delaware. The concept behind MK beverage is the stomach surgery of the founder’s youngest son. The biggest problem here is that he is a great fan of sweet drinks, but most of them lack nutrients.
As a result, this creator had developed her own formula for water, juices, tea, and shakes, which were beloved by her son, friends, and staff. They were all surprised with various flavors, low-calorie count with rich nutrients of her drink. After that, MK beverage products were officially published to the market and develop day by day up to now.
Beverage industry overview example
For the time being, there is a trend in the beverage industry with the booming demand for non-alcoholic beverages, especially in two regions: Europe and North America.
Honestly, what was the most noticeable?
According to the statistics of 2020, the health beverage demand in Europe made up 30% of the total non-alcoholic beverages assumption. In the US, 760 are the number of companies that produce healthy drinks, but only 15% of them include non-alcoholic beverages. So we can see the opportunity for MK Beverage due to demand exceeding supply.
Overview of your beverage business example
The goal of MK Beverage: change the mindset about healthy taste to develop the long-term customer’s desire for a beneficial beverage and stay healthy.
Three missions of MK Beverage:
- Bring something new to the market
- Harmonize with the scare of the supplier in terms of healthy beverage
- Provide beneficial drinks without hurting the clients’ wallets.
Company strategic position (SWOT analysis) example
Here are the details about the SWOT analysis of our successful sample- MK Beverage.
It is noticeable that the most strength of MK is the unique product line that focuses on low cost but still ensuring quality. Moreover, this firm basement has become the most competitive advantage of this company to recall the impressions on their target market.
By creating more and more upscale opportunities, they tried to create new products with diversified flavors with different product lines.
However, there are some existing threats of similar products due to an abundance of competitors. Especially, being a startup in the industry without expert experience can bring a higher level of risk for this company in some specific ways.
Marketing plan and sale strategy example
From the beginning, they are building loyal customers by developing relationships with schools and programs funded by low-income governments.
Following that time, MK Beverage identifies the target market transparently. They are sweet drink lovers, living surrounded by communities, friends and neighbors. Regardless of their economic status, young females and family-oriented households have a tendency to become target customers.
The primary marketing positioning of this beverage company is to concentrate on the benefits and convenience of products for human consumption. They have tried their best to deliver the product in the most optimal way and method.
However, the quality of the beverage is not on the list. MK Beverage company affirms that their basement of sustainable development is the loyal customers, which is built up from credibility with a qualified drink.
Product differentiation example
Due to the mission of being a true leader in the healthy beverage industry, MK Beverage products are differentiated by providing nutritional drinks for their customers. MK Beverage would like to establish a healthier habit for clients by consuming good daily beverages in the long term.
Moreover, MK business realized that many overweight beverage consumers are found in low-income families, which raises the idea of reasonable prices and keeps the product affordable to the income levels.
In the future, apart from being the pioneer in the domestic market with nutritional drinks, MK company always harbors a dream of going to the world.
Experiencing the beverage industry for half a decade, this company has been preparing all the resources, especially the quality product, for a more straightforward approach and development.
Operational plan example
Are you curious how the operational plan changes depending on the scale development?
In the very first stage, MK Beverage imported the ingredients and delivered the supplies online. The production process took place directly in a private house of the owner and delivered finished by her vehicle or some common delivery services.
After some months, MK Beverage started to purchase materials in bulk and deliver MK’s drinks by vans. Ultimately, like all other beverage companies, it required a distribution center with its own delivery transportation like vans and trucks.
Guess what?
It is noticeable that after five years of standing in the beverage world, MK Beverage can successfully make the contract with national supermarkets and some convenience stores, marking an outstanding milestone of the company’s progress.
Human resources, the first employees of the company are the founder and two of her sons. When the business grew by the scale and the market, MK Beverage hired more employees and facilities to serve clients’ demands.
Management and finance example
Despite being a small beverage company, MK had worked enthusiastically to establish some significant milestones below:
- 2015: Brand launched
- January 2017: First investment
- March 2017: New facilities
- August 2017: Cooperate with state assistant programs
- January 2018: Achieve breakeven point
- Jun 2018: Market collaboration strategy with Pepsi
- March 2019: Broaden target customers
- June 2020: Bring MK to the world
In the final stage: Finance, MK Beverage announced their statistics for gross sales, gross profit and net sales in 5 years, from 2016 to 2020. The numbers made great impressions on their clients and partners.
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Conclusion
To sum up, we have just provided a step-by-step process for making a beverage company business plan that is easy to understand and follow. However, this beverage company business plan template only plays as the foundation guidelines for you.
Therefore, some necessary modifications are needed to make it unique and suitable for your beverage company’s available resources and current situation. Let’s start to build up the business plan for your own beverage company. It will ensure sustainable development and improve profit margin from scratch.
Tan Do is a global beverage ODM/OEM manufacturer and supplier located in Vietnam. Since 1996, we have built trust and credibility not only throughout Vietnam but also in many parts of the world. Leveraging state-of-the-art technology, we have crafted thousands of products that align with ISO, HACCP, HALAL, FDA, and many other standards.
