Guide to Starting a Small Manufacturing Company

How to Start a Manufacturing Business by Meir Liraz

This guide will walk you step by step through all the essential phases of starting a successful manufacturing based business. To profit in a new manufacturing business, you need to consider the following questions: What business am I in? What products  do I provide? Where is my market? Who will buy? Who is my competition? What is my sales strategy? What merchandising methods will I use? How much money is needed to operate my firm? How will I get the work done? What management controls are needed? How can they be carried out?  And many more. This guide will help you answer all these questions and more.

Here's what’s in the book:

~ Things to consider before you start - crucial things you must consider before you start pouring in your hard earned money. Ignore it at your own peril.

~ How to plan and start your new manufacturing business - complete, step by step instructions, this is must-know must-do information; ignore it and you stand a good chance to fail. You get specifically designed instructions for each phase.

~ How to develop winning marketing strategies for your manufacturing business.

~ How to plan and execute a results driven advertising program - tips and strategies to make your advertising pay off big.

~ How to find new customers - new customers and more sales are essential for profit and growth. Here's a little known yet extremely effective ten-step formula to locate and find new customers. This same formula helped one client of ours to increase his customer base by 46% last year.

~ How to set the right prices - pricing secrets to help you make money and still be competitive. You get specifically designed instructions for a manufacturing based business.

~ How to fix production mistakes.

~ How to set up a quality control system.

~ The lease or buy decision - a revealing look at the pros and cons of leasing vs. buying and which option is right for you.

~ All these and much much more.

My name is Meir Liraz and I'm the author of this book. According to Dun & Bradstreet, 90% of all business failures analyzed can be traced to poor management. This is backed up by my own experience. In my 31 years as a business coach and consultant to businesses, I've seen practically dozens of business owners fail and go under -- not because they weren't talented or smart enough -- but because they were trying to re-invent the wheel rather than rely on proven, tested methods that work. And that is where this book can help, it will teach you how to avoid the common traps and mistakes and do everything right the first time.

Sample Content:

This guide will walk you step by step through all the essential phases of starting a successful manufacturing business. To profit in a manufacturing based business, you need to consider the following questions: What business am I in? What goods do I sell? Where is my market? Who will buy? Who is my competition? What is my sales strategy? What merchandising methods will I use? How much money is needed to operate my company? How will I get the work done? What management controls are needed? How can they be carried out?

No one can answer such questions for you. As the owner-manager you have to answer them and draw up your business plan. The pages of this Guide are a combination of text and workspaces so you can write in the information you gather in developing your business plan - a logical progression from a commonsense starting point to a commonsense ending point.

It takes time and energy and patience to draw up a satisfactory business plan. Use this Guide to get your ideas and the supporting facts down on paper. And, above all, make changes in your plan on these pages as that plan unfolds and you see the need for changes.

Bear in mind that anything you leave out of the picture will create an additional cost, or drain on your money, when it unexpectedly crops up later on. If you leave out or ignore enough items, your business is headed for disaster.

Keep in mind, too, that your final goal is to put your plan into action. More will be said about this step near the end of this Guide.

What's in This for Me?

Time was when an individual could start a business and prosper provided you were strong enough to work long hours and had the knack for selling for more than the raw materials or product cost. Small store, grist mills, livery stables, and blacksmith shops sprang up in many crossroad communities as Americans applied their energy and native intelligence to settling the continent.

Today this native intelligence is still important. But by itself the common sense for which Americans are famous will not insure success in a business. Technology, the marketplace, and even people themselves have become more complicated than they were 100, or even 25, years ago.

Common sense must be combined with new techniques in order to succeed in the space age. Just as one would not think of launching a manned space capsule without a flight plan, so one should not think of launching a new manufacturing business without a business plan.

A business plan is an exciting tool that you can use to plot a "course" for your company. Such a plan is a logical progression from a commonsense starting point to a commonsense ending point.

To build a business plan for your company, an owner-manager needs only to think and react as a manager to questions such as: What product is to be manufactured? How can it best be made? What will it cost me? Who will buy the product? What profit can I make?