Industry Stats - More Than You Want To Know

Business plans have all kinds of stats.  Industry stats.  Demographic stats.  Stats are just not always easy to deal with AND lots of stats are derived from big business, not small business.  The stats in this link fall pretty much into the latter category.  They are pretty much based on big business reporting.

While you cannot -- and should not -- use these verbatim in your own business plan, they do give you an idea of the kind of data that your banker will look at.

The secret to using this set of stats is just to keep clicking until you find what it is you want.  In all that clicking you may even discover something useful that you hadn't thought of.


So once you actually find a bunch of numbers that seem appropriate for your industry, how do you incorporate them into your business plan?  Here are typical uses:

• Map out the demographics of your service area.
• Graphically demonstrate the growth of your own industry, or the growth of the industry that you serve.
• Compare your financial summaries with those of the industry.  They won't match because yours is a new, probably smaller, business, but understand why they don't match.

This is likely to be only one source that you use to locate pertinent industry stats, so don't feel discouraged if they don't work for your business plan.