The “Starting a Business in Ireland” online course is an essential resource for anyone interested in launching a successful business in Ireland. This comprehensive course provides learners with the knowledge and tools needed to navigate the complex landscape of Irish business regulations, tax laws, and supporting government agencies.
Designed for entrepreneurs of all levels, this course covers everything from developing a business idea to securing funding, hiring employees, and creating a strong brand. With a focus on practical advice and real-world examples, learners will gain the skills and confidence needed to start and grow a successful business in Ireland.
The course is delivered entirely online, with video lectures, interactive exercises, and written materials that can be accessed at any time. Learners will have the flexibility to learn at their own pace and can revisit modules as needed to reinforce their knowledge and skills.
Throughout the course, learners will also have access to a range of resources specifically tailored to the Irish business landscape, including templates for business plans, advice on navigating Irish legal and tax requirements, and insights into cultural factors that may impact business success.
By the end of the “Starting a Business in Ireland” course, learners will be equipped with the knowledge and tools needed to turn their business ideas into a reality and thrive in the dynamic Irish business landscape.
Resources:
Financial projections spreadsheet
Financial projections – Predicting your revenue
In this lesson, we will create a 12-month financial forecast for your business, focusing on the revenue, which can be most challenging when starting from scratch with no previous financial data.
In this course, alongside the video, there is a template we will use, which can be downloaded here.
As every business is different, I want to combine several exercises to get you the initial data; you need to predict your company’s revenue in a financial year based on accurate data.
Breakdown
- Target Market size – using Facebook audience
- Looking at Cro.ie tax returns
- Looking at their website – the pricing
- Linkedin staffing
- Looking at competitor reviews on Facebook
- Lifetime value
Target Market size
Target market: A target market, also known as a serviceable obtainable market, is a group of customers within a business’s serviceable available market at which a company aims its marketing efforts and resources. A target market is a subset of the total market for a product or service.
We will define your market size in the following lessons. However, there is
a great way to find the size of your target market through Facebook audiences.
Facebook audiences allow you to create an audience or group of people based on demographics, interests and buying habits.
Facebook will tell the audience’s rough size, which is excellent for understanding our market’s size.
To get to the Facebook audience, we will need to go to our business Facebook page -> “Promote a post”
Once we get here, we will have the ability to create an audience.
Here we can choose age, gender, interests, locations, behaviours, and demographics.
You should be able to create a detailed audience from this screen ( You should save it as it will be helpful in the following lessons. )
Here we can see the number of people in the audience, which for this example, can be the maximum number of people who would be interested in your product; this would be the potential market.
Looking at Cro.ie tax returns
Here you can research or audit your companies and pay for their tax returns, find out their registered address and view their director.
There is also a website called Solocheck and vision-net.
Note you will not be able to get much useful information on sole traders and some companies will have differnet company names then their branded name.
Competitor website
We can get a wealth of information from our competitor’s websites with the following.
- Pricing
- Customers
- Upsells
- CTA
Pricing
It is essential to understand the pricing model of your competitors and how it compares to your business; if you a service-based business that has a dynamic pricing model, asking for a quote can give you great insight.
Customers
Here we can see monday.com has Hulu, BD oil and much more; this is important to know as a business. If your business targets consumers or B2C look at the highlight reviews.
B2C: Business to customer
Upsells
Every business should try to increase customer revenue and lifetime value. Looking at your competitor’s upsells will give you insight into what you could upsell you could provide to your customer, ‘s in-turn increasing lifetime value and value per customer.
Upsells: Upselling is a sales technique where a seller invites the customer to purchase more expensive items, upgrades, or other add-ons to generate more revenue. While it usually involves marketing more profitable services or products, it can be simply exposing the customer to other options that were perhaps not considered.
Lifetime value: In marketing, customer lifetime value, lifetime customer value, or life-time value is a prognostication of the net profit contributed to the whole future relationship with a customer
CTA
Looking at your competitor’s call to action is a great way to find out what they believe attracts customers and leads; this can be a free survey, consultation, free trial, or a 30-day refund. This is important for the next lesson when we do your marketing plan.
CTA: A call to action (CTA) is a prompt on a website that tells the user to take some specified action. A call to action is typically written as a command or action phrase, such as ‘Sign Up’ or ‘Buy Now’ and generally takes the form of a button or hyperlink.
Linkedin staffing
Looking at the staff your competitors have is a great way to understand their labour needs and perhaps yours in the future while also giving you a minimum revenue your competitor is making based on average salaries.
Take, for example, a bakery with two bakers and a cashier. Your research shows the cashier was hired nine months after opening the bakery.
Their minimum salary is
24,000 x 2 = 48,000 @bakers
22,000 x 1 = 22,000 @cashier
Total: 70,000
The bakery must make more than 70,000 a year to sustain their salaries; there are other expenses and Employee tax; payroll accountants can add a lot to this calculation.
Competitor reviews
We should navigate to their pages where customers can leave reviews.
This can be Google my business, Linkedin, Facebook and Trustpilot.
As you can see, this photographer had 83 reviews; from this data, we can get three data points, the amount of reviews/sales, the timeline of the reviews, and the customer’s review message.
The amount of reviews/Sales
We could derive that this photographer has had 83 sales throughout his creation of the Facebook page; as we have researched our competitor’s pricing and upsells, we could derive the amount of revenue generated here. This is especially useful for competitors who are sole traders and don’t have tax returns or employees.
Timeline of the reviews
At least on Facebook, there is a date when the review was given. This can give you great insight into seasons differences in this company; for example, if the vast majority of weddings are around summer, this may not be oblivious for certain businesses. You can also estimate the max amount of supply the company can provide; for example, if there is no month with more than four reviews, perhaps that is because most weddings are on weekends, there are only four weekends, and the wedding photographers’ max output is four a month on average.
Customer’s review
Here we see what customers like and dislike about the service; the negative review is critical, using that information to craft a CTA ( call to action ) and a service or product that tailors to them or fixes their problem. More on this on the Marketing lesson
Lifetime Value
The lifetime value of your customer is essential to know; it can vary between businesses, put simply the lifetime value after somebody has made the initial purchase is the number of other services or products they will purchase after the first.
Lifetime Value: In marketing, customer lifetime value, lifetime customer value, or lifetime value is a prognostication of the net profit contributed to the whole future relationship with a customer.
Financial projections – Predicting your expenses
Thankfully once you have completed the revenue predictions, the expenses should be a lot easier, putting aside the tax obligations, Vat and employee-related taxes.
I suggest speaking with your accountant about these figures and how they will affect your forecast, as it can change from year to year.
We will look at the correlation between revenue and expenses, called Cost of sales or COS for short.
Cost of sales
There are two elements to take into account,
1) The maximum amount you can supply based on labour or asset limitations. Take, for example, a wedding photographer that does wedding that is mainly hosted on the weekend. If this photographer wanted to expand to 6 or 8 weddings per month, he would have to hire another photographer as he could not be in two places simultaneously. Furthermore, if our bakery shop wanted to ramp up production, they would need a new oven or more staff to bake the products. This is important to note and consider when looking at your company’s maximum output and what expenses would increase with the increase in sales.
2) The cost of providing a service or product. This is easier to calculate than above and may decrease with higher sales, for example, better margins when buying baking material in bulk. It is essential to correlate this in your spreadsheet, as the expenses are directly linked to a sale. Furthermore, if this affects your business, a margin of error can be added, such as products not sold or returned.
In the next lesson, we will talk about our marketing plan, giving you more insight into marketing spending, the cost of marketing per sale or CPA ( Cost per acquisition ).
Creating your marketing plan Day 1
Creating your marketing plan Day 1
In this lesson, we will look at your 12-month marketing plan; this lesson will guide you on how to fill in your 12-month marketing plan template which is essential to growing your business and getting your brand out there.
You can download the spreadsheet here.
In this lesson, we will fill in the “Day 1: Taking Stock” sheet.
Campaign goals:
This section will be based on your target Cost per sale, which is explained in the video and in the CPA calculator lesson that is coming up. The takeaway is how much you can reliably afford to spend on marketing and still be profitable when accounting for expenses.
Your business:
These questions about your business, such as “In one sentence, what does your company do? For whom?” will help you think about your core USP.
Your target audience:
These are the questions you should ask yourselves about your ideal customer or target market, such as their age, Income etc.
In the next lesson we will be going over the “Day 2: ” sheets
Creating your marketing plan Day 2
Competitor analysis
We will use one or a combination of the following to perform competitor analysis regarding google search ranking.
Here the main thing we are looking for is Domain authority, the amount of organic traffic and their backlinks.
‘A website’s domain authority describes its relevance for a specific subject area or industry. Domain Authority is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz. This relevance directly impacts its ranking by search engines, trying to assess domain authority through automated analytic algorithms.’
‘A backlink is a link from another website to that web resource. A web resource may be a website, web page, or web directory. A backlink is a reference comparable to a citation. ‘
Theses can all be gathered from the website linked above and will tell you how competitive your competitors are regarding organic ranking on Google.
Creating your marketing plan – Calculating CPA
CPA -> Cost per action ( the cost of somebody performing an action you want through PPC (paid per click) advertisement such as buying a product, signing up or registering an account )
The average cost per action (CPA) is calculated by dividing the total cost of conversions by the total number of conversions. For example, if your ad receives two modifications, costing $2.00 and $4.00, your average CPA for those conversions is $3.00.
We hope the templates, and educational course, alongside the Youtube videos, help you on your journey to create your planning for your business journey.
If you have any questions feel free to contact adam.sever@cryt.ie
