A new online service hopes to help small-business operators create and maintain a business plan and make better planning decisions—all for free.
Enloop is a cloud-based service that lets operators manage their financials and create business plans online to help them better organize their business and forecast their growth.
Elliot Tomaeno, director of communications for Enloop, says operators just need to input all of their business information and data into the program and its auto-writing feature produces a bank-ready business plan.
“We ask you a couple questions about your marketing, we ask you a couple questions about what kind of corporation you are, what kind of funding you have, and that builds it into the legalese that is expected in a business plan,” he says.
After all of the data is entered, Enloop not only produces the business plan, but it also creates three-year profit-and-loss statements and helps the operator make better business-planning decisions.
Enloop also gives the business an Enloop Performance Score, which Tomaeno says gives the operator a better idea of how well they’re doing with their financials. The score is based on industry statistics, he says, adding that a good business plan has a score of about 400.
“As you make changes, that score adjusts in real time,” Tomaeno says. “So if you were changing the cost of your product, or you were changing how much you think you’re going to be making that year, the number is going to adjust.”
The tool also stacks the operator’s business against competition to help him understand his position in the industry.
“It’s a really good indicator if you’re maybe over-forecasting how much you’re going to make, under-forecasting the costs that are involved, and it’s really to help people reign their passion in,” Tomaeno says.
Tomaeno says Enloop pulls information from about 700 industries to help operators with their financials, meaning upstart companies—anything brand new or innovative—would have a hard time using the product.
Still, he says it’s a good tool to help jumpstart the economy’s growth.
“Small businesses are the lifeblood of this economy, so … we believe it’s probably going to help small business owners in America and the entrepreneurial community, but it’s also going to help our economy overall,” he says.
By Sam Oches
