A sobering 2012 study from the Harvard Business School revealed that 3 out of 4 venture-backed startups end in failure. This is due to a number of factors: management inexperience, insufficient capital, irrational exuberance without enough market research. But the uber-reason for new business failure is insufficient real time planning for long term success and the ability to execute on that plan. Planning allows the entrepreneur to consider and answer the basic and strategic questions and to stay organized and remain on track. Businesses without a plan can easily get off-target because they have no clearly defined goals. Creating a defensible plan with realistic marketing and sales strategies, numerical summaries, revenue forecasts, helps entrepreneurs convince investors and remain committed to their company’s long-term goals.

Equity crowdfunding increases everyone’s odds of success by requiring applicants to answer these questions for themselves before they present their proposal to would-be investors. When entrepreneurs turn solely to their family and friends, it can be easy to gloss over a lack of rigor and strategy with pure enthusiasm, imperiling the funds of the people closest to them. Entrepreneurs owe it to their friends to be more transparent but in the past have not always done so; but now they’ll be required by the laws outlined in the crowdfunding provisions in the JOBS Act of 2012 to be fully prepared before seeking investment from the wider audience. And this changes everything, including the use of what we have traditionally used and thought of as business plan. The virtual nature of funding portals and the need to share information with hundreds or thousands of investors in real time 24/7 makes PDF documents completely obsolete for crowdfund investing.
Putting all of these issues together, it’s clear that if the crowdfunding industry wants to succeed along with the businesses it funds, the business plan product must be transformed. The general consensus of crowdfunding industry leaders is that the state-of-the-art planning tool for crowdfunding is the Funding Roadmap, http://www.fundingroadmap.com/ -a virtual platform that makes business planning faster, easier and more systematic,  and helps entrepreneurs to create viable long term vision and strategy.

The speed, efficiency and standardization built into the Fundingroadmap reporting system provides the kind of transparency necessary in a constantly expanding global digital world. “…we are very excited to be able to provide this kind of advanced technology to our customers worldwide” said Vincent Molinari, CEO of GATE, a crowdfunding transaction facilitator. The fully compliant, shareable Funding Roadmap places your idea or business on a proper trajectory to raise capital now and succeed in the long run.

Fundingroadmap helps entrepreneurs prepare a compliant document and disclosure package for the coming SEC crowdfunding rules. It’s designed for compatibility with crowdfunding portals. It facilitates collaboration at a distance in real time. Items with finite answers are formatted in multiple choice. Navigation is easy. Funding Roadmap streams video presentations and indexes downloads of required supporting documents in its repository, as well as providing a Crowdfund Disclosure Report to greatly facilitate the required due diligence process.

If you’re funding your new business with friends and family, Angels or Venture Capitalists, Funding Roadmap will increase your odds of getting funded by helping you to consider and solve the essential puzzles of your enterprise, and to share your polished presentation with your invited investors fully, securely and instantaneously anytime from anywhere on the cloud.

Funding Roadmap will also: – Help you stay organized and remain on track with its unique benchmarking functions which also serve as a guide to track your progress and hold yourself accountable in the future. – It forces you to consider and decide on things you might not have otherwise, like business interruption insurance and cash burn rate. – It saves you a lot of time and frustration thinking through the numbers, and making sure it’s possible to hit your revenue and profit goals. – It will force you to prove the validity of your ideas, the product/service target markets and sales strategy. – Its virtual collaboration features helps keep everyone on your team aligned with the current and future plans for your business in real time and as changes occur.

Equity crowdfunding is changing forever the way new businesses are conceived, evaluated and funded. We have seen that even Venture Capitalists are not getting the information they need to make good investment decisions. Funding Roadmap is the technology that makes compliant and comprehensive planning documents easy to generate and share. Whether or not you’re crowdfunding, Funding Roadmap helps entrepreneurs and investors to increase the odds of success.

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Funding Roadmap replaces static business plans with an instantly sharable, simple to use, eco-friendly online platform:

Simple Standardized Design - Present your business plan to investors and lenders in a simple and easy-to-read format that’s SBA and GAAP compliant.

Collaborate with professionals and partners - Share and build your Fundingroadmap in an easy multiple choice format with your co-workers,

advisors and mentors to receive advice and refine the plan anytime from anywhere.

Enrich your story - Easily embed a video, pictures and drawings in PDF to tell a fuller story.

Communicate on all fronts! - Share and broadcast your listing from our marketplace via Twitter and Facebook and gather votes and attention. Tweet it, Like it, Share it.

Social media integration - Within the reporting system with Twitter and Facebook: gives investors and lenders a context to your story in real-time even on a smart phone or tablet. Have access to everything you will need to present wherever you may meet.

Be reachable -Secure reviewer login system stores all your contact info in one secure place so investors and lenders know how to contact you and you control who has access to your report.

Easy to consume - Your Fundingroadmap is divided into separate sections (including

Business Plan, Due Diligence and Numerical Summaries) where questions are hyper-linked to the relevant answers right away so investors and lenders can make a decision faster.

Get your idea in the spotlight! Increase your online exposure by posting on our virtual Dealflow Marketplace -expand your access and pitch to a world of potential investors, and lenders.

Your Dealflow -  Give investors and lenders access to a complete and accurate report and “Get funded faster.”

Disaster Resistant - Cloud-based storage allows for instant access to relevant documents for FEMA assistance or insurance claims.

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The Problem

In states struck by natural disasters, tens of thousands of small businesses have been damaged or gone in an instant! This has caused unprecedented challenges to the public and private mechanisms designed to address small business access to capital and community recovery

Nothing but the shirt on their backs: Affected business owners are too often left without the necessary documentation or information for FEMA/SBA to process their claims and applications after a disaster.

The longer it takes for a small business person to painstakingly re-construct their documentation, the more likely it is that they will give up and the JOBS they created and their tax revenues will be lost forever.

Look at the facts: SBA and the Department of Labor statistics indicate over 40% of businesses that experience a major fire or natural disaster never reopen and over 50% that do fail within two years.

Preemptive Disaster Planning tools for a FEMA/SBA loan need to be accessible on websites such as http://www.preparemybusiness.org/  and http://www.ready.gov/ to provide a way for small business people to beprepared for an SBA Disaster Loan, as opposed to downloadable PDF list.

Why we need to solve this problem now

Mitigate the economc impact: Responsive and prepared government agencies can mitigate the economic impact of disasters.

Businesses that reopen quickly after a disaster realize increased business revenue, can put people back to work, create new jobs, and provide much needed sales, property and payroll tax for the impacted communities. Early successes are also critical to boosting morale during recovery efforts and can have a substantial positive effect on the community rebuilding effort.

The technology solution

Make it easy, make it available: We have the technology to solve this problem now and increase the success rate of rebuilding American small businesses and towns long before they may need it.

It’s called the http://fundingroadmap.com , a standardized private label licensed cloud-based SBA and GAAP compliant, transparent multiple choice business plan and due diligence reporting system and repository, where all information required by the SBA for a disaster loan is included and can be retrieved from anywhere at any time.

See the list here: https://disasterloan.sba.gov/ela/InfoNeeded.aspx  as required by the SBA.

Cloud-based: Fundingroadmap technology can instantly play a very important role in preparing entrepreneurs and small business owners ahead of time so they can compile and protect financial documents and information in an SBA compliant standardized reporting system that is ready in an emergency for the process of applying for FEMA/ SBA small business loans and other necessary capital.

Completing a Funding Roadmap document enables a business to look ahead, allocate resources, take key steps, meet challenges, solve problems, and embrace opportunities. It provides a place to compile facts, upload and store securely online all of the answers to the mandatory questions and the documents lenders and investors require during the review process for capital.

Keep moving forward: We all recognize the importance of a plan for startups. Less obvious is the need for established companies to maintain long term effective plans that are flexible enough to adjust to changing challenges and goals and can be made instantly available for review by FEMA/ SBA online should an emergency strike.

Improve staff efficiency

Go virtual: Instant access to this critical information will allow FEMA counselors to assist the recovery efforts of those FEMA staff on the ground in the disaster states, remotely and quickly helping determine the current and future status of a company.

Go mobile: This information is accessible on mobile devices and provides instant access for review by investors, lenders, SBA/FEMA or insurance companies, helping small businesses back to productivity much more quickly than current methods. Fundingroadmap helps claims processors to quickly and accurately determine resources to be distributed to claimants after a disaster with complete security and transparency.

You can learn and see more on this short webinar below we presented with our partners the ASBDC:

http://asbdc-us.org/Resources/Webinars.html

The participants’ journey

Keep everyone calm, make the process smoother: Post-disaster processing staff, instead of commiserating with victims and giving them a nearly impossible to-do list of required documents, could instead be receiving applicants armed with everything they need. Claims and loans could be processed in hours, days or weeks, instead of months, years or never.

Bring back jobs: Providing a faster more efficient and successful process for small business owners desperately trying to access capital, to quickly recover after a disaster strikes, rebuilds a community faster, bringing back jobs, community morale and tax revenues.

By implementing a new technologically advanced standardized reporting system, governments can reach victims faster and farther away, engage more easily, and deliver a more successful experience while creating quantifiable results.

This holistic, integrated approach to data management empowers everyone involved and will revolutionize the government’s ability to preserve the businesses of the hard working entrepreneurs who have built this great nation.

By adopting the Fundingroadmap, government can solve the problems as outlined above quickly, and systemically ensure better results.

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“Funding the World Forward” is a way of sharing funding success with other startups. We want to inspire our clients who get funded, launch a new venture, or continue to grow their already established businesses, to take some of their good fortune and “pay it forward,” in the form of a small investment/donation, a mutually beneficial initial contract, or deeply discounted necessary resources to a local or interesting startup or non-profit, -we leave it up to participants to contribute whatever their new venture can afford.

Here’s how it works.

Register your company on our http://startupsacrossamerica.com Marketplace with a free listing. Include the amount of money you’re trying to raise and where you are located, or sign in to your company’s Funding Roadmap. Bring your A-game to convey the compelling essence of your proposition in your Executive Summary. If you’re a subscriber to the Funding Roadmap Hone your executive summary and upload your video pitch to get across. Fill out the full Funding Roadmap and be ready for serious investors and lenders when they come calling. Whether you’re a subscriber or a free lister, make it exciting for people to invest in you and the public to vote for your idea.

Use social networking to get the word out.

Share your business idea with your friends, followers and fans, let the world know about your vision and innovative business. Use Twitter and Facebook to spread the word and learn more about your company. Encourage friends, followers and fans to vote for you on the marketplace. Impress investors with how the public feels about your idea and the transparent and compliant information you choose to present  to them within your Funding Roadmap .

People love to be the first to discover the next big thing. Their vote for you helps them to be a part of your success. Once you are funded you’ll be aware of a roster of great startups to whom your newly funded company can donate a small percentage of your funding or samples from your inventory, or special discounts for other businesses or non profits that need your product or service. Everyone can recommend and vote for other startups who might receive some of your or others’ largesse. This is how we all “Fund the World Forward”.

Simply register a free listing or subscribe to the Funding Roadmap, post on the Marketplace, then let the networking begin!

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Startup pages are popping up all over Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube. Gone are the days of writing a business plan then hoping some friend of a friend will discover you and make an investment or introduce you to an angel or VC. Today’s social media gives you a means of demonstrating market support to investors through the fans, followers, and friends who support your innovative business ideas and the developments and progress you’re making along the way. Investors are looking for a groundswell of excitement, a fan base, potential traction, and you can show it to them through Funding Roadmap.

Now you can demonstrate this support to investors in real time. With tens of thousands of twitter followers, credible linkedIn business associates or the enthusiastic comments left on your facebook page, investors can see that you have the ability to influence and inspire potential customers. The involvement of your team with other respected business leaders, mentors, and associates is reflected in social media and helps to bolster confidence among potential investors and lenders.

Helping you capitalize on the power of social media is just one the of the ways the Funding Roadmap –a web 3.0 business planning and due diligence platform on the cloud- can provide transparent information so investors and bankers can make better informed and faster funding decisions.

Networked human capital has become an asset category like any other and can be considered in the valuation of your company. We make it accessible as a click-through for our subscribers to use as part of a truly transparent and complete presentation to investors and lenders on what you have accomplished on the way to realizing your goals. By integrating these networked groups into our cloud based reporting system, reviewing investors and lenders can immediately view a company fan page, youtube video or twitter or linkedIn page as part of the discovery and due diligence process.

Take advantage of Business Planning reinvented for Web 3.0

Explore it here: http://fundingroadmap.com/

Try it here for free: http://www.fundingroadmap.com/free-trial.php

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As the WSJ has reported in this piece (Keeping capital close to home  The Wall Street Journal (8/6)), there are good reasons to look for funding in friendlier terrain:
1. Banks aren’t lending. Even with SBA guarantees.
2. VCs and Angels often want too great a return and too much control. Entrepreneurs may want to develop their business more fully to be in a better bargaining position for when they go to these sources.
3. Friends and family are more likely to be in the corner of “their” entrepreneur.

Using friends and family money creates perhaps even more of a moral imperative to plan and manage funds responsibly. Whether friendly investors are demanding or not, the entrepreneurs should be fully prepared to succeed through sound planning.

Time and again, small loans or investments have created seemingly disproportionate numbers of jobs. See this article about the impact of SBA “Express Loans” made through Sams’ Club: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/05/business/05loan.html in which entrepreneur Michael Golata secures $10,000 and is able to hire three people.

In 2009 there were approximately 7.8 million millionaires, and 1 million “ultra high net worth individuals” with assets of more than $5 million in the U.S. Certainly it is time for these people to stop sitting on their hands and seek out the investment opportunities in their communities and in their fields of interest to benefit themselves and the economy.

We need to usher in an era of activist investors concerned with the bottom line, yes, but also with the well-being of their communities and the growth and health of the American economy. Startups Across America is a free state-by-state interactive map of potential investments for friends and family –and other- investors. Visit at http://startupsacrossamerica.com

Funding Roadmap is the cloud-based business planning tool that takes advantage of the connectivity, collaboration and networking abilities afforded by current technology. Look at and Subscribe to this groundbreaking platform at http://fundingroadmap.com/

When the going gets as weird as it is now, entrepreneurs and investors need to find each other and get going. Together.

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