Andrew77777
New Member
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2015
- Messages
- 1
Hello,
I'm an intermediate Excel user who is trying to come up with the best methodology for predicting future growth based on seasonality, trends and investment scenarios.
For example, let's say I run a coffee shop that's growing X% MoM with some seasonality throughout the year and I don't do much paid marketing. There's a natural growth curve from word-of-mouth, and some customer recurring behavior.
Revenue could look something like this:
January - $10,000
February - $20,000
March - $30,000
April - $40,000
May (getting hotter) - $30,000
...
Sept (cooler) - $80,000
At the same time, I'd like to start investing more heavily in marketing and sales (without lots of data on past impact), so I would expect the impact of that investment to create a potential range of new revenue and some exponential behavior through social media and word-of-mouth. I think in this scenario, we'd assume that the $ per customer or cups of coffee per customer, as well as retention characteristics, would stay the same.
I would think this is a very common modeling scenario for small businesses and startups, but haven't found any single templates or methodologies that seem to clearly accommodate trends, seasonality, growth, investment scenarios to come up with a low, medium and high case. You could certainly do a bottoms-up analysis and separate the impact of paid and earned marketing, but I'm interested to hear some thoughts on how best to model this efficiently - or any existing programs / templates / models / tutorials that would accommodate it from a "best practices" standpoint. My objective is to come up with a range of scenarios starting with trending behavior with seasonality, with one or two investment scenarios – even if they don't include the full bottoms-up detail (which could be unknown) of how much spend / how much return. It could be back-of-the-envelope, but shouldn't be a WAG, either.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
I'm an intermediate Excel user who is trying to come up with the best methodology for predicting future growth based on seasonality, trends and investment scenarios.
For example, let's say I run a coffee shop that's growing X% MoM with some seasonality throughout the year and I don't do much paid marketing. There's a natural growth curve from word-of-mouth, and some customer recurring behavior.
Revenue could look something like this:
January - $10,000
February - $20,000
March - $30,000
April - $40,000
May (getting hotter) - $30,000
...
Sept (cooler) - $80,000
At the same time, I'd like to start investing more heavily in marketing and sales (without lots of data on past impact), so I would expect the impact of that investment to create a potential range of new revenue and some exponential behavior through social media and word-of-mouth. I think in this scenario, we'd assume that the $ per customer or cups of coffee per customer, as well as retention characteristics, would stay the same.
I would think this is a very common modeling scenario for small businesses and startups, but haven't found any single templates or methodologies that seem to clearly accommodate trends, seasonality, growth, investment scenarios to come up with a low, medium and high case. You could certainly do a bottoms-up analysis and separate the impact of paid and earned marketing, but I'm interested to hear some thoughts on how best to model this efficiently - or any existing programs / templates / models / tutorials that would accommodate it from a "best practices" standpoint. My objective is to come up with a range of scenarios starting with trending behavior with seasonality, with one or two investment scenarios – even if they don't include the full bottoms-up detail (which could be unknown) of how much spend / how much return. It could be back-of-the-envelope, but shouldn't be a WAG, either.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
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