Term Paper on "Ice Cream Parlor"

Term Paper 15 pages (4739 words) Sources: 5 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Ice Cream Parlor

Company Background

Business History

Growth and Financial Objectives

Legal Structure and Ownership

Company Location and Facilities

Plans for Financing the Business

Organization

Team Members

Organizational Structure

Other Key Employees

Principal Stockholders

Market Analysis

Industry Analysis

Target Market

Customer Profile

Major competitors and participants

Market Segmentation

Projected Market Growth and Market Share Objectives

Product and Service Offering

Product and Service Summary

Product and Service Uniqueness

Product and Service Descriptions

Competitive Comparisons

Research and Development

Patents and Trademarks

Marketing Plan

Creating and Maintaining Customers

Product Pricing Strategy

Product Positioning

Sales and Distribution Plan

Promotional Strategy

Business Plan

Darden Restaurants

Executive Summary

Darden company is the largest in the world public company which is an important player in restaurant business,

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thus is a service providing company, specializing in casual dining and is located primarily in the U.S.A. And Canada in approximately 1,427 locations. The company has two major brands the Olive Gardens and the Red Lobster. The first is a full-service special Italian restaurant, while the second is an operator focusing on sea food. These two brands both account for approximately 45% of total company revenues.

The company has enjoyed great success as its products and services have gained a strong following in its target market.

The company has several competitive advantages:

Established brands with stable highly attractive to investors financial performance

Association of the food offered with good quality and accelerating health conciousness improves potential development of the both brands.

Large distribution chain and development program through franchising.

At the same time, top management realizes company weaknesses in other then the mentioned above brands and is working at development program in new emerging markets.

Type of Business

The company has been in business since 1962 which is longer than the biggest number of company competitors. It is in the restaurant industry and is trading under DIR code on New York exchange. The primary services offered are good quality casual dining.

Business Summary

The company enjoys U.S. $5.77 billion market capitalization, has operations in over 1,500 places around the U.S.A. And Canada, and is starting to grant franchisees to well established operators to expand the company prevalence. It has 4 major brands, two of which are well established and 2 are rather new brands. Financial performance of each of them varies. The company has 150,000 employees.

Financial Objectives

The company aims to continue its' growth pattern of 7% annually increase in sales for at least two coming years and achieve up to U.S.$11 billion sales in 10 years time, by maintaining or improving its profitability margins. The company achieved approximately net cash receivables from operating activities of U.S.$717 million in the year of 2006 compared to U.S.$525 in the year of 2004.

Product and Service

The company offers restaurant services under four brand names. The industry has expanded rapidly in the past several years and growth is expected to continue at a strong pace for the foreseeable future. This offers excellent opportunities for new companies to enter this market and for existing companies to expand into new product areas and to differentiate existing products. However, because the company has been effective at carving out it's own niche, management believes that the company can remain very competitive in this market. The company name distinguishes itself from the competition by:

Offering only finest quality products meeting sophisticated health requirements.

Increasing brand awareness, prevalence and reputation.

Managing costs hikes and thus being able to maintain profitable performance while only slightly increasing menu costs.

Carefully orchestrating the marketing mix (product, price, physical distribution (place), and promotion) to meet the needs of its target market.

Funds Requested

The amount of funds needed is up to U.S.$170 mln annually to carry out annual expansion of approximately 35 restaurants both located in the main market and other markets. The company operating proceeds are sufficient to cover expansion and existing long-term debt.

Company Background

Business History

Founded in 1968 as the chain of Red Lobster restaurants, the company has achieved total number of operations approximately 1,500 in different locations and has become the leader in casual dining industry. For most of its history, the company has distributed its services via a network of restaurants and is open to grant its' franchisees to well established local operators, which happened in the case of Japan and allowed the company to open 34 restaurants in this country and thus start gaining the market share. The company is very well established in its major markets of the U.S.A. And Canada, serving approximately 300 millions meals annually resulting in approximately $5.7 billion sales in the year of 2006 with optimistic outlook for the future sales. The company headquarters are located in the U.S.A., Florida, Orlando city and the total company staff is reaching enormous number o f150,000 employees. he company is [well established in its market, becoming well established, highly profitable, seeking financing]. The major challenges facing the firm are:

Low barrier to entry which has lead to tightened competition in the industry and increasing number of competitors.

Growing oil prices and total economic downturn in the major company markets threat further company development and trigger necessity to source for new more attractive markets.

High price elasticity further make the demand for the company services vulnerable.

The company intends to respond to these challenges by offering high-quality products and services differentiated by careful orchestration of the marketing mix.

Growth and Financial Objectives

The company has achieved sales growth of 8.4% in 2006 compared to the year of 2005 and 5.5% in the 2005 compared to the fiscal year of 2004. The company's sales objective is to grow in the coming two years the sales at least by 6% to 7% annually and in the long-term due to well established and constantly perfecting business model, launching of new products and adaptation of the current to meet challenging consumer demands, will enable the company to achieve annualized sales growth from 7% to 9%. Thus, in the pessimistic scenario, within 10 years time the company wishes to achieve total sales of approximately U.S.$11 billion and in the optimistic scenario to double the sales of the company to exceed the U.S.$11 billion.

Nevertheless, the company sales are very seasonal, achieving their peaks in spring and winter, being lower in summer and the lowest in the fall. The company recognizes this seasonality and addresses this by varying the sales volumes within its brands in order to smooth the total company sales throughout the year.

At the same time the company is managing to operate on profit margins of approximately 6% and is planning to increase the profit margins by cutting optimally the costs, costs of delivery the products to the operations locations, thus optimizing logistics in light of growing oil prices, and generally increasing operating effectiveness of the brands.

Though the economy has been experiencing accelerating inflation of the consumer goods prices due to growing oil prices and economic slowdown, Darden company has managed to decrease the costs of selling their goods while increasing total sales. Thus, the company has reduced total costs of sales attributable to food & beverage from 30.5% to 29.6% in years 2004 to 2006, has successfully managed to cope increasing labor costs and has remained them from the rate of 32% in 2004 to 32.3% in 2006, and the restaurant expenses have remained at constant 15.5% out of total sales level during the last two years. This fact reveals ability of the management to decrease marginal costs of selling more goods and opening more operational spots and the company is targeting to remain this. In the overall operations structure, the company has successfully reduced interest costs and has kept administrative expenses constant, which has allowed the company to enjoy 8.4% operations profit margin in 2006 compared to 6.6% in 2004, and thus considerably grow company earnings before taxes.

The company employs a number of budgeting techniques, both long-term and short-term debt, summary of company liabilities is presented below.

The company has approximately U.S.$910 million obligations to be covered in less than one year, and the biggest share of them being attributable to acquisition of new properties for opening of new restaurants, other capital strategic importance projects. After that, the company will have less obligations to be met within the medium term up to 3 years, with slightly growing obligations in 3 to 5 years attributable mainly to necessity to pay out the long-term debt of the company. Nevertheless, the biggest share of the company long-term debt has to be paid out in more than five years time, thus, the company has a good chance to employ capital available in one to three years time for its strategic development program in order to generate enough income in the 3 to 5 years time and onwards to finance the future obligations without the refinancing needs.

Within the total capital structure of the company, accounting for adjusted long-term debt, the equity to debt ratio is 47% to 53% which gives grounds for strong financial position of… READ MORE

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Quoted Instructions for "Ice Cream Parlor" Assignment:

“

This business plan that you will create is a business about an Ice Cream Parlor. This business will sell ice cream dishes, malts, floats, shakes, etc. The project guide line is on this form below. I will be sending a sample concept paper for you to use as a guideline on how the business plan should look like. Hope that helps you. Thank You very much.

Final Project Guidelines

The final project for the course is the development of a small business concept paper. This paper will bring together the application of the materials in the classroom, the text, lectures and independent research though the development of a new business venture concept paper focused on the creation of the venture.

The paper will be constructed using the following Topic Outline:

I. Executive Summary

II. Company Background

a. Business History

b. Growth and Financial Objectives

c. Legal Structure and Ownership

d. Company Location and Facilities

e. Plans for Financing the Business

III. Organization

a. Team Members

b. Organizational Structure

c. Other Key Employees

d. Principal Stockholders

III. Market Analysis

a. Summary

b. Industry Analysis

c. Target Market

d. Customer Profile

e. Major competitors and participants

f. Market Segmentation

g. Projected Market Growth and Market Share Objectives

IV. Product and Service Offering

a. Product and Service Summary

b. Product and Service Uniqueness

c. Product and Service Descriptions

d. Competitive Comparisons

e. Research and Development

f. Patents and Trademarks

V. Marketing Plan

a. Creating and Maintaining Customers

b. Product Pricing Strategy

c. Product Positioning

d. Sales and Distribution Plan

e. Promotional Strategy

Please develop a tightly focused, strategically ***** paper. I will be looking for depth and breadth of your findings and analysis. Do not write in any section that you *****couldn*****t find needed information*****. If you are not comfortable with the information available to you or that you can create, then pick another business enterprise or discuss this with your instructor.

Mechanics

*****¢The paper should be a minimum of 15 and a maximum of 25 pages! You must tightly focus your thinking in this limited space.

*****¢Double space, 1 inch margins with 12 point type.

*****¢Page one should be your cover page with title of paper, your name, class, and date. Also put your name and a subject title in the header of each page.

*****¢A "References" pages is required as your last page. It should include all outside references used in your paper, including your text. I would expect to see a number of references. Please use APA or MLA format for your references.

Concept Paper Template

Use this template for preparing the concept paper. In the template you will find complete instructions for what is required in each section. It is not meant to be a fill-in-the-blank template. The template has sample information that will guide you as to what must be placed in each section and how it may be done. Much of the information you will use may be hypothetical. It may be based on ideas but not always facts.

There is no financial section for this concept paper and no funding section. However, in the development of the paper you will have made assumptions as to the organizational structure and possible annual sales. You can look at the marketplace or the business opportunity and know that, while the numbers that you place in this paper may not be true, they are required for a "REAL" business plan.

So, in this paper, you may need to estimate the product or service annual revenues in order to fund your small business, decide on its corporate structure, and establish a five-year forecast based on expected unit sales, profits, and margins. This paper IS NOT a complete business plan, so there are sections missing that would be in a complete business plan. Knowing this, and knowing that a critical component is to be CREATIVE in your thinking, you will have to use your own creativity to complete some of the sections.

*****

How to Reference "Ice Cream Parlor" Term Paper in a Bibliography

“Ice Cream Parlor.” A1-TermPaper.com, 2007, https://www.a1-termpaper.com/topics/essay/ice-cream-parlor-company-background/824610. Accessed 26 Jun 2024.

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A1-TermPaper.com. (2007). Ice Cream Parlor. [online] Available at: https://www.a1-termpaper.com/topics/essay/ice-cream-parlor-company-background/824610 [Accessed 26 Jun, 2024].

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1. Ice Cream Parlor [Internet]. A1-TermPaper.com. 2007 [cited 26 June 2024]. Available from: https://www.a1-termpaper.com/topics/essay/ice-cream-parlor-company-background/824610

1. Ice Cream Parlor. A1-TermPaper.com. https://www.a1-termpaper.com/topics/essay/ice-cream-parlor-company-background/824610. Published 2007. Accessed June 26, 2024.

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