Business start-ups – answers

Exercise 1 You should have written down:
a) The Potential Market
b) Financial Projections
c) The Proposal
d) The Product

The headings matched up with the paragraphs as follows:
1c The Proposal
2d The Product
3b Financial Projections
4a The Potential Market

Exercise 2: You should have written down: Proposal, Territory, Financial Projections and Expenses.

The words you heard and wrote down were the following:
area
blueprint – noun – detailed plan or technical drawing, or outline that acts as a model for a project

The break-even point (BEP) is the point at which cost or expenses and revenue are equal: there is no net loss or gain, and you have "broken even". If a business is not reaching this break-even point (and so going into profit) people decide whether to reduce fixed costs (such as the rent), or variable costs, (such as the sum paid to a supplier), or whether to raise the price of the product.
estimate
forecast – noun (plural forecasts) – 1) an estimation of a future condition 2) a prediction of the weather.
location
outgoings – regular expenditure. Eg What are your monthly outgoings apart from the rent for you flat, and your food bills?
overheads – plural noun – expenses incurred in the upkeep or running of premises for a business or home Eg The fact that our house is old and very cold means we pay a lot for our heating bills, which makes our overheads higher than we would like.
project
running costs – the various continuing costs of managing a business, including materials, labour, bank charges, fuel, telephone bills, repairs and marketing. Running costs are often differentiated under two headings – operational and capital expenditure. Operational expenditure is the cost of running a business day to day – so staff costs, fuel bills, rental, etc, while capital expenditure tends to be one-off expenses, such as the purchase of a building or equipment, and these are then assets which you can sell when you sell your business.
A one-off (adj) expense means you only pay for something once. Eg The exhibition cost a large amount to stage, but it was just a one-off (noun), and we won’t have that expense every year.
scheme
sector

Under Proposal you should have written down: blueprint; project; scheme

Under Territory you should have written down: area; location; sector

Under Financial Projections you should have written down: break-even point; estimate; forecast
A projection is a calculation

and under Expenses you should have written down: outgoings; overheads; running costs

Proposal blueprint project scheme

Territory area location sector

Financial Projection break-even point estimate forecast

Expenses outgoings overheads running costs

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