 As Kirstie said, my name is Kevin Teller. I'm the customer success manager for San Francisco Public Library from Gale specifically. So anytime if you've spoken with Kirstie or anybody else at the library before about any of your Gale resources and they've said, let me get back to you. I have some questions that I need to ask Gale. I'm usually the person that they'll go to for those questions. So basically we're here to help all of you to get the most benefit out of this resource and reach all of your goals. As I'm sure all of you have lots of different ideas for maybe just beginning starting a business. Maybe you're kind of part way through and need some guidance and a tool like this seems like a really good opportunity to be able to use something to help with that. Or maybe you're way down the road and just want to kind of get a little bit more of a organizational tool and need something that is going to give you a little bit more flexibility and be able to kind of game out some different scenarios as you continue with your business. So without further ado, I do want to hand it over to Mark who is the product manager for Gale Business Plan Builder. And he's going to share a little bit about the resource and some of those different aspects and facets that I talked about. Thanks Kevin and thanks everybody. My name is Mark. Hi, I am an associate product manager at Gale. I'm Kevin's colleague. One thing I'll say is that if an end user or a librarian or a staff writes in to Gale's tech support with a product question, I am the person at the other end that would receive that question actually. So that's where I sit. Okay, so what I'm going to do for you today is I'm going to share my monitor and I'm going to go over Gale Business Plan Builder. I'm not necessarily going to burrow down into every single corner or nook and cranny of the program but I am going to show you all of the broad strokes as an overall introduction and familiarization for it. So I will now share my screen. Okay, so hopefully everyone is able to see what looks like the Gale Business Plan Builder landing page. And this is the outside sign-in or sign-up page that a user will see when they first enter the program. So we've got a little bit of summary texts here along these icons. And then there's a sign-in button in the upper right corner and there's a get started button in the middle. And both of them do the same thing, which is they take you to the screen where you can now either sign in if you have an account already or you can sign up for an account. So I'm going to sign in to a Gale Business Plan Builder a demonstration account that we have that has already filled in the various corners of the program. And let's see. So I'm going to say Gale Demo and I'll click sign-in. Okay, so this is the first main dashboard page of Plan Builder. So as you already know, this is a software that builds a business plan for you. Well, you do it. It doesn't do it for you, but it's the software that will generate it in that format for you. If you've done any Googling, you know that there is no shortage of Plan Builder software out there. A lot of it is direct to consumer that costs. Here, as an end user, you would have free access to it. All of these programs do basically the same thing. It's just a matter of how does this particular one work? So that is what I'm going to summarize for you today. So when you're looking at this page, there are three basic sections to this page. This big one down here has these five sections that are called Entrepreneur Profile, Business Ideation, Break-even Analysis, Business Plans, and Financial Projections. That set of five links appears three times, and it's a little bit different each time. So up on the top here, we have this row of small icons, but they are icons that take you to the same section. And then thirdly, over on the left side, we've got the same five sections, but now they're displayed as drop-down menus. So what these do is they give you different routes to go into the same sections where you will actually type in text or type in numbers. All right. So what I'll do, if this is your first time in there, we have tried to put in a lot of help and guidance for the users. So if you click on this button, which appears in each major section called Guide Me, you'll see this pop-up window that explains what is going on on each particular page that you're looking at. All right. Up here in the upper right, you got your user menu, so you can do things like work with your account and a couple of other things. We also have several language translation options that will translate it for you. It will translate the interface that you see, but it will not translate what you type in. So you can enter things into any language that you want to, and it will remain that way. All right. So our sample company that I'm using to demo for you today is called Neptune Coffee. That's just a coffee shop. And if you click on it here, it will take you to this basic screen, which is where you can edit your company. By edit company, I mean the basic fundamental overall information about your company, not necessarily like the nitty-gritty details. And you can also have more than one. So there's three here, and Neptune Coffee is the one that I'm demoing. Here's the button you would hit if you wanted to do another one. And then organizations is what the program treats nonprofits. So if I click up here where it says Gale Business or Plan Builder or Dashboard, they all take me back to this central landing place. All right. So what I will show next is where it says scenario down here. A scenario is where you can take one company and you can envision basically what if scenario. So you can create different like say like if your sales are more than you expected or if they're lower than you expected or there's some outside event or maybe you bought a second building or a piece of capital equipment. You can run different scenarios in the same company. And another kind of potential way to use that scenario is maybe to adjust for the price of materials or price from vendors in your business too. We know definitely that that's we've seen some increases as part of the pandemic and other factors. So being able to kind of plan out worst case scenario of what are the highest prices for my vendor might be next year versus kind of feasibly what might they be if they were a little bit lower. Exactly. All right. And over here I'll go to the upper right. You can email documents. It doesn't have to be complete. You can email partials to yourself and you can choose a format. It could be a PDF. It could be an Excel spreadsheet. It could be a Microsoft Word document. Or you can download them and again you can pick and choose partial or full and you can choose your format as well. So what I will do now is I will show briefly these main sections. So if I expand these dropdowns it shows me text links to go into two general sections with subsections within each section. So the first one is the worksheet and then the second one is resources. So I'm actually going to show the resources real quick first. So what these are are summary articles about a topic and they're not long because we know you don't want to necessarily spend hours reading through an article but that's what they are. And then these topics change based on which section of the program that you're in. All right. So if I clicked in my breadcrumb trail rectangle right there this is just yet another way of displaying again a route into the same place that I'm going which is the worksheet. So in this section there are a bunch of editable text fields and this is essentially a self reflection or a self exploration section. It's not required. The program doesn't require it but if you want to as an exercise for your own mind answer these questions. Each of these sections in this blue screened area here has these four questions which is what is this? How does it work? Why should I do it? And where do I start? And it's just answers that for each main section that you're in. And then when you're done you can save, you can return to the dashboard or you can say you want to edit it. If you click I've got more to do on this section or any other section what it will do is it will prevent these icons from turning green. They're all green right now because I'm demoing on a version that has everything completed but they are white if they are not completed. So it's a simple status bar essentially for you. I will go back to the dashboard and I will go into the second section. This one uses the lean canvas which as you probably know is a popular way of doing things lately. And again we've got these questions which you can click these edit icons to edit. If you click one so here's the problem statement for example what's the problem that your business is aiming to solve? You'll get this pop up and here is the actual text window that you'll write your text in. We've got these prompts here if you click on a prompt sometimes it will give you a link and when it has this box with an arrow that indicates it's going to open a new tab that usually means that it's going to open another product which is adjacent to plan builder in Gail's product suite. So for San Francisco for example we have a product called Gail Business Entrepreneurship and another one called Legal Forms and both of those link between plan builder and themselves and this helpful resources window is where those links would appear and they appear when it's appropriate for them so they're not always there they just appear when you're in that section that calls for them. All right and then you can close or you can save your changes and if I click this button that says show example it shows me an example. All right so I'll click return to the dashboard. Okay break even analysis this is where it gets a little graphy and a little mathy. I've been clicking into this one just to show you a slightly different route in which is in the large links section and these little buttons here will take me to each individual section and once I'm in there I can also get to them from each other here. So here is where you start to get into a little more of the details so you would factor in your payroll your various other expenses or how your budget is being split out if you have unclassifiable expenses you can enter them here and this program automatically projects out five years from the year that you enter starting your company. So this example was put in a couple years ago which is why it says 2021. If you were to edit your company's start date to say 2023 now it would then count forward to 2028 and then your growth here you would enter your expected percentages for each one and you can enter zero if it's expected to stay level and you can enter negative numbers if you think there might be a drop. All right and again we've got helpful resource links here. We've also got a guide me which is a step by step pop-up sequence explaining what exactly is each window looking for and then here you've got cost of goods sold and you can enter any number of products that you want. Capital is here here's where you can track like are you putting your own money or are you getting a loan or anything like that. Sales is your projected sales and then once you've completed at least one thing in each of these it will generate a breakeven report. This is an overly optimistic one because it has the breakeven point happening in year one so it's very idealistic I guess but this is what it will show you and as you change numbers on these tables the graph will change accordingly. So in other words you wouldn't you wouldn't necessarily manipulate this graph by clicking and dragging these points it just shows you what results from the numbers that you entered on the prior screens. The breakeven analysis graph is viewable as a graph but you can also run real quick sort of mini scenarios so what this is is it takes one year and it will show you five different rows where you can experiment with manipulating how your sales might change and how a change in sales might affect each of these other financial categories. So the expected row meaning a hundred percent of sales sales is a hundred percent of what you expected is always the third row in the middle and then you can type in any percentage you want that's either lower than expected or if you have a better than expected year and it will show you perhaps most importantly your net operating profit after taxes based on how good or how not so good your year goes. So those first three main sections are what we know that the majority of plan builder users do they'll use it as a as a thought exercise for a soft reflection they'll use it to you know run experiments with their breakeven and their expenses and all that. Sections four and five are both larger and again the software doesn't require them but you if you really want a complete plan that covers all the details and all the nooks and crannies this is where you would go. So business plans essentially takes business ideation and it drills down and expands as much as possible so you've got all of these different categories company background direction etc etc all of these are editable the sample text is quite long but you can be as brief as you would like and as you can see it's got sections for even like executive summaries and so on let me click edit lean business plan and again this section has these four questions just like all the other ones do which is what am I supposed to do here what is the screen mean it's always there for you and then if you want to edit any of these things you would simply click on the bar that they're in here's one where you would actually upload a visual an image file if you have a load up board is where you can put in like if you actually have like board members all right so you can if you would like search for sample business plans what this link does is it takes you into the adjacent product gale business entrepreneurship which San Francisco does have and again if you if you run a search here for the type of business that you want it will show you examples of business plans for that type of business and you can use that as a guide to type in anything any of these fields here including things like exit strategy and mark I think that we we got a quick question in the chat here from Talia who says is the sample text on always on the home page like on your screen I'm assuming that's referring to the the sample text that you input and the answer would be no that that's something that you just put in as kind of the demo for for for the presentation purposes so when you make a new account the there is not like placeholder text for you in the text field it's it's just like so then you you would start so we that's why we try to have like links that go out to examples or guide me text that explains what each text field is looking for but there there won't be like prefab examples in there for you exactly I I hope that I represented your question correctly Talia correct me if I'm wrong though all right so that gets to the answer all right so I'm actually almost done here I will just take a quick look at financial projections and this is where if you love balance sheets and cash flow statements and all of that stuff this is where that all lives here you can select your time frame a lot of these categories drill down into subcategories this is this outer screen is where you can look at what's going on and then if you want to change something you would either click edit or you could click into any of these and if it's got a green check mark by it that means there's already something in there the program won't judge for you if what you put in there makes sense or is great it just looks to see if you've entered something and so each of these subcategories is where you can account for anything that's going on so if you have a loan you can enter your loan information here and so on and so on and again we've got our helpful resources all right so coming back to the the dashboard screen let me just show you real quick what changes if you select a nonprofit so if I click that entrepreneur profile has changed to founder profile business situation is now just ideation and business plans now becomes bylaws and strategic plans if you build a plan say like in for profit business mode and you've entered a bunch of text and a bunch of numbers and then you want to switch to nonprofit or if you want to switch in the other direction it will remember everything that you've entered in so you will not lose anything it's all still there there are a few other small changes for example buried way deep in the financial projection section there's a section about staffing which what the concept behind that doesn't change it's just what it calls what it's called does change a little bit it's called like mission staffing as opposed to staffing and the last thing I will just want to real quick is if I click on my user menu and I go to account settings you do have the option if you click users you can add more than one person and so if you're partnered with somebody or if you have someone who reports to you you can add them in their email as a user here and then you can also define if I click edit user you can define which sections they have access to and which sections they're allowed to edit all right so I'll click back into the dashboard and all right that did not take long but that is the program in Nutshell I'm more than happy to revisit or visit further any of the subsections I know that's there's still some time left on the clock here so but thank you very much for for watching awesome thank you so much Mark and yet like Mark said let's open it up to some questions now if anybody has any questions on anything that Mark went over or anything if you can throw those in the chat we will respond to those all right I will just just show up a couple of other things here in the ideation section actually let me switch back into for profit business ideation section it does give you some things that you can do optionally if you like you've got some swap fields here and you've got past and as you can see down here we've got quarters five forces which we all remember from business school if we went there do you do you know Mark this is just kind of a question from my own ignorant but you probably have a lot of information on kind of overall data for how the product is used do you know if if it's most common that people will use the but one kind of analysis method versus another more frequently I'm kind of putting you on a spot here yeah so I can't answer that mathematically all right and say that I it wouldn't surprise me if swat and porters are the ones that are used more frequently as opposed to pest my I may not be a business encyclopedia but I believe that a pest framework is is simply a more recent development in business thought it was probably just don't don't be on anything or used to yeah okay that makes sense all right we got a question is there a special pricing for SFPL well everybody that is a SFPL member you have open access to the full resource just through through being a patron of the library you do need to be careful that you are accessing through the library we do occasionally get frequent questions about well we do get frequent questions not occasionally frequent questions about people accidentally hitting the paywall for the direct to consumer version of this software and that is almost always because the user forgot to go through their libraries platform to access the program exactly so make sure that you're using the link as it is as is listed on the SFPL website we got a question do you have to fill out the previous sections of profile ideation and break even in order to complete the business plan section or are they independent of each other so they are independent of each other you can do anything in any order you can just do any particular thing if you only want to do one particular subsection somewhere exactly that's that's why I mentioned up top this resource is really great for any stage of your business that you're in really and you can email or download any partial or any subsection that you work with and take it with you yeah that's a great point mark mark can you show us what it looks like when you print it out yes I can't hold up a piece of paper but I can at least at least the PDF yes I can show all right so hopefully you can see my my little window here on here but I downloaded a bunch of them and mostly PDF farm and then we've got one spreadsheet here so here's here's the balance sheet for Neptune coffee showing our numbers here all right let's do a couple more oh hold on this is going to take a while because our company just happens to be between Adobe licenses right now so I always get this pop-up window about your license has expired all right so here's the here's the download PDF of the entrepreneur profile and you can also download these as Microsoft Word documents if you want so you can keep editing them you know after you take them with you it would give you the shape the the table in that format that's useful if you want to head it offline at all yep maybe I'll show maybe I'll show this one okay yeah this was the long one this is the long one this is like the actual business plan it's 18 pages long as you can see you can take this to the bank literally and it's got even got your table of contents and it will include everything that you have filled out that's what I really love about this is that it formats it so beautifully and you don't have to worry about that you just have to worry about the content yeah exactly we'll we'll fill out and it will make all the design choices for you any more questions coming in I don't see any more questions coming in the chat well I guess that's a good sign because it's so easy to use and you demonstrated it so well Mark I guess so that's great and there there are avenues you know if you want to ask questions those questions will get to us and we will answer them definitely yeah as Mark mentioned before either submitting something through tech support or if you go to any of your anybody at the library they can bring them over to me or Mark or either of our teams okay that's a good chat so lean lean is is a business concept the person the actual persons who created it is escaping me right now I actually think it's listed somewhere in here but I would have to find it but it's it's basically a more efficient or shorter version counterpart to a full business plan essentially here it is the lean startup by Eric Reese Rice I'm not sure if his name is pronounced Risa Rice but there it is maybe the library has it or Libby has it we have a ton of books about the lean canvas so yeah we have a ton that name is listed if you go into the lean canvas section I actually forgot I had stopped sharing my screen and then you click the link that says what is this it will list the lean startup by Eric Rice as the source for that that's R-I-E-S and Kersey asked me to put the the general help email address in the chat I'll just put the just put the tech support address in their mark and that that will that can get to you yeah is it like support at Cengage.com yeah yeah let me see just double check that I always I always just type it in the address bar I type in tech support and then it comes up yeah gale.technicalsupport at Cengage.com I'll type that in the chat and then oh we we did have a question is there a limit of how long we can use the product for free no no limit at all it's a completely you know completely free to you and any other users who again all that's required is becoming a member of San Francisco Public Library well if there are no other questions I want to thank both Kevin and Mark for such a great presentation you made it really easy to to understand and I think it's I think it's a great resource that's why I wanted to invite you so I hope people start using it because it's such a good resource absolutely thank you for having us and thanks to everyone out there for watching and listening to me today you were great Mark thank you and thank you to Kersi for setting all this up we wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for you so