Animal feed companies: New companies thrive on innovation. If you want to come up with a winning idea for a new company, you’ll need to set yourself up for success by learning to conduct market analysis and identify a gap in consumers’ needs, then develop a compelling vision to fill that desire with a new and undeniable product. See Steps to start learning how to start a new company.
Read also: 15 Successful Ways of Goat Breeding Business
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1. Get the Business Background:
Animal feed is food given to domestic animals, especially livestock, in the course of animal husbandry. There are two basic types: fodder and forage. Used alone, the word feed more often refers to fodder. Animal feed is an important input to animal agriculture, and is frequently the main cost of the raising or keeping of animals. Farms typically try to reduce cost for this food, by growing their own, grazing animals, or supplementing expensive feeds with substitutes, such as food waste like spent grain from beer brewing.
Read also: 17 Tips to Become Grain/livestock Buyer
Animal wellbeing is highly dependent on feed that reflects a well balanced nutrition. Some modern agricultural practices, such as fattening cows on grains or in feed lots, have detrimental effects on the environment and animals. For example, increased corn or other grain in feed for cows, makes their microbiomes more acidic weakening their immune systems and making cows a more likely vector for E.coli. While other feeding practices can improve animal impacts. For example, feeding cows certain kinds of seaweed, reduces their production of methane, reducing the greenhouse gases from meat production.
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When an environmental crisis strikes farmers or herders, such as a drought or extreme weather driven by climate change, farmers often have to shift to more expensive manufactured animal feed, which can negatively effect their economic viability. For example, a 2017 drought in Senegal reduced the availability of grazing lands leading to skyrocketing demand and prices for manufactured animal feed, caused farmers to sell large portions of their herds. Additionally agriculture for producing animal feed puts pressure on land use: feed crops need land that otherwise might be used for human food and can be one of the driving factors for deforestation, soil degradation and climate change.
2. Identify a new market.
A successful company uses creativity and innovation to discover previously untapped markets for products and services, creating things that consumers didn’t even know they needed, then selling it to those consumers at a profit. If your goal is to form a successful company, you need to start by finding a great need in a consumer base and planning a way to exploit it.
- Do market analysis to identify potential consumer needs and desires. If you’ve already got a great idea for an innovative product, think about who it is that will want to use and purchase your product or service. Be as specific as possible.
- Consider important statistical factors in your potential consumer base that will help you plan your product and structure your company around its consumers:
- Age of an average customer
- Socioeconomic status
- Location (urban, rural)
- Education
- Spending habits
See also: 41 Analytical Fact on Livestock Farming Business
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3. Develop a compelling product, concept, or service for that market.
When you’ve identified a need, fill that need with a new concept for a product. Think big. Innovation requires that you identify something that will change the way people think. Apple wouldn’t be a successful company if they hadn’t identified a consumer base’s desire for elegant and simple music, phone, and computing technology.
- Recent start-up success story “Coin” had the idea of a simple card that consolidates all your credit cards, debit cards, gift cards, and other wallet-clogging plastic into one, easy-to-use card. By identifying a consumer need (to de-clutter) and a simple, elegant product that filled that need, Coin generated a lot of buzzes and attracted serious investors and customers.
4. Create a working model of your product.
To attract serious investors, you’re going to have to prove that your innovation is possible. Whether your company will be structured around the most delicious brownie mix ever marketed to Brooklynites, or a chain of coffee kiosks, you’ll have to develop a working model that works.
- Hook up with engineers and other technological innovators if you can’t create a working model of your product yourself. Depending on what you’re trying to create, this may be a serious time and money investment. Consider crowd-sourcing for an initial product, if it should prove expensive.
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5. Create a long-term series of goals for your company.
What will you need for your company to be successful at the end of this month? The end of this year? Ten years down the road? Give some serious thought to where you want your company to head and what you’ll need to take it there. Flying by the seat of your pants is a good way to create a company that will fail. Careful planning will help you to structure your company and accurately anticipate the challenges that await you.
See also: 8 Tips to Start Livestock Farming Business
6. Put a name on it.
It’s important to come up with an appropriate and eye-catching name for your company to make it official. Brainstorm lots of possibilities and get feedback on a handful of your favourites. A well-named company has a much better chance of sticking around long-term. Your name also needs to be unique in your state, if you plan on filing for incorporation and should be registered with the Business Bureau or Administration in your state. A good company name should be:
- Catchy
- Simple
- Fresh
- Easy to brand
7. Obtain the proper state and federal permits to conduct business.
Depending on the nature of your products or services, you’ll have to file at the federal and state level to conduct business legally. Research the requirements and talk to a representative at the business bureau to make sure you’ve filed appropriately and are within the bounds of the law.
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8. Estimate your start-up costs.
This should be done as part of the business plan, as a way of figuring out exactly what you’ll need to request from investors and acquire via other means. It’s an essential part of getting your company started, and helps to give possible shareholders or venture capitalists a hard number to consider.
- Try to distinguish between essential and optional costs. The cost of the start-up should only include essential costs, the bare minimum to get things started. While it’d be great to have money built-in to the start-up for the Fruit Loops bar you’ve always wanted to have at work, it’s probably not a great idea to build that into the initial plan.
Read also: How to Write Superior Livestock Business Plan
9. Complete a cash-flow analysis.
Before anyone will consider putting up money to invest in your business, they’re going to want to know when they’ll start seeing some return on that investment. You can determine this by performing a cash-flow analysis, the result of which will be a reasonable expectation of the time it will take for your company to become profitable and begin paying back the investment.
- A good cash-flow analysis should accompany your business plan when you meet with investors.
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10. Get your formula:
With the right knowledge of where you want to specialize in, spend some time to learn about the nutritional needs. For e.g., the combination for chicken feeds is different from that of catfish, likewise those of other livestock. This is where you need the assistance of an animal nutritionist to help you come up with the right formula.
11. Ingredients:
You need to purchase the following ingredients for production. Maize, Corn, Cassava grits for energy, Wheat offal as a source of protein, Noodle wastes for carbohydrate and Proteins, Soybean meal, Fish meals Palm kernel cake, Oyster shells, Bone meals, Minerals and common Salt.
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12.Equipment:
These are the equipment you would need to start a full animal feed production on your own. Grinders, wet and dry, Mixers Wet/dry, Pellets, cooker, freezer, crumblier, Elevators, Conveyors, Sifter, Weighing scales, Steam boiler, Sealers and Bag sewers and Packaging bag. If you find this hard to come by, no problem, some effective custom made are readily available to choose from for your business and its size. Get an expert involved!
Read on: How to Run a Successful Livestock Agent Business(customer service)
13.Packaging:
This is so important because the size of your feeds either hold or scare your customers away. Give them various sizes to choose from and make sure to stick with what you are known for.
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14. Embrace new media and advertising.
While it’s important to announce your company in the traditional business trades and make regular contacts, it’s essential to embrace new media and structure your company in the 21st century. Building a buzz around social media and other online venues could be the difference between a hot new unveiling and a flat-out failure.
15. Marketing:
This is an area that every aspiring feed producers fear most and they are right because they can only make money by having their products sold repeatedly.
The only solution to this, is to market, market and market! Have enough samples with you any time you are out there and always leave your means of contacts with your prospective customers.
Get sales representatives and give them enough incentive to keep them motivated to be up and doing.
Warning: Do not put them on a fixed salary. Let their earning be based on commissions because they would be encouraged to work harder for more pay.
See also: How to Run a Successful Silent Superior Livestock Auction
16. Have your own outlets if you can afford that.
You can as well supply to livestock feed stores while you leave your contact address with them but do not hope to get a direct referrals from them as that would cut their customers from them, instead, have your contacts discretely inserted into the bag if an end user wishes, he can contact you from there.
Animal feed companies
17. Have few trusted farmers
Another good idea is to have few trusted farmers in your list and supply them more than enough of what they can use within some stipulated time and be directing customers there, that is another way of indirectly having some outlets for your products.
18. Online too, is another avenue that you can sell your products.
By the time you are through with the necessary inquiries from some livestock farmers during your market surveying, you would have come up with enough strategies to employ and have your productions stand out among the rest as that could as well help you to know the price tags on your products without hurting your investments negatively. Wishing you success as you embark on this interesting endeavour.
Read also: 25 Tips to Find Livestock Feed Business Investors
Animal feed companies
19. Make your company a trendy place to work.
As you recruit and hire new employees, dropping your new company on the world, you want to cultivate a reputation as an innovative and trendy place to be associated with. Companies like Google and Facebook, aside from being incredibly successful and innovative service providers, have also established a reputation as places that celebrate progressive office culture. If you want to attract the best and the brightest in young workers, forego the dismal office park and the traditional culture in the wake of flextime, worker-friendly aesthetics and features, and an open policy of making your employees happy.
- In general, the difference between thinking in terms of a successful business and a successful company is that a company requires much obsession over issues of HR and office policy, in addition to the traditional business concerns of product development and innovation.