Stakeholder Approach to Sustainable Business (100 points)

As organizations incorporate sustainability efforts into their processes, stakeholders are affected in many ways. Stakeholders should be on-board with the organization’s commitment to sustainability efforts, while maintaining a voice in future directions.

For this assignment, choose an organization in which you have experience with and compare and contrast how sustainability efforts affect their stakeholders. Your paper should analyze how the organization’s sustainability compliance efforts includes and affects its stakeholders. Explain every type of stakeholders (internal: employees, leadership; external: stockholders, citizens in the area the business operates, contractors, NGOs, etc.) and how the sustainability efforts impacted them. Which of the stakeholders are the most critical for the organization to survive and which are not critical for the organization’s success but important for numerous other reasons?

Your well-written paper should meet the following requirements:

• Be 4-5 pages in length, which does not include the title page, abstract, or required reference page, which are never a part of the minimum content requirements.
• Use Saudi Electronic University academic writing standards and APA style guidelines.
• Support your submission with course material concepts, principles, and theories from the textbook and at least two scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles.
• Review the grading rubric to see how you will be graded for this assignment.

Module 6: Business Plan Assignment 5

The next step you will take in developing your Business Plan is to create financial statements (step 13) and the loan or investment proposal (step 14).

Business Plan Elements

1. Title Page and Table of Contents

2. The Executive Summary

3. Mission and Vision Statements

4. Company History (If you are purchasing an existing business or are looking to expand an existing business)

5. Business and Industry Profile

6. Business Strategy

7. Describe the venture’s product or service

8. Marketing Strategy

9. Location and Layout

10. Competitor Analysis

11. Description of Management Team

12. Plan of Operation

13. Financial Statements

14. Loan or Investment Proposal

15. Conclusion

A. Key assumptions
B. Financial Statements (year 1 by month, years 2 and 3 by quarter)
1 Income statement
2. Balance Sheet
3. Cash Flow Statement

C. Break even analysis
D. Ratio analysis with comparison to industry standards

Loan or Investment Proposal

A. Amount requested
B. Purpose and use of funds
C. Repayment or cash out schedule (exit strategy)
D. Timetable for implementing plan and launching business.

Personal Financial Statement

Include personal financial statements for each owner and major stockholder, showing assets and liabilities held outside the business and personal net worth. Owners will often have to draw on personal assets to finance the business, and these statements will show what is available. Bankers and investors usually want this information as well.

II.Startup Expenses and Capitalization

You will have many expenses before you even begin operating your business. It’s important to estimate these expenses accurately and then to plan where you will get sufficient capital. This is a research project, and the more thorough your research efforts, the less chance that you will leave out important expenses or underestimate them.

Even with the best of research, however, opening a new business has a way of costing more than you anticipate. There are two ways to make allowances for surprise expenses. The first is to add a little “padding” to each item in the budget. The problem with that approach, however, is that it destroys the accuracy of your carefully wrought plan. The second approach is to add a separate line item, called contingencies, to account for the unforeseeable. This is the approach we recommend.

Talk to others who have started similar businesses to get a good idea of how much to allow for contingencies. If you cannot get good information, we recommend a rule of thumb that contingencies should equal at least 20 percent of the total of all other start-up expenses.

Explain your research and how you arrived at your forecasts of expenses. Give sources, amounts, and terms of proposed loans. Also explain in detail how much will be contributed by each investor and what percent ownership each will have.

III.Financial Plan

The financial plan consists of a 12-month profit and loss projection, a four-year profit and loss projection (optional), a cash-flow projection, a projected balance sheet, and a break-even calculation. Together they constitute a reasonable estimate of your company’s financial future. More important, the process of thinking through the financial plan will improve your insight into the inner financial workings of your company.

12-Month Profit and Loss Projection

Many business owners think of the 12-month profit and loss projection as the centerpiece of their plan. This is where you put it all together in numbers and get an idea of what it will take to make a profit and be successful.

Your sales projections will come from a sales forecast in which you forecast sales, cost of goods sold, expenses, and profit month-by-month for one year.

Profit projections should be accompanied by a narrative explaining the major assumptions used to estimate company income and expenses.

Research Notes: Keep careful notes on your research and assumptions, so that you can explain them later if necessary, and also so that you can go back to your sources when it’s time to revise your plan.

Four-Year Profit Projection (Optional)

The 12-month projection is the heart of your financial plan. This section is for those who want to carry their forecasts beyond the first year.

Of course, keep notes of your key assumptions, especially about things that you expect will change dramatically after the first year.

Projected Cash Flow

If the profit projection is the heart of your business plan, cash flow is the blood. Businesses fail because they cannot pay their bills. Every part of your business plan is important, but none of it means a thing if you run out of cash.

The point of this worksheet is to plan how much you need before startup, for preliminary expenses, operating expenses, and reserves. You should keep updating it and using it afterward. It will enable you to foresee shortages in time to do something about them—perhaps cut expenses, or perhaps negotiate a loan. But foremost, you shouldn’t be taken by surprise.

There is no great trick to preparing it: The cash-flow projection is just a forward look at your checking account.

For each item, determine when you actually expect to receive cash (for sales) or when you will actually have to write a check (for expense items).

You should track essential operating data, which is not necessarily part of cash flow but allows you to track items that have a heavy impact on cash flow, such as sales and inventory purchases.

You should also track cash outlays prior to opening in a pre-startup column. You should have already researched those for your startup expenses plan.

Your cash flow will show you whether your working capital is adequate. Clearly, if your projected cash balance ever goes negative, you will need more start-up capital. This plan will also predict just when and how much you will need to borrow.

Explain your major assumptions, especially those that make the cash flow differ from the Profit and Loss Projection. For example, if you make a sale in month one, when do you actually collect the cash? When you buy inventory or materials, do you pay in advance, upon delivery, or much later? How will this affect cash flow?

Are some expenses payable in advance? When?

Are there irregular expenses, such as quarterly tax payments, maintenance and repairs, or seasonal inventory buildup, that should be budgeted?

Loan payments, equipment purchases, and owner’s draws usually do not show on profit and loss statements but definitely do take cash out. Be sure to include them.

Opening Day Balance Sheet

A balance sheet is one of the fundamental financial reports that any business needs for reporting and financial management. A balance sheet shows what items of value are held by the company (assets), and what its debts are (liabilities). When liabilities are subtracted from assets, the remainder is owners’ equity.

Use a startup expenses and capitalization spreadsheet as a guide to preparing a balance sheet as of opening day. Then detail how you calculated the account balances on your opening day balance sheet.

Optional: Some people want to add a projected balance sheet showing the estimated financial position of the company at the end of the first year. This is especially useful when selling your proposal to investors.

Break-Even Analysis

A break-even analysis predicts the sales volume, at a given price, required to recover total costs. In other words, it’s the sales level that is the dividing line between operating at a loss and operating at a profit.

Expressed as a formula, break-even is:

Breakeven Sales =	Fixed Costs
	1- Variable Costs

(Where fixed costs are expressed in dollars, but variable costs are expressed as a percent of total sales.)

Include all assumptions upon which your break-even calculation is based.

And of course, depreciation does not appear in the cash flow at all because you never write a check for it.

A-11: Try the Testbed

(1) Try the Testbed interface on the sample tables with these queries (one at a time) to get used to it:

show tables;

describe sample1;

describe sample2;

select * from sample1;

select * from sample2;

select sample2.name, city, amount FROM sample2, sample1
where sample2.name = sample1.custname AND industrytype = “B”;

select salesperson from sample2, sample1
where sample2.name = sample1.custname and city = “Manchester”
order by salesperson asc;

Also, try the various buttons and controls on the Testbed webpage to see what they do.

(2) Then, CREATE AND POPULATE THE THREE TABLES AntiqueOwners, Orders, and Antiques as defined in the Hoffman SQL Tutorial. To do this, you will use (at least) the Create Table and Insert commands.

(3) Capture the result of a SELECT * for each of those tables and submit them.

(4) Then, run this join query, also from the Hoffman SQL Tutorial, and capture and submit its result:

select OwnerLastName, OwnerFirstName from AntiqueOwners, Antiques
where BuyerID = OwnerID and Item=”Chair”;

A-12: Run the Antique Buyers query from a PHP program –

Based on the sample PHP program given for running a database query,
write and run a PHP program to perform the Antique Buyers query from the last step of assignment A-11. Name the script “buyers.php” and put it in your samples directory.

Submit your PHP script buyers.php (your .php file but not the others files the instructor gave you that it uses) and a captured sample of its webpage output.

A-13: Tables Design for a Film Showings DB

Given the attached requirements for a Film Showings database, develop and document your detailed plan for what Tables and needed in the database and how those Tables are related to each other.

Use whatever notation or documentation method you have been taught for expressing such a design that will satisfy the requirements of the problem.

DO NOT BUILD and tables in your MySQL database for this assignment. This is an exercise in understanding and designing to meet user requirements and to come up with a workable plan for relational database tables. It is NOT an exercise in building those tables.

Attach you answer as a Word, PDF, Powerpoint, jpg, png, gif, or text document, or some combination (could be several files). Please put your name on the top of the first page of every file of your submission.

Analyzing the Significance of Art

(100 points)

Overview: For your first out-of-class essay, you will select a creative visual work—photograph, painting, film, novel, poem, music video, etc.—and analyze why the art is significant and what arguments can be inferred from the piece. While it is encouraged to include personal connections to the art, be sure your arguments about its meaning are mostly universal. Because this is your first essay, and it is important to see where you are at as a writer, the guidelines for this assignment will be somewhat open-ended compared to other essays you will write this semester.
Purpose: To analyze the significance of art, make personal connections, and develop initial arguments about visual rhetoric.
Audience: Someone who might be unfamiliar with you and/or the art you have selected.

Requirements ï‚”

Your essay should be 1000-1500 words in length (about 3-5 pages). ï‚”

Craft a catchy title that encourages the reader to keep reading. ï‚”

Include an introduction paragraph with a hook and a thesis statement; body paragraphs with topic sentences, specific examples to support your assertions, concluding sentences, and transitions; and a conclusion paragraph. ï‚”

Use MLA formatting, and include the word count in your heading. ï‚”

Embed images of/from your piece of art into your essay to enhance your reader’s experience. 

Submit your essay to Canvas by the final due date

After responding to the weekly discussion topic on FOOTPRINTING, you now have an idea as to how to conduct a digital investigative project. For this assignment, you are asked to develop your own crime scenario. Explain the incident that occurred, and then list the steps you would follow to solve this case (examples might include: a lost child, an unauthorized charge on your credit card, an unidentified charge made with your EZ PASS, etc.).