gills thoughts on business

Set up costs

• People (staffing and management)
• Materials ( to do the service)
• Resources (services, spaces, support)
• Communication (design and production of promotional material, awareness building)
• Servers and tech backup costs (IT to run the thing, handle databases, traffic and code Development)
• Other general business overheads including insurance, accountancy fees etc.

You can do this on the cheap by yourself, or you may like to borrow money from some form of investor for a good idea, but you have to convince them it. These costs are often described as sunk costs - that is they can't be taken out of the business and used again, they're the basic investment to get it running.

• Running costs
• People
• Resources needed
• additional services
• IT infrastructure costs
• Delivery/distribution costs
• Other general business overheads including insurance, accountancy fees etc.

• Expansion costs
• Additional services to provide new aspects of the service
• Additional training and development
• People
• Raw Materials
• Other general business overheads including insurance, accountancy fees etc.

But, and this is a big but, it's not all about the money, is it?

You may also consider the costs of the materials used in delivering your solution - now this is normally the domain of green consultants, but I think it should be as mainstream as Word is to computing. Basically there are not only costs about the production and performance of your services, but there are also hidden 'costs' of what you are trying to do. In product design land things appear to be fairly clear - it's about sustainable materials - that they are reusable, or renewed from other sources for example, or that they involve low power use. But there are costs that are hidden from sight, through the production processes - for example how much energy it takes to make something, or how much water is involved in the process of extraction, processing or shaping the raw materials.