The Chrysalis Process

Craft Business Plans 

While a great business idea may come easily, bringing this idea to fruition as a full-time, profitable venture is more difficult. The Chrysalis team works with our clients to transform their businesses with a values-oriented mindset that promotes sustainability, culture, empowerment, transparency, and participatory planning. By keeping these principles in mind we will help women with a vision find financial freedom while having a positive impact in the world. 

Financial Literacy 

Timidity and lack of confidence have been cited as two of the largest causes of the discrepancy between female entrepreneurs and financial resources. It seems that this lack of confidence in the business environment stems from a feeling of lack of know-how in the financial world. This apprehension to approach investors and funds is amplified even more throughout communities of color, and notable marginalized communities due to lack of higher education in lower socioeconomic groups. 

The VC world has been referred to as one big “boy’s club” for too long, and not without reason. Chrysalis aims to change this narrative and empower female entrepreneurs by giving them the financial knowledge they need to feel confident in their abilities for themselves and for the investors we will connect them with. Fostering financial literacy and confidence in business acumen is going to be a crucial part of the Chrysalis process. 

Investment Pitches

Once entrepreneurs have created viable business plans and feel confident in their abilities to discuss their ideas and advocate for themselves financially, we work to create investment pitch materials, such as decks, presentation skills and financial forecasts. We will provide them the opportunity to mock pitches, and receive professional feedback. Chrysalis intends to work alongside organizations such as IFundWomen and Spring Bank, to provide our entrepreneurs with the funds they need to succeed. 

Within their pitches, we will encourage and assist entrepreneurs to promote their business’ values oriented mindset, highlighting concepts such as sustainability, culture, transparency, and participatory planning. Creating organizations that are aiming for net positive, rather than net zero, is a critical component of success in the eyes of Chrysalis. While we work to uplift female entrepreneurs financially, we also work to uplift the communities they surround themselves with and exist within. 

 Value Proposition

We will be the first student consultant group that focuses on helping marginalized female entrepreneurs, starting with no cost to them. Our target clients and our revenue models are our two unique selling points.

Financial Accessibility

At the core of Chrysalis is our value of making startup consulting financially accessible to women from marginalized communities. Research shows that "31% of Black women business owners rely on personal funds to finance their businesses, whereas only 16% of non-minority women business owners say the same."  This makes it hard to get their business started, especially with start up consulting rates at $50-300/hour.  Unlike other consulting groups, we will not take any forms of payment or compensation until we help a business achieve net profits, as we are only shareholders of the company. From here, we will have a small portion of the business and continue to be a part of the organization if the founder/owner wants to continue our relationship. This will enable underprivileged entrepreneurs to get started with sound advice of a business plan, a pitch presentation and other resources at no initial cost. 

Competitive Context

There are organizations that utilize the talent of students to consult on sustainability and non-profit organizations (See Appendix B). However, none focus on women or marginalized communities and none are out to make a profit. 

The organization 180 Degrees Consulting has a similar structure in using students at universities like NYU as the consultant talent pool, which enables them to offer their services for free, and provides volunteer and professional experience for students. What makes us different is our revenue model, which enables entrepreneurs to start consulting for free, but ultimately charges them for services. Another difference is our target group – whilst 180 Degrees Consulting focus on non-profit and social mission businesses, we specialize on the business ideas of women and making them come to life in a sustainable and ethical way. Effectively, both the clients and our team make a profit.

Other universities have student-consulting organizations, namely Cornell Sustainability Consultants group. They exclusively focus on sustainability consulting and local businesses, which therefore focuses on a different target consumer base. In addition, they charge no fee for their services and thereby make no profits. 

Our Values 

Chrysalis takes a holistic and intersectional approach to sustainability. By looking at the systematic problems of society, our company is tackling racial & ethnic inequity, gender inequity and planetary health at once. Those values are embedded into our company ranging from the way we choose our clients, the locations we operate in, and how and what we consult our clients on. 

Gender Equity

Women are consistently disadvantaged in the business world. This is especially true for women of color. To achieve an equal society, we need to uplift women to an equal playing field. 

In addition, Studies have shown that women are more likely to align their businesses and investments with their values and start social ventures. Enabling women would not only help a budding entrepreneur’s livelihood, but also their families and communities. 

Racial Equity

The two biggest minorities in the US, African-Americans and Latinx folks, are systematically underfunded through housing, education and health.  By empowering those women, we want to foster the bottom up approach of solving issues and needs in the community, rather than the usual top down approach that often fails. Our mission is to make consulting accessible to them financially and enable them to succeed. In addition, as we choose clients who are also mission driven, it will enable them to strengthen their local communities. 

Transparency and Accountability

In order to accomplish intersectional sustainability and system change, we believe that radical transparency and accountability is needed. Transparency is important because it builds trust, enhances productivity and helps consumers make informed choices. This will include full-cost accounting which will be critical to our success. With our mission to help marginalized female entrepreneurs, ‘unsustainable’ projects will not be rejected by us, but rather workshopped to transform into an enterprise with a positive impact on society and our environment. 

Planetary Health 

Environmental concerns are some of the biggest of modern society, and people of color are disproportionately affected by the consequences of climate change and pollution. Our environmental goals will play out in how we function, as well as who and how we consult our clients. Our goal is to enable our clients to create a sustainable product, supply chain and business model that helps them as an entrepreneur, their communities and the environment. We will provide sustainability consulting and encourage our clients to seek B-Corporation certification after we have successfully become one ourselves. This would enable us and them to become part of a business movement for social good. 

 Key Partners

Chrysalis’s key partners are IFundWomen, Spring Bank, NYU, Columbia University and NYU Leslie eLab. In addition to these, local partnerships are at the heart of our businesses as we value collaborating with the community to bring the best results for the community. Last but not least, we partner with online business tools in order to provide supportive resources to our customers.  Below is a list of Chrysalis’s partnerships and their purpose. 

IFundWomen: IFundWomen, the world’s largest funding marketplace for women-owned businesses, is Chrysalis’s strategic partner that will provide funding and educational opportunities to female entrepreneurs Chrysalis works with, as well as to Chrysalis itself. IFundWomen’s capital, coaching and connections are crucial resources for Chrysalis to empower women entrepreneurs to launch their businesses. In its first few foundational years, Chrysalis will depend on the iFundWomen platform to support its initial expenses.

Spring Bank: Chrysalis creates its financial literacy education for female entrepreneurs in collaboration with Spring Bank, New York’s First B-Corp Bank. Spring Bank provides ​​personalized financial solutions and commercial lending to Chrysalis’s female entrepreneurs while they become loyal customers of Spring Bank. 

NYU Leslie eLab’s Female Founders: Chrysalis matches its female entrepreneurs with female entrepreneurs from NYU Leslie eLab’s Female Founders group for peer to peer mentorship.

Value Chain

Strategic Partnerships: A fundamental activity Chrysalis will focus on is building strategic partnerships with outside organizations because most of the resources we provide to women, other than consulting, will be provided through partnerships and are crucial for the success of our business and female entrepreneurs.

Student Consultants: Marketing targeted at NYU and Columbia will help Chrysalis recruit students as consultants. In addition to recruiting student consultants, Chrysalis needs to create a cohesive set of shared resources and training materials in order to ensure unity and quality in our student work. 

Workshops: Weekly 1-1 consulting workshops held at our office; monthly workshops on financial literacy and business development for women entrepreneurs at our office space. 

Community Outreach: Outreach and marketing activities to find and connect with marginalized women entrepreneurs.

Building Network Communities: Women entrepreneurs will be matched with each other for peer-to-peer mentorship as a part of our community-based strategy. Building a network within our community will create an empowering culture and ensure bottom up solutions, as well as increased network effects. A network effect in this business will be very important, first for connecting us to entrepreneurs, but also to build a network of professionals, business leaders and owners that can offer their services, insight and financial resources to make these ventures become successful.

Distribution Channel

Virtual: FLY Social Media presence through Instagram, Facebook, website, and email newsletters

In-Person: Visit target communities, either at community centers or set up a booth in major meeting areas

Financials

Within the first two years, Chrysalis will be making a loss due to high startup costs and operating expenses, in addition to a lack of client revenue due to our delayed fee model. This model, while allowing for financial accessibility of our services, means that we only start making income from our first clients in Year 2 (2024), when we charge a client service fee, as well as incurring net income from non-controlling interest. In order to fund the ~$100,000 debt in the first two years of operation (2022 is Year 0), we will rely on external funding, details of which will be covered in the subsequent section. However, after this period, we will charge an average fee of $26,000 per client per year, which is a quarter of the industry average rate of approximately $105,000; this is simply a projection, as the fee varies depending on the level of services and the client’s profits. Each client will be aware of the terms of the agreement, and our pricing model.

We will also take a 7.5% stake in the companies, allowing our clients to maintain most of the control. Once we start incurring client income, we will be profitable, with a projected profit of $363,153 in five years. This projected growth is steady, but does have an exponential trajectory as client numbers increase and existing clients grow more successful. (See Appendix C) 

Funding

Our two main methods for fundraising in our first two years will be through grant applications and crowdfunding through our partner, iFundWomen, and contributions from donors and investors. iFundWomen offers a platform for female entrepreneurs, and we can leverage this network by creating a donation page for Chrysalis, as well as applying for grants, which we qualify for due to our status as a female-owned and operated business. In addition to this, we will tap into our network of individual connections who both believe in our mission and future financial success, and would therefore be willing to invest in our business. These funds will allow us to cover startup costs, general operating expenses, and salaries. 

Risk Analysis

The main risk that we face as a new organization is having enough credibility to be trustworthy to our clients. As a group of 20 year old students, we understand that the suggestions we make can influence a business's standing. However, we strongly believe that our education and mentorship from advisors will enable us to help others. In order to prove ourselves we will have to be transparent with our clients and fully dedicated to helping them grow. 

Another key risk is finding clients who are genuine in valuing the same things that we do. It is easy to promise that a company will continue to uphold the same ethics that we stress, but we need clients who genuinely care about maintaining these values in