The plan we would have sent.
A market plan is the written starting point we hand a company before any work begins: what their ideal customer looks like to us, and how we’d turn that into research covering their whole market. This is the one we’d have put in front of a company selling reconciliation and deposit operations software to US community banks, on day one.
The company itself, TieOut, is invented, because a real client’s market never goes on display. Nothing else is invented: the market, the filings and the dates in the plan are all real.
Most of the work is in what it rules out.
A plan that only says yes is a brochure. These are the four calls in this one that changed what we’d build, and every one of them makes the job smaller.
Direction decides everything.
A bank buying another bank and a bank being bought look almost identical in every public source: same filing, same date, same coverage, same excited press release. One of them is a prospect. The other is a company whose operations team is about to be folded into somebody else’s. This plan establishes which side of a transaction a company sits on before it measures anything else about it.
Credit unions are out, and not because they’re a poor fit.
Credit unions report to a different regulator on a different form. The numbers this plan runs on, how big a bank is, how many people it employs, how its costs compare to its income, simply aren’t published for them. So excluding credit unions is a statement about what can be measured, not about who’s worth selling to. Including them would have produced confident-looking scores resting on nothing.
Fit and timing are never one number.
One bank in this market scored high on the event and low on strain. It had absorbed an acquisition cleanly and was gaining leverage rather than losing it: a real conversion engagement, and a terrible distress pitch. Those two facts lead to completely different opening lines. A single blended score would have averaged the most useful thing about that account into nothing.
It names what we’d have to build.
The plan proposes three research paths we don’t run today. It would have to read the regulator’s approval documents, pick up deals at the point they’re announced rather than when they’re filed, and work out which software each side of a merger was running. Saying so costs us the appearance of completeness, and it buys something worth more: the rest of the document can be taken at face value.
The strongest section is the one that admits what it does not know.
Every plan ends with what it assumed and what changes if the assumption turns out to be wrong. It’s written before we have spoken to anyone, so it’s guessing about several things. Saying which ones is the whole difference between a plan and a pitch.
We assumed your buyer is the acquirer. If you also sell to institutions being absorbed, during the window before they’re absorbed, your market roughly doubles and the decisive test inverts.
This plan became the example.
The plan and the example are the same story at two points in time. The plan is what arrives first, written from the outside. The example is what it turned into once the work ran on that market, with every claim carrying its source and its date.
Get one for your market.
Yours would be written the same way, on your market, from your website.