What do you have to supply?
Less than people expect: no finished plan, no data room. Enough on the scoping call to point the research at the right question.
- What you sell, at roughly what price, to whom.
- Where: the address, candidate addresses, service radius or target states. A national answer and a three-mile answer are different work.
- Who reads it: bank, SBA lender, investor, immigration adjudicator, landlord, or only you. It changes what has to be proved.
- Competitors you already worry about, including the ones beating you.
- Numbers you hold: sales history, quotes won and lost, waitlists, footfall, ad spend, cost per lead. On the files we have worked on, a client's own trading numbers are often the material we lean on hardest.
- Your deadline, and whether it is real.
If you have none of that yet, take the call anyway: being told which of those six you cannot answer is half its value.
What do you actually receive?
Four things, on every tier:
The report
A designed PDF covering sizing, competitors, demand, pricing and segments, with the implication stated after each finding rather than left for you to infer.
The sizing workbook
The TAM, SAM and SOM calculation in a spreadsheet, assumptions in editable input cells, so a reader can change one and see the result move.
The source register
Every figure with its publisher, table or page reference and the date pulled, so a lender's analyst can verify it without calling us.
The handover call
30 minutes on the findings, including the parts that argue against your plan and what you could do about them.
How do revisions work?
Essential includes one revision round: read the draft, send comments in one batch, we work them through. On Standard and Premium revisions are unlimited within the agreed scope: scope meaning the market, the geography and the question we agreed to research on your call. Rewording, restructuring, changing the emphasis, and anything we got wrong: all included. A different geography, a second site or a new segment is different work, requoted openly rather than absorbed and rushed.
What a revision cannot do is move a finding because you dislike it. If demand comes in below what your model needs, we show you the calculation and the sources, and change the number only if the evidence changes. That rule is the reason the document is worth anything to the person reading it.
Why does market research fail in front of lenders and investors?
Weak market sections fail in a few recognizable ways, nearly all avoidable:
- The one percent fallacy. A vast national figure, then an assumed share of it. It says nothing about whether anyone within driving distance will buy.
- National TAM, no local SAM. A single-site business sized against a country. If it serves a catchment, count the catchment.
- Figures with no traceable source. Statistics recycled from blog roundups or generated by an AI tool, with no primary publisher and no date. We will not carry a figure we cannot trace back to a named publisher and a date pulled.
- A competitor list missing the obvious competitor. The nearest or the largest operator left off the matrix, usually because it was never found rather than because it was judged irrelevant.
- Prices that are not observed prices. Industry averages or aspirational rates, where what is needed is what the business down the road charges today.
- Research that contradicts the model beside it. Modest local demand in the narrative, explosive volume in the projection. Both have to come from one set of assumptions, which is why our research and financial models are built together.
When is market research the wrong product for you?
Four cases where we will tell you to spend the money elsewhere, or not at all:
- A lender or program asked for a feasibility study in writing. Buy the feasibility study. Market research is not a cheaper version of it. On the files we have worked on, sending research in place of a requested study has meant buying the study afterwards anyway. Read our page on SBA feasibility study requirements, then bring the written request to the call so we can read what was actually asked for.
- You are buying a full business plan from us anyway. The research is already inside it. Add this only for depth a plan chapter would not carry.
- You need statistically representative primary research. Surveys at a defensible sample size, focus groups or a commissioned panel are a different discipline and budget. We will say so rather than staple a survey onto desk research.
- You want the research to agree with you. If a lower number would be unusable to you, do not commission the work. Its only value is that it survives being challenged.
Written and reviewed by Muhammad Tayyab Shabbir, founder of AVVALE and of Business Plan Firm, its US practice. UCL, published textbook author. Questions on scope or sources: (315) 226-7205, Mon to Fri, 9am to 6pm ET.
Statements on this page about what lenders, CDCs, USDA programs, landlords and boards ask for describe the requests we have seen in our own engagements. They are not a published rule, and what is required varies by program, by lender and by file: the written request you were sent governs. For the published requirements we do cite, see SBA feasibility study requirements. Package contents, revision terms and the 5 to 10 day window describe our own service, not a standard any lender or investor is bound by. Reviewed 22 August 2026.