Writing a Business Plan
Thursday, October 23, 2008 12:24
Entrepreneurs don’t need business plans to succeed, Pierre Omidyar who created eBay is a good example. However, a business plan is a simple and useful tool for collecting the thoughts, prioritizing the actions, and planning for the business success.
The goal of making business plans is to set the business up for success not to become an armchair entrepreneur pondering every detail of business plans.
Actually, the business plans is more like a diary and a list of what to do than a college term paper. As mentioned previously, there are no hard and fast rules, or executive summary, pro forma, and sales forecasts, only if these things are found to be beneficial. However, there is some basic structure to follow to write up a good business plan.
1. The Vision
In this part, answers to several questions should be clearly stated. What exactly the business is? What problem does the business solve? Why is the solution offered by the business the best or most unique to your customers?
2. The Branding
After the statement of vision, it comes to the branding stage. What is the tailored story and marketing message? What is the product’s personality, soul, and voice? How can the above be translated into an identity, logo, website, business card, and so on?
3. The Budgets
What does it cost to build the product and provide the service? What are the expenses? Are there any hidden costs at all? And finally what profit can be expected?
4. Testing
What existing resources could be maken good use to help create new product or service? Is there someone who can try out the product or service and how can the feedbacks be collected and utilized?
5. Sales and Marketing
How can the business get its initial customers? How will the customer service be provided? And what marketing channels can be explored?
If the answer to the above aspects are not certain, some market researches should be done, or the SCORE should be turned to for advice. This basic structure can be mixed up, reordered, and further modified to suit different needs. But there are some basic points that should be bear in mind.
First of all, making a business plan is not just about writing it down, but about palnning to set the business up for real success. As a business plan is writen down for your own good, there are no hard and fast rules to write one!
Secondly, writing a business plan is a ocntinueing process that shouldn’ end untill the company is sold, quit, or failed miserably. It should be under ongoing amending in order to adapt it to the ever-changing environment. Frequent revising and periodically updating could be helpful as any plans out of the date is completely useless.
And last but not least, it should also be remembered that a business plan is there to help but not get in one’s way of moving forward with the business.
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