How to Make a Business Plan That Works

By Sarah Taylor

Looking to develop a business or extend one you're already running? You'll need to create a business plan before you do. Through this book you will walk through the method of establishing your business, researching the market, and planning your product. Once you've decided out what your product or service will be, this book will provide direction for thinking through your sales plan, day-to-day progress, staffing, and financial forecasting. A sample business plan is presented so that you can track along with the development of a real-world company.

Content Include:

1-problem to discover
2-Defining the problem your business solves
3-Determining your product and revenue model
4-Understanding customers and the competition
5-Developing and delivering your product
6-Branding and marketing
7-Pricing
8-Managing production and operations
9-Financial planning
10-Avoiding business plan pitfalls

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sarah Taylor
• Release date: Dec 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781386536598

Sarah Taylor

Sarah Taylor has a BA in History and an MSLS. She enjoys reading and writing about history, playing piano, and going on park walks with her dog. You may find her at https://beautifuldreamerdotcom.wordpress.com and Goodreads at https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/21550493.Sarah_Taylor.

Book preview

Introduction

Are you looking to launch your business but you don't know where to start? Are you concerned about some of the risks you might face in getting your business off the ground? A business plan is a great way to plan for launching your business, as well as accounting for and planning for some of those risks you might face.

In this book I will cover, how do you define your business? And then, understanding the market where you're going to compete. How do you define your product or your service and then sell it to customers in a way that they'll care about? How do you run the operations such that you can support that business, as well as managing a lot of the administrative functions of your organization? Then the heart of the entire process projecting your financial results. Look, creating a business plan doesn't have to be an intimidating process.

It's straight forward, with some clear-cut components that I'll walk you through, step by step.

Defining your business

You may ask why do I need a business plan. Why can't I just launch my business and get to market? The importance of a business plan cannot be understated. First you have to define your business and how you're going to compete. You need to understand the market and where is your business going to occupy its space in that market versus your competitors. You’ll need to clearly define your product and why your customers should be interested in it. Once you've defined that product, have a good understanding of how you're going to take it to market.

After you've decided how you're going to take a product to market, you need to understand and articulate how you're going to operate that business and create an operating plan to support those operations. Now that means you're going to have people and you'll need a plan for managing your people and the resources that come along with them. You'll also need to define the administrative responsibilities and how you're going to fulfill them. Once you've got all that down, you'll need to project your financial results and create a clear financial plan that helps you understand how should the business perform over time.

Now with all of that done, you'll need to think through what are some of the major pitfalls that you could face as you launch your business and make sure you incorporate those into your plan. Now depending on the type of business you're running, not all of these elements will be relevant. However, these are the major components of the business plan and why you need to put them in place.

What is the problem you want to solve

The first step in writing your business plan is articulating a problem that you solve. Is this a problem that people are willing to pay you to fix? You'll need to define who has the problem, is it companies, is it individuals, spell out what your typical

Reviews for How to Make a Business Plan That Works

[Chiamaka Ifediora · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Simple and straight to the point. I just couldn't find the sample business plan at the end.