Business Plan Development
Entrepreneurship, The Art of Succeeding in Business contains four sections that will progressively help you understand the challenges and opportunities associated with starting a business.
The second section of the book is the Business Plan Development Guide. This 12-chapter guide uses the Creative Discipline process to help students establish realistic business goals, develop sales forecasts, and estimate the potential income of the business. The process begins by having students focus on why they want to start a business and why their business has (or does not have) a chance to succeed. The exercises help students assess their personal strengths and weaknesses and help set goals that will meet both their personal and business priorities.
The Business Plan Development Guide then provides a guided process to develop a Marketing Plan and Financial Plan. Marketing Plan development begins with a Customer Survey that identifies customer demographics, product/service needs of potential customers, and annual purchasing expectations. Students then conduct a Competitor Survey to identify and evaluate other businesses that serve similar client needs. The customer and competitor data are then combined to identify a potentially under- served market segment - a market niche. The Marketing Plan is completed by calculating the estimated sales potential of the market niche.
The Financial Plan includes a detailed Cash Flow Analysis, Capitalization Plan, and Pro-Forma Financial Statements. After completing the Financial Plan (especially the Cash Flow Analysis) the student will have an implementation plan to capture the business potential identified in the Marketing Plan. Creative Discipline principles are most fully applied to the development of the Financial Plan. The students’ ability to make product, pricing, and overhead resource decisions is facilitated by adherence to a very structured spreadsheet development and analysis process.
The final section of the business plan is the Plan of Action. This list translates the sales and operating goals listed in the Marketing and Financial Plans into a calendar of things to do.
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