Business Plan Format

The Business Plan format is a systematic assessment of all the factors critical to your business purpose and goals.

Here are some suggested topics you can tailor into your plan:

A Vision Statement: This will be a concise outline of your business purpose and goals.

The People: By far, the most important ingredient for your success will be yourself. Focus on how your prior experiences will be applicable to your new business. Prepare a résumé of yourself and one for each person who will be involved with you in starting the business. Be factual and avoid hype. This part of your Business Plan will be read very carefully by those with whom you will be having relationships, including lenders, investors and vendors. Templates for preparing résumés are available in your library, Kinko's, bookstores and the Internet under "résumés."

However, you cannot be someone who you are not. If you lack the ability to perform a key function, include this in your business plan. For example, if you lack the ability to train staff, include an explanation how you will compensate for this deficiency. You could add a partner to your plan (discussed in Section 4) or plan to hire key people who will provide skills you don't have. Include biographies of all your intended management.

Your Business Profile: Define and describe your intended business and exactly how you plan to go about it. Try to stay focused on the specialized market you intend to serve.

Economic Assessment: Provide a complete assessment of the economic environment in which your business will become a part. Explain how your business will be appropriate for the regulatory agencies and demographics with which you will be dealing. If appropriate, provide demographic studies and traffic flow data normally available from local planning departments.

Cash flow assessment: Include a one-year cash flow that will incorporate your capital requirements. Include your assessment of what could go wrong and how you would plan to handle problems.

Include your marketing plan and expansion plans.

Refer to helpful government Web sites such as the Small Business Administration. See "Resources" on the home page of this Web site.

Six Steps To A Great Business Plan

Start-up entrepreneurs often have difficulty writing out business plans. This discipline is going to help you in many ways so don't skip this planning tool! To make it easier, here are six steps that will produce a worthwhile plan:

1. Write out your basic business concept.

2. Gather all the data you can on the feasibility and the specifics of your business concept.

3. Focus and refine your concept based on the data you have compiled.

4. Outline the specifics of your business. Using a "what, where, why, how" approach might be useful.

5. Put your plan into a compelling form so that it will not only give you insights and focus but, at the same time, will become a valuable tool in dealing with business relationships that will be very important to you.

6. Review the sample plans we furnish and download the blank format to a MS Word document. Fill this in as you progress though the course.

Why Prepare A Business Plan ?

Your business plan is going to be useful in a number of ways

First and foremost, it will define and focus your objective using appropriate information and analysis.

You can use it as a selling tool in dealing with important relationships including your lenders, investors and banks.

Your business plan can uncover omissions and/or weaknesses in your planning process.

You can use the plan to solicit opinions and advice from people, including those in your intended field of business, who will freely give you invaluable advice. Too often, entrepreneurs forge ahead ("My Way!") without the benefit of input from experts who could save them a great deal of wear and tear. "My Way" is a great song, but in practice can result in unnecessary hardships.
To help get started in lining up appointments, you can fill in and use the following template. We have also provided a larger blank template for you to use at the end of this session.
Names include your investors, family members, banker, lawyer, attorney, business mentors, trusted business friends, potential customers, competitors (distant ones), potential landlords, and the U.S. Small Business Administration.

What is Business Model ?

Business model converts innovation to economic value for the business. The business model spells-out how a company makes money by specifying where it is positioned in the value chain. It draws on a multitude on business subjects including entrepreneurship, strategy, economics, finance, operations, and marketing.

Simply put, a business model describes how a business positions itself within the value chain of its industry and how it intends to sustain itself, that is to generate revenue.

In the most basic sense, a business model is the method of doing business by which a company can sustain itself – that is, generate revenue

source: http://www.1000ventures.com/

Business Development

Business development is among the foremost concerns of any organization, and as a manager, much of your attention will be devoted to developing and exploiting the business opportunities that are presented to you and your company.

Business development and making your organization successful is reliant on good knowledge of best practice and management theories.

Business development management involves asking yourself some searching questions. Are you prepared to change to realize the vision created by your business development strategy? What must your business excel at? How does that affect processes, people and customers? Who does the planning and controls the implementation of the business development ideas, answering to which goals, actions and measures?

Perhaps most significant of all, you have to decide whether to be radical rather than incremental – are you revolutionary in your skills as a business development manager or are you more evolutionary?

Small business development contains a paradox – if the business turns out to be successful then it won’t be so small any more. The challenge, then, is that of developing a small business to grow while retaining the elements that made it successful in the first place.

Green Is a Strategy

In 2004, when General Electric Company CEO Jeffrey Immelt presented a plan for a green business initiative to 35 top executives at the company, they voted against it. Perhaps it was inevitable: GE had a spotty environmental record up to that point, and its leadership had consistently declined to voluntarily address high-profile problems, such as the company’s role in polluting New York’s Hudson River with PCBs from an upstate electronics plant. But Immelt refused to take no for an answer and overruled his team. Today the initiative, called Ecomagination, is one of the most widely recognized green programs in the corporate world.

By the end of 2008, Ecomagination had delivered US$100 million in cost savings to GE’s bottom line while reducing the company’s greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent. The program has yielded a portfolio of 80 new products and services — including energy-efficient MRIs, locomotives, and lightbulbs — generating $17 billion in annual revenue. Going green “has been 10 times better than I ever imagined,” Immelt told journalist David Magee (as reported in Magee’s book Jeff Immelt and the New GE Way: Innovation, Transformation and Winning in the 21st Century [McGraw-Hill, 2009]).

Like a handful of other companies — Dell, Kaiser Permanente, and Nike, among them — GE views going green as an essential strategy in a global commercial landscape increasingly contoured by environmental policies, regulations, and attitudes. These companies recognize that consumers’ concern for the environment has morphed into buying behaviors that are at least somewhat recession-resistant. A 2008 survey of 6,000 global consumers, conducted by public relations firm Edelman, found that 87 percent believed it was their “duty” to contribute to a better environment and that even in a recession, 55 percent would pay more for a brand if it supported a cause in which they believed. In turn, retailers and manufacturers are demanding greener products and supply chains. In 2007, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. announced that it would begin a transition in its U.S. stores toward selling only concentrated laundry detergents, which use much less water and therefore require less packaging and space for transport and storage. By 2009, this changeover was complete, with every major supplier in the detergent industry involved, including Procter & Gamble (Tide), Dial (Trend), Sun (All), and Church & Dwight (Arm & Hammer).

Government actions are also driving the shift to green initiatives. In the 2009 stimulus package, the Obama administration and the U.S. Congress earmarked $70 billion for the development of renewable and efficient energy technologies and manufacturing. The European Union has set targets for reducing emissions to 20 percent of 1990 levels by 2020. And in a September 2009 address to the United Nations, Chinese President Hu Jintao said his country would generate 15 percent of its energy from renewable sources within a decade. In part because of the urgency expressed by government, venture capital money is pouring into renewable energy projects. In 2008, as much as $4.1 billion in seed money was contributed by private investors to 277 so-called clean-tech startups, which was 52 percent more than the year before, according to data from the National Venture Capital Association, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Thomson Reuters. Employees are also encouraging their companies to formulate and pursue sustainability campaigns. In a 2008 National Geographic survey, more than 80 percent of U.S. workers polled agreed that it was important to work for a company or organization that makes the environment a top priority.

As is the case with most corporate priorities, going for green makes sense in financial terms. For many years, the widespread adoption of solar energy systems was hampered by the high cost per kilowatt-hour of using photovoltaic (PV) cells compared with other energy sources. But as the price of traditional energy skyrocketed, low-cost thin-film technology (which had existed since the 1970s) was commercialized and began replacing first-generation crystalline silicon PV installations. A similar transition is taking place today: Third-generation PV technologies that promise to combine cost-effectiveness with higher productivity are under development. In general, the savings that can be captured in green initiatives are proving to be meaningful, even in small increments. Since 2006, U.S. health-care provider Kaiser Permanente has recovered $4.8 million from its IT budget by purchasing only hardware and software registered with the Green Electronics Council’s electronic product environmental assessment tool (EPEAT), which evaluates electronic products on the basis of their environmental attributes.

source: http://www.strategy-business.com

Business Development

Business development is a combination of strategic analysis, marketing, and sales. Business development (or "biz dev") professionals can be involved in everything from the development of their employers' products and services, to the creation of marketing strategies, to the generation of sales leads, to negotiating and closing deals.

The job of the business development professional is typically to identify new business opportunities—whether that means new markets, new partnerships with other businesses, new ways to reach existing markets, or new product or service offerings to better meet the needs of existing markets—and then to go out and exploit those opportunities to bring in more revenue.

Since the field is a cousin of marketing and sales, even when an organization doesn't have a stand-alone business development department or employees with the phrase "biz dev" in their job titles, you can bet that folks in sales and/or marketing are handling business development responsibilities. You can find biz dev jobs in all industries—at everything from tech startups to huge pharmaceutical companies. What the work entails, exactly, depends on how big a company is and what industry it's in.