Before Business Plan

Before Business Plan

Dealers conventional wisdom would have you believe that the first thing to do when creating a new company is to create a business plan.

No matter if you are selling junk on eBay from your living room or something larger and more complex

The business plan is excellent and necessary. Too few of us self-employed and professionals use them.

They force us to clarify our objectives. We assign a number to our expectations and assign a time line with our objectives. They become our roadmap and keep us going.

But I suggest that you can not make a business plan is worth anything until you've done your homework.

And that means knowing what you want to do and how you want to do it. And to think that there is sufficient demand for a product that generates enough revenue to cover its own costs and to enable the victory.

In other words, the business plan before coming research.

If a body of knowledge that already exists, it makes sense to exploit it and save some work. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and other sources, for example, publish a lot of demographics. Some of them are very useful.

But it is also likely that, as a creative sole-proprietor, meaningful statistics do not available in your specialty.

Many small businesses target a very specialized niche. And many owned by creative types exist to sell a product or service that does not follow well-worn prototypes.

It is particularly difficult for these people to make sense of published data.

If you fall into these categories, you need to generate your own information.

Do not limit your search to a purely business-related information. You have to build their lives as well as trade.

These are the requirements and conditions for your proposed business of life that you want to create?

For example, illustrators often work on short deadlines - meaning that sometimes have to work at night to finish a project on deadline. In addition, some customers are demanding and some do not pay on time. After all that, do you still "love is" enough?

Or maybe your business is that sales will vary throughout the year. How are you going to make it lean months? Can you handle the uncertainty of variable income?

So how do you find the information?

First, if other people provide services similar to yours, talk to them. You make a lot of information quickly. Their answers to your questions will save a lot of steps and open our eyes to factors that you have not taken into consideration.

Try talking with at least five or six people, so you can get a number of perspectives.

You can find them through professional associations, schools, mouth to mouth. If the locals are reluctant to share information - perhaps because they see you as direct competition - look after your people to another place.

Then create the information you need.

Mimic and simplify what large companies do. Methods to reduce to a level that is practical and convenient.

For example, you may want to survey customers and potential customers for feedback.

If you are a creation of a micro-enterprise on a shoe string, it may not be affordable and practical for a book discussion group. But you may be able to talk to potential targets informally or using direct mail to send a simple survey.

Finally, you have to "put one foot in the water." Try it on a small scale - so you do not lose much if not - and see the results then y. experience modify if needed. Once it works to your liking, you can dive right in.

This approach, known as the technical term "trial and error can be applied to all facets of your business.

After all, even before the largest producers of market testing new deployment.

Put some parameters around your efforts. Decide in advance how long you want to allow and how much you budget.

Then test, test, test.

Trial and error for each part of the business. Try different ways to package their services and different prices, different marketing, etc.