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The Profitable Home-Based Business Plan
| Guest post by: Skye King |
Article Overview: In many ways, writing a business plan can be a major challenge as well as a major blessing. As much as it helps you get the ball rolling on executing the steps you need to take in order to start your home business, a business plan also lets you map out exactly what your business is going to entail.
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Free Download - The Profitable Home-Based Business Plan By Skye King |
The Profitable Home-Based Business Plan
In many ways, writing a business plan can be a major challenge as well as a major blessing. As much as it helps you get the ball rolling on executing the steps you need to take in order to start your home business, a business plan also lets you map out exactly what your business is going to entail.
Think back to English class in school when we were taught to create outlines before we started on an essay or project. The purpose behind the outline was to build a skeleton of what the end product will look like and allow for productive and effective brainstorming. A good business plan does just that.
The simplest way to write a great business plan is to ask yourself questions. Just like in middle school, we turn to the 5 Ws and 1 H: Who, What, Where, When, Why and How. Using these basic categories you can formulate questions and areas of interest to be addressed later in the planning stage.
A business plan is also extremely important because it contains your vision for your new endeavour. The business plan in this context is like the guide with which you will plan your next steps. It's also, in many ways, the earliest form of marketing you are putting out, and as such has to follow some basic rules.
Here are some basic guidelines and questions for a Speedy Home-Based Business Plan.
- A good business plan will help you figure out approximately what your business will cost to get off the ground. You don’t want to guess at this. Knowing your costs will help you decide what you’re going to charge.
- Your business plan should also include information about your competition. Don’t forget about them. In one way or another they exist and you’re going to want to get to know them.
- The bottom line – most businesses fail because they don’t have a clearly spelled-out business plan. Don’t make that mistake.
- For those of you who have been in business for awhile, don’t think a business plan can’t help you. Your business plan should be taken out on a regular basis, reread and updated.
- What is your business exactly? Explain in one or two sentences. (If you can’t describe your business in a couple of sentences, rethink your business and focus your idea).
- Is your particular business needed? List the reasons that make you thinks so and reason why you think it isn't.
- Where do you see your business in one year? In three years? In five years? Be specific and realistic. Nothing destroys a new venture like unrealistic expectations.
- How will you fund your business? Savings, credit cards, loans? What are the various options available? What will it cost me in the long-run? How much interest will I be paying?
- What equipment/office supplies/licenses will you need to get your business started? Total Cost?
- What organizations and trade publications will you need? Total Cost?
- Who is your target customer? Describe them. Again, specifics are important. Think of this as the demographic research of your marketing plan.
- What other businesses will you be competing with? Learn more about them and find out their history. Look into their successes and failures and try to avoid repeating them.
- What makes your business different from your competitor’s business? (Include price, quality, unique services, etc.)
- Where will you set up your home office? Is it going to cost me money to make a nice workable office? Will it come in the way of my family life? How can I minimize the negative effects?
- Will you use daycare everyday or once a week? Cost?
- How much money do you need to make each month to help my family survive? Think of a realistic and exact figure so you have a goal in mind and when you do cost-benefit analyses.
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Article Tags: business plan, financing, home based business, skye king
Referred by: http://jaykubassek.com
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About the Author: Skye King RSS for Skye's articles - Visit Skye's website Click here to visit Skye's website   The Profitable HomeBased Business Plan A simple way to greatly improve your search engine results BusinessTM My Home Based Business Portal 6 HighProfit Blog Redesign Priorities Integrating Social Media Into Your Small Businesses |
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- Hi Simon
If you can finish off the Business Plan and think about your strategic direction or how you are going to use your product to convince people it's a great idea, it will set the foundation for your programming project. You see, when you are looking for funding you will need a Business Plan and Strategic Plan that will convince companies to invest into your new idea.
Has anyone achieved this idea before using another industry besides health and fitness that you know of?
You should also design some mockups as a "preview" for your programming project. This will also help reduce your programming costs as everyone will know exactly what you want if you have detailed mockups already completed including any functionality you require.
Starting mockups for websites and software applications on paper is the best way if you're not a guru in graphic editing software.
Re: NEW VIDEO - How to improve your business plan - Ask Evan
- Thanks Evan, great intro into how the VC's see business plan.
I will take a look, but hope that this video as number 1 in a series.
It is unfortunate that these types of errors, the most basic of errors as you point out here are common to too many business plans, having reviewed a few hundred myself from both a development and funding perspective.
As a mentor and workshop facilitator for Business Plan development for a number of start-up IT and multimedia companies, your presentation help support and show how the VC's see and evaluate a plan
Shameful, that too many don't take the time to learn how to properly prepare, present and defend their plans. Over the years, I have enjoyed Business Plan competitions, and help re-work some of the winning proposals
New Small Business Topic
- Hello everyone,
I'm on the lookout for new topics to add to my site. We just launched a Franchising section and are planning Human Resources section. Do you have any thoughts for a new section?
Here's a list of what we currently have:
Angel Investors
Branding
Bank Loans
Business Coaching
Business Plan
Franchises (New)
Insurance
Legal
Marketing
Public Relations
Sales
Small Biz Loans
Venture Capital
2007 Goals
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2. Revenue stream from both individual and corporate
3. Business Plan complete
4. Full marketing strategy complete and implemented
My entry
- 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read
- this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody.
2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto.
3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book
Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.
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