Emira Mears & Lauren Bacon will be available via live chat to give advice on how you can be a successful entrepreneur. Live chat: 7.29.07 at 7pm EST, here on Writers Revealed.

When we first decided to go solo and start out own design studio I cringed everytime someone mentioned writing a business plan. I had so much else to think about, why did I need to write this weighty tome that no one would look at but me? As images of late night paper writing from university days gone-by haunted my head, I knew this was one task that as a newly minted entrepeneur I was most likely to procrastinate on. Then a miracle happened: I realized I didn’t need a big formal fancy business plan. I was off the hook.

How did I get off so easy? Well, I had already done the important parts of the business plan process (details in a second here) and I really didn’t need to bother putting it all together into a formal document, because no one else was ever going to see it. We didn’t need a bank loan or any outside investment to start our business, and I dind’t need to prove anything to
anyone but me and my business partner. As such, our scribbled on the back of a napkin brainstorm about how we were going to find clients could in fact serve as our marketing plan. There was no need to polish it up into something slick and convincing for anyone else.

Business plans are pretty much a must have if you do need a bank loan or outside money to get your dream off the ground, but if it’s just you and your line of credit/credit cards bankrolling your early days then you don’t need anything nearly as formal. That said, writing a formal business plan is no excuse for not doing your homework. And really, that’s why I got off so easy. I had already done the work over sushi lunches, coffee dates and wine with my business partner. We just hadn’t thought of it that formally.

So, here’s how I’d recommend figuring out which parts of a business plan you do need and avoiding what felt to me like a painfully large and dull task. Find a resource on writing business plans, (there are plenty online or there’s decent coverage of the topic in the book Small Time Operator), and look over the sections that they recommend including in your plan.

They’ll be something like:

- Demographic Business Details, things like:
* Business Name
* Location
* Owner(s)/Partner(s)

Obviously, you know all these things. So, no worries here. Unless you know you want to doodle your new business name all over the margins of your other notes with little hearts around it.

- Marketing & Identity Related Stuff, covering things like:
* A company mission statement
* Target market, ie/ who are your customers
* Marketing plan, ie/ how are you going to reach out to your customers to let them know you exist

- Product/Service Details:
* What you make/sell and what they cost, this may be as easy as “websites” or long detailed list of all the different colours and styles of crocheted bikinis you plan on offering.

- Finances:
* First year budget, ie/ what it is going to cost to start your business (puchase new computer + damage deposit on rent + cost of business license + cost of new materials + etc) plus the ongoing costs for the first year (rent + phone bills + ongoing materials costs + etc)
* Revenue projections, ie/ how much money are you likely to make if you sell X number of fabulous crocheted bikinis, Y number of bikinis etc.

Take a look at that list and figure out which things you really need to pay attention to. The demographic details? Well you kind of know all that already right? So feel free to doodle your new business name in the margins of your first year budget like a teenager in puppy love, but don’t worry too much about the formal aspects of it. The marketing stuff? Well that could
range from being super important to your business and therefore something you really need to focus on, taking you off in the direction of doing all kinds of research into what other folks are doing, keeping a scrap book of ads you really like and tracking down the prices of placing ads in
magazines, to pretty straightforward and something you’re able to keep on the back of a bus transfer like “sign up for craft fairs, decorate booth”.

Finances. Well, I do recommend spending some serious time in this land (and for the record a whole long and detailed chapter on this in our book) to make sure that when rent next rolls around you’re not totally hooped. That said, it doesn’t need to be all fancy. A column of numbers and a calculator will do the trick. If you have trouble coming up with the numbers for things then feel free to ask around and see what others are paying for rent for example, or do some online research to see just how cheaply you can get some new equipment off Ebay etc.

Even if you do write all this down on scrap paper and coasters do hang onto it. Even if you’re the only one who ever sees it, it will come in really handy down the road when you need to revaluate things as your business grows and changes.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 2:14 am and is filed under Live Chat, Non Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.