Business plan

Some basic steps are:

1. What do you want to sell?
2. What is the market for those items?
3. What drives that market – price, uniqueness, or something else? If the market is price driven, how long can you survive before you achieve enough market penetration to break even? Make a profit?
4. How much of that market can you reasonably expect to get?
5. What tools, facilities and staffing will it take to get started?
6. How will you finance your business?
7. What metrics will you use to monitor the business so you know what works and what doesn’t.
8. For things that work, how will you expand, and at what rate?
9. For things that don’t work, when will you get away from them?

-- Adversity doesn't build character...................it reveals it.

Sawkerf:

Questions for you #2 – How do you know what the market is? #3 – How do you determine what drives that market?

Thanks,

Dusty

If you have a nearby Small Business Administration office, most of them offer business plan workshops with templates and questions to be answered. Also there are free business counselors there.

-- Rich, Seattle, WA

SCORE is a free service as well, and available online.

Community Colleges are interested in small businesses and often have free counseling services.

If you just want to get started, get a business plan template off the web and start answering the questions. It’s a little less daunting way to get your feet wet in the process of projecting outcomes.

Don’t be buffaloed by it. You are capable of doing this step, and it is a very important one though it does not allow you to smell fresh sawdust or make the cash register ring.

Kindly,

Lee

-- "...in his brain, which is as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage, he hath strange places cramm'd with observation, the which he vents in mangled forms." --Shakespeare, "As You Like It"

There use to be free business help in ft. Wayne that would help you set things up. I hope you can compete with other woodworkers in your area. There are several craftsman in that area.

Everyone I know dreads doing business plans, but you’re smart for knowing that you need one. They are super important. I’ve done a bunch of them the hard way (spreadsheets and templates galore) in the past, but there is a better solution that you might want to take a look at. Here’s the website:
http://www.start-upengine.com/

It’s worth a look anyway. Even if you don’t go this route, you do need to do one. Just don’t let anyone do it for you! That’s the biggest mistake anyone can make. It’s actually the process of creating it that is important and you won’t learn anything if someone else does it.

Best of luck to you!

Dusty -
One way is to find out how many businesses you would be competing with. If nobody is making and selling a left handed framus, you’ll have the market to yourself – if enough people want a left handed framus. Convincing them that they want one is a marketing function.

Generally speaking, the more businesses there are selling whatever you want to sell means that they’re probably price driven. If you can’t compete on price, you better find a way to convince customers that your more expensive product provides better value than the other guys.

-- Adversity doesn't build character...................it reveals it.

I’ve never found the multi – page business plan formats effective for a one person business.

The “One Page” business plan and it’s variations seems to work well for some.

The SBA and SCORE usually has lots of free workshops on business start and planning. I would attend as many as you can.

At a minimum you need to know how to price your overhead and material costs. Then you need to get the message out the masses (marketing). You need to close some sales (selling) put the profit back in the bank and repeat for several cycles.

When my father and I started a sales rep business, we were told to do a busines plan. We modeled ours after Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie.
You might have to submit one to get a loan for a business.

-- Regret- the feeling you get just after you do something really stupid.

One thing i learned in business school (and stuck with me) is doing a SWOT analysis. “Strengths, Weakness, Opportunity, Threats”. This is typically done in the beginning stages of the business plan. When we were doing case studies and group work involving business plans this was usually the driver to most everything else.

The strengths are the strengths of your company. What you do well and usually better than the most. Weakness is obviously the opposite; what does your competition do better than you?

Opportunities are opps. in the market you are in. Is there a small niche that you havent cashed in on yet? Could you switch suppliers? Upcycling? Trends?

Threats are identified in basically the opposite way. What could damage your business? Law changes?

Youve got to look at your business open and honestly, if you dont yoire only hurting yourself.

-- "there aren’t many hand tools as awe-inspiring as the #8 jointer. I mean, it just reeks of cast iron heft and hubris" - Smitty

IMHO, the one thing you need to manage most closely of all is CASHFLOW!!!

How much do you have? At what rate will you burn through it? How much do you need to float the boat? How long do you have until it’s all gone? What are the numeric milestones you will pass along the way? What’s your contingency plan if those milestones don’t happen when you need them to?

Postpone taking on employees as long as you can…. Rather, develop a network and sub jobs out if you can’t keep up.

-- Pine is fine, but Oak's no joke!

This came across my inbox today:

http://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-make-a-living-in-the-web-industry/

How to make a living in the web industry?
I worked with a fellow who was asked to go in with a college classmate in a web business. It was a porn site! My friend passed it up. Later he found the guy was making over 200 grand A MONTH!

-- Regret- the feeling you get just after you do something really stupid.