Every Business Needs a Plan
No matter what kind of business you are thinking of starting you need to write a business plan, even if it will never be seen by another living person.
There are plenty of places on the net where you can go to download a business plan template. There are probably dozens of library books on the topic too.
There is a problem with these business plan templates, however. They all talk business school talk. That is all well and good when you have to write a formal business plan to show to potential investors, or to a lender. They talk the same business school talk, and it is what they expect to hear.
For your own purposes your business plan should consist of two major sections.
What Human Need Does Your Business Fill
The first section is about what major, pressing human need does your business address, and what kind of person is most likely to have that need?
Business school plans expect to see language about demographics, geographic location, and things like segmentation. The business school business plan makes the customer an abstraction.
You can be sure of one thing. Whatever it is that you are going to sell it will be to one real live, flesh and blood person at a time. Abstractions don’t buy anything. People do.
Business school business plans sell the drill bits. You want to sell the holes.
You want to know everything you can about why your customer has that pressing need. Give your customer a name and a face. What’s happening in her life right now that she thinks about every day that you can help her with?
Anne Smith is a 64-year-old widow with a garage full of things she doesn’t want any more, and cannot do anything herself about removing them. Her daughter is coming to stay with her for a month and is expecting to park her car in that garage. This is not an earth changing problem, but it is something that Anne Smith will think about every day until the problem is relieved.
Her real problem is not the junk in her garage. It is the anxiety that she will disappoint her daughter. Three are thousands of people like Anne Smith in your community who have a pressing need for a variety of different services. Those needs do not all occur at the same time, and they may not last forever.
How Does Your Business Fill That Human Need
The second section of your business plan is about what you can do to fulfill the needs of the customers you have identified in detail in section one.
The business school business plan would break down your section two into a marketing plan, a management plan, an operating plan, and a financial plan. You can do it the same way, but you have to be just as careful about avoiding the abstractions.
The best way to keep your business plan as reality based as possible is to attach a specific person, a time of day, and an actual location to each and every aspect of your plan. “On every Tuesday at 2 p.m. Jack will place a classified ad in the Town Crier from his home computer.”
It may turn out that your initial business plan is impractical in many regards. That’s OK. But it is still no reason to ignore the benefit of putting the excruciating specificity in your original plan.
Psychologists tell us that the more detail you can provide to your brain when evaluating a situation, the more specific your subconscious will be producing a solution. The very act of being ultra specific in your written will trigger a dozen variations and alternatives you never would have thought of.