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ARTICLE
Develop Your Business Plan
by Workz.com
Before you sit down to write your business plan, figure
out how you're going to use it. If you're a small outfit or hobbyist, the plan may be a
step-by-step guide to going online. If your Internet plans are bigger, your plan may be a
strategic document designed to convince others to invest in you and your business idea.
Regardless of how you'll use your plan, here's a checklist of action items for completion:
Define Your Offering and Your Target Market
You'll need to clearly articulate the products and services you'll be selling online and
evaluate your product's or service's strengths against online and offline competition. You
also need to describe the customers you expect to buy it and sketch out an advertising and
sales plan to reach them. You need to think through offering your products online and
consider your customer base as you think through this one. For example, what Internet
technologies will customers in your market use, including browser brands and versions,
online connection speeds, and processor types?
Name Your Management Team
Identify the key players who will set the strategy to produce, develop, build, and
maintain your web-based business. This project will demand producer, technical, marketing,
and professional expertise, and don't forget your customer service, order fulfillment, and
other backend business systems. You may choose to look outside your company for some of
this expertise but you should know going into startup and development where these
responsibilities lie.
Create a Content Strategy
A website can only be as good as the content it contains. If you spend all your website
development resources on building the technology that contains your message and don't
clearly think through the message you want to convey, your site won't be effective. Part
of your web strategy and design planning requires that you think through the type of
content that would be most appropriate, who your audience is, and how you'll create that
content and keep it fresh and interesting. See the checklist steps that follow to make
sure that your site reaches its target.
Evaluate Your Technical Needs
Decide which features and functions are necessary to run your website and then learn the
costs to deliver those features. For example, you can host your website on AOL or Yahoo!
Store and take advantage of the eCommerce technical aspects those organizations offer. Or
you can pay for the learning curve and technical expertise to bring your web development
in-house. Remember that you also need technical expertise to either develop or integrate
the website into any of your existing automated backend business systems. This evaluation
is a critical determinant in deciding whether to seek additional capital to invest in your
web-based business.
Prove Your Product Delivery Process
How many orders can you process in a day--from receiving the order to shipping the product
or sending a salesperson? That's a critical question for success on the Web. Many
companies have been burned and spurned because they gained their customer's trust online
and then couldn't deliver the goods and services they promised. So another critical part
of your success is capacity planning for your inventory, fulfillment, warehousing, and
shipping resources.
Deliver Financial Projections
You need to look at your existing business--or existing capital--to see how far it will
go. You can include pro forma monthly income statements, monthly cash flow statements, and
annual balance sheets. If you've been thoughtful in developing the rest of your plan you
should be ready to make some income versus expense projections based on estimated site
traffic and industry standard visitor-to-order ratios (how may visitors came to a site
compared to how many actually purchased a product). Your investors will require these.
Find Capital Investment
You'll need to invest time and money to get your site up and keep it running, and to run
your business. But whose time and whose money depends upon the scope of your vision and
the depth of your pockets. If the costs of your web business exceed the amount of money
you or your company want to invest, you may want to ask for investments from family and
friends or seek financial investment from banks, private investors, or venture
capitalists.
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