viernes, 23 de agosto de 2013

How to get ready to write your Business Plan?


By Eduardo Corona

Para mi buen amigo Martín Medina.

Ok, I am ready to write my one page business plan, but where to start? It is a lot more difficult to envision a whole running business. My values involved, my objectives and my personal touch, than only cooking my delicious tamales, or be able to care and love my beautiful kids eight to ten hours a day, or even cleaning this mess until this house looks like new.

Even if the logic sequence of a business plans starts with the executive summary, where we can explain our whole idea running, we do not need to start there, but talk about our first passion: our product or service.

We truly believe that our menu is good enough to make a living out of selling it.  We are convinced to make money out of our ability of making things look good, or run smoothly, or taste delicious. We have no doubt that we are experts in our field, and no body can understand better than us the wishes of our client for her/his garden, or kitchen color.

So the natural way to start your business plan is talking about your passion, your expertise and your enjoyment doing it (if you do not enjoy manufacturing your product or providing your service, please, look to do something else)

We are here talking about our product or service, but now; what to say? Easy, talk about all the things you know about your product and service, be detail oriented, the first and most efficient description of your product or service are the characteristics of it, what it is, what it's made of, what is made for: think of the tags in the back of the food boxes that nobody reads. Write the specifications, directions, cautions and so on.

Yep, this is the exciting part for you and the boring stuff for the rest of us.

Can you see know why your product and service is so worthy?

Now, can you communicate this to your clients? Wait, who in the world are your clients? I would say that your clients are all those people that find benefits in all that stuff that your product or services offer… The benefits of your product or service is a perception in the client’s mind, they do not care if you have 30 years of experience in cleaning houses or if you use your secret recipe to cook tamales… They care about getting an immaculate house or a delicious taste after making business with you.

So make a list of the benefits that your product or service will deliver to the clients, a clean house will benefit your clients with:
•          A healthy environment
•          More time to spend with their loved ones or making money
•          Less stress etc.

Delicious tamales will bring to your clients:
•          A memory of their own country or their vacations in exotic places
•          Healthy sensation
•          Pleasure etc.

It is very important to identify these emotions and feelings that your product or service would make your client experiment. Those benefits will tell you who are the people that will make business with you.

Once you find these four elements, product/service characteristics, benefits and target market you are ready to talk about your Vision, your Mission Statement and your goals.

Going forward with your product/service characteristics and features, you will need to get a very professional description of your product for labeling, canning and export: that is your technical file. 

What a technical file should contain?

•          Description of the apparatus, usually accompanied by block diagram
•          Wiring and circuit diagrams
•          General Arrangement drawing
•          List of standards applied
•          Records of risk assessments and assessments to standards
•          Description of control philosophy/logic
•          Datasheets for critical sub-assemblies
•          Part list
•          Copies of any markings and labels
•          Copy of instructions (user, maintenance, installation)
•          Test reports
•          Quality control & commissioning procedures

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