Business plans appear in many different formats, depending on the audience for the plan and complexity of the business. However, most business plans address the following five topic areas in one form or another.
Starting a Business/
Business Planning
Resources for Starting a Business
Legal Structures of Organizations Legal Forms and Traditional Structures of Organizations Market Research — Inbound Marketing Planning Your Research Market Research Find and Feed the Feeling Strategizing Understanding Strategy and Strategic Thinking Competitor Analysis Porter’s Five Competitive Forces (Part I) Porter’s Five Competitive Forces (Part 2) Competitive Intelligence Product Planning Product Management E-Commerce Sales and …
While many entrepreneurs tend to think first of selling products or services to consumers, far larger markets exist in selling to other companies. Those sales, known as business to business, or B2B, roughly account for ten times the sales directly to consumers. So if you are undecided about what kind of business to launch, and …
If you are interested in the theories of business strategy covered in the blog post below, you may want to read Henry Mintzberg’s excellent book, Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour through the Wilds of Strategic Management. For example, Mintzberg and his co-authors provide a more lucent (and compact!) description of Michael Porter’s Five Forces Model …
Unique Selling Proposition: Setting Yourself Apart (Guest post from Michael Zipursky.) Lack of focus. That’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a consultant. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, whether you’re a marketing, management, or public relations consultant (or any other type of consultant for that matter). The client of today …
Imagine that you could dump all the words of a million books from the past 500 years into a giant database, and look to see how various words have waxed and waned in usage over the centuries. You could look and see when archaic words like thou and yon disappeared from popular usage. You could …
Since every business has competitors, every business plan needs competitive analysis — also known as competitive intelligence. Direct competitors provide more or less similar products or services, such as coffee shops. Indirect or generic competitors provide different things, but customers will often choose between them. For example, nearby restaurants may offer different eating options, but …
The strategist is one who is concerned about the future of his or her personal, family or organizational life, and spends time and thought considering the best possible direction upon which to set forth. Yes, this makes us all strategists. Strategy is, simply, chosen direction. Smaller, perhaps, than the mission or purpose of an individual, …
