One of the common challenges in business planning is that one often has a better handle on predicting expenses than revenues. It doesn’t mean you’re 100% sure about what your costs are going to be, but for many folks, when they start looking at sales, it’s a crap shoot. As a result, many business plans …
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 …
The historian Alfred Chandler of Harvard Business School wrote a seminal book published in 1977 on the history of strategic decision making at the highest levels of Corporate America , including DuPont, General Motors, Standard Oil and Sears Roebuck. The book was called The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. In this work …
Microcredit offers great promise in helping the world’s poor. The basic idea is that a small loan, say $100, can help someone in the developing world buy some goats or a sewing machine, and use that asset to earn a living, plus pay back the loan. The idea has proven so successful in Bangladesh and …
In the old days, people raised money for their start up ventures in traditional ways. They put in their own money and sweat equity. They borrowed against home equity, insurance policies, and credit cards. If they were lucky, they also got money from friends, family, even “angel” investors. They collected gifts, loans, forgivable loans (“pay …
One way to develop and test your plan is to submit it to a business plan competition. These competitions are mostly associated with business schools. Most offer winners consulting assistance and in many cases seed money. But here’s the catch: in most cases, only students can apply and competition can be stiff. But check out …
There are few topics in strategic planning that generate such diverse and strong opinions as what should be in a mission statement. The statements vary from one-line slogans to multi-page documents. There are few activities that can become such as waste of time as extensive discussions about what words should be in a mission statement …
Strategy-making begins with an idea. Without a guiding idea there can be no sense of direction. Yet many articles and books about strategy do not address a most important matter: how to generate ideas. To conceive the essential set of ideas that we call strategy, the strategist must understand and master the art of the …
