This article aims to answers that, how do we create a basic and successful business plan? This plan should be just a template for all entrepreneurs. Because every business’s plan has unique details about the company, market and their product. Therefore every business and enterprise should have their unique business plan. So, the article only show that, how are we reach to this plan from the template that we are planning to make.
Either you are a new start-up company or existing one who tries to enter a new market, it’s vital that one should make a business plan for his business.
When you start a business ,the first thing you need to do is to make a solid business plan. Business plans are like the blueprints of your business. If you set badly or unbalanced ,your whole business might collapse.
So, what is the business plan and how are we able to make it a successful one?
Business plans basically explain
how a company works internally and how the company makes money. The purpose to make a business plan is to understand the business and it’s mechanics that you’re going to do and also figure it out how to lead your company.
“The business model (plan) is about how a company can create value for both sides by selling their products or services to customers.”
We can get help from “Business Model Canvas” when we make a plan. Business model canvas is a nine staged norm with building blocks to create a business plan. It describes a company’s or product’s value proposition, infrastructures, their customers and finances. It helps to illustrate a company’s activities, trade-off’s and strategies.
A company’s business model can be simply defined in nine basic building blocks (stages);
1. Your Customer Segment
In this stage we have to ask ourselves these questions;
- Who are my customers?
- Why would a customer want to buy my product?
- What are the specifications of these people?
- How can I define them İn terms of their social class, personality, lifestyle or even geographic & demographic specifications?
It’s so similar to make a STP Framework study and describe or make sub-groups or segment the market.
2. Your Value Propositions Brief Segment
The value proposition answers the question; What do you make and for who?
It’s always about solving a problem or a need for a customer. Because customers usually don’t care about you or your technology or even your product. The only thing that matters is to fulfill the needs and solve the problems. Is the product or service that you provide them able to do that? If it’s yes, then you might have considerable market share in later times. (cp, vice versa)
Do not forget that, the only important thing in business is always to satisfy the customer. It is always like that.
“Customers don’t exist to buy your product. You exist to solve their problems and fulfill their needs”
3. Channels to reach customers
How do you make your product get to your customers hand?
The distribution channels are used for that. But in 2017, we have a lot of various channels to do that.
So, we have to ask ourselves how can I sell and how do i distribute my products? How can my products get to the customers hand from my company? Physical channels? Virtual channels? Mobile, web? How?
4. Customer Relationships you established
Once you figure out how you sell and distribute your product or service, you should now start thinking about the relationships between you, your company and your customers.
So, in this stage we should face with these questions;
- How do i get my customers? How can I make them to search my website or visit my store to buy my product or service?
After gaining customers, we should think about;
- How do i keep them?
Once we get the customers and make them aware about our brand and products, we might want to not to lose our customers. So the important thing that we should think about is how to keep them our product’s or brand’s around? What should I do not to lose them?
And once we figure it out the way not to lose our customer and keep them around, we should think;
- How do i enlarge them?
What should i do for permanent and stabil customers to spend more money or use my product or service more frequently?
When we concern about these important customer related topics, we can get to the next stage;
5. Revenue Stream that we generate
In this stage we have to think about the money that we can get.
We should think about how we actually make money from our products or services which are sold to customer segments that we specify. And that question leads us to,
What value does the customer want to pay for? & What strategy do we use for capturing this value?
Do we use a direct sale and computer transaction based on price?
Is it a freemium model where we give the limited edition of product for free and wait for the consumer request the full edition? Or is it a license or subscription model? Or both of them?
We need to make things clear about our stream methods. Revenue stream is different from the pricing policy. Do not mix these two of them.
In this stage we’re making a plan about how are we modelize our product or service for consuming.
6. Key Resources that we require to create value
As you can understand from the headline, in this stage we will think about our resources that we need in business development.
We have to figure out what we need to make the business model work and what assets are important for our business?
And also some assets and resources are physical. So, do we need a physical plan to care for a manufacturing line? Do we need advanced machines or vehicles for delivering services?
Beside the physical assets, we might need intellectual resources as well.
We might need to acquire patents, protect our customer list, get talented people in a specific area as programmers, coders or hardware designers.
We should ask ourselves; what do we specifically need to do to keep these people and develop our business’s and products.
7. Key Activities that we require value
Like the key resources, key activities are also the most important tasks for a company. To make a successful analysis and specifications about key activities, we must determine our products most needing activities for development, production, marketing, sales and distribution. After that we should categorize all of these key activities and determine how they are.
For example, in production category, key activities might be a product or packing designs, scales, weights or other features about product itself.
We can also determine a production, manufacturing or retailing strategy for our product.
Key activities should make us expert at our job. So we need to determine wisely.
8. Key Partnerships
Doing business with the right people at the right time can open many different doors. So we need to find partners to help us to leverage our business model.
We need to determine our partners and suppliers according to our priorities and resources & actives that we determine at stage 6 and 7.
After that we need to think about the partnership kinds that we’re planning to set up. Is it become an alliance, joint ventures or just a regular supplier and buyer?
9. Cost Structure for business model
This stage is about the financial structure of the business model. In this last block, we should determine costs and expanses to operate the business model.
We have to find out the minimum to maximum costs of resources that we need to pay for and most expensive key activities that we’re planning to set up.
Besides of these potential costs, we should also check for the fixed costs, variable costs or any kind of financial requirements for developing economics of scale and our business.
Conclusion
With all these of stages or blocks, we should be able to plan our business model.
Remember the first times of the Nokia in mobile phone market and think about the current smartphone market. Where do you think Nokia is located in the smartphone market?
Every market has the Darwinian idea of ”Survival of the fittest”. Any business that fails to adapt to changes in the market or customer demands will disappear by the competition.
References
Patrick De Pelsmacker, Maggie Geuens, Joeri Van Den Bergh. “Marketing Communications A European Perspective”. Pearson Education Limited, 2013 5th Edition.
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