Build Your Business Plan
Hello, i will be leading our webinar today so a quick some quick things about the library itself we will be reopening to the public february 1st so this coming monday we will be retaining our current curbside hours so that's 9 a.m to 6 p.m monday through saturday and then sunday will be open from noon to 6. we will be operating under a grab-and-go method so things may be different at the library but we are so excited to open our doors again and see all of our patrons if you don't want to come into the library all of our curbside and virtual services are still going to be offered so you can always book a one-on-one appointment with the librarians at on our website www.champaign.org/book-a-librarian we're always available for live chat during our open hours and then you can always just at your leisure shoot us an email at librarian@champaign.org so i'm going to go over some a couple of zoom uh little things for today's webinar so on your lower left hand corner this is a webinar so unless if you would like to talk i am so happy to unmute you we have a small group this morning so we can definitely operate this in a a meeting format but all of your vocal controls like volume settings that's in the lower left hand corner it looks like a microphone that's where you can control those in the middle you'll find the chat option and i always like to remind people make sure you know who you are chatting to so if you click on the two you'll see all panelists or all panelists and attendees so i'm just going to type in a hi good morning so if you just want to ask me a question make sure that just says all panelists if you want to share an opinion or a question with everyone else who's still here make sure that says all panelists and attendees i really encourage you to use the chat to ask any technical questions you may have like if you're not able to hear me or if something with zoom isn't working um and just questions about the webinar again we have a small group this morning so you guys should let's take advantage of it i can definitely cater this presentation to where everyone is at and where they want to go with their business all right so again this is being recorded and it will be uploaded to our youtube channel in addition to being emailed out to all the registrants um so if you're not okay with that then that's perfectly fine just be conscious of what you're sharing all right let's go ahead and get started by going to my second thing all right how will your business succeed i am really curious um how many of you are currently in the what phase of your entrepreneurial journey are you in do you have a business do you have an idea have you tested this idea out before have you even tried to create a business plan so feel free to type in the chat um where exactly you are right now again that helps me kind of cater and decide where what what i want to talk about today and where i can best help you all so a business success rate um it isn't the best so most businesses fail within the first five years and even according to the u.s
bureau of labor statistics only 25 of businesses actually succeed within the text 10 years um okay caroline already has a business but it's in the young stages how exciting and you know what a lot of people think even before they have to start their business before they start doing any work they have to have a business plan but most commonly the the most successful entrepreneurs actually write their business plan within or between the six month and 12 month period and we have someone else who's owned three businesses and they're starting a new business that's fantastic terry you're gonna have to share some of your awesome experience with everyone else all right so by setting yourself up for success we're going to be brainstorming utilizing a lean canvas approach and then turning that lean canvas into a business plan so i also want to remind everyone if you have access to the internet right now i'm able to use a computer i recommend pulling up champaign.org having your library card on hand because we will be using some of our amazing databases to just we're just going to plug in some things and make business plans today all right we have someone else i've had a business for four years but never wrote a business plan so i do so now excellent yeah there's no time like the present to start all right so we're going to touch base on this so first off um yeah just the agenda today where i really like to focus on customer oriented ideation so this is essentially putting your product or service first ensuring that it's fulfilling a customer need and then allowing that customer need to dictate what you're creating what your what product you're doing what service you're going to be generating and letting that kind of dictate and form your business and dictate choices that you make regarding finding funding and also just future developments so we're going to be using the gale business plan builder and don't worry i'll show you exactly how to access that so we're starting off with a lean model canvas and then after we complete that we're going to be going into building up the business plan and then lastly using another database statista for market and financial data so something we love numbers especially people who invest in your business love numbers so we have the tools for that all right so the ideation process so i took this is from um this is two things so this image is taken from vemma so they are an idea validation service so i thought it was a beautiful rendering of Eric Reiss's lean startup so i'm sure a lot of people who have been in business are probably familiar with this but i am so obsessed with this because um it really is a great way of validating your business idea and eliminating just without wasting time and energy so one thing i always think of is uh google we're all familiar with this really big big corporation big company and are you do you all remember google glass uh those amazing freaky glasses that slightly infringed upon your privacy what google loves to do so this is a really great example of why ideation is so important uh because it was a semen google glass was a seemingly good idea that was executed so they went through the production they had a huge uh marketing campaign big blow it i can't imagine how much money they spent on it but it was an item that no one really wanted or needed so not only was it marketed pretty badly it also looked unattractive it had some safety and health concerns and it was like around fifteen a hundred dollars so the price didn't make the situation um or the product any better and it also failed to offer any clear benefit to the user so they had no idea what their target customer audience was um and everyone when they saw they were like okay why do i need this uh and the only i think yeah from from my opinion it really only served to violate people's privacy a little bit more easily so that is an example of why it is so important even if you already have your business uh thought out and already have an idea of what you want it's still really important to go through this ideation process validating your idea to ensure that you're not wasting again time and energy so starting off with defining your goals so this incorporates um identifying your problem so is your service or product something that is solving a problem and is it even a problem worth solving it also really helps if you're solving a problem that you yourself have because you're able to essentially talk about it even more you're able to relate to your product or service making it more personal um basically helping drive your energy around creating this amazing business it also focuses defining your goal on solutions so will it actually solve your problem that you have does someone else already solving it is someone else already solving it also focusing on your features so how exactly will your product or service work um and also focusing on the price maybe considering a business model what sort of licensure do i need to have in order to make this idea come to fruition so for you it might be an assumption that is more likely to happen but you can also start with the fact that your idea might have the biggest downside or the world's worst expected value so defining your goals allows you to map out all of your assumptions pertaining to your specific product or service and prioritize the specific ones that are most critical for your idea to succeed so next is developing that hypothesis i love the scientific method um in it time and time and again it keeps on working so this is where you start from the most critical assumption that you kind of defined within your goals so this is the one that's the most likely to fail and would also have direct consequences so what would have to be true for your hypothesis to be feasible so a great example of this is airbnb um so their critical assumption was that people were willing to stay at a stranger's house and that homeowners were willing to rent out their homes to strangers which i am a user of airbnb and like vrbo um it's my favorite way to travel but when you just kind of spell it out it's definitely creepy that is a uncomfortable critical assumption so airbnb their critical assumption was that people are willing to share their homes with strangers so even though house swapping was already a validated concept um like couch surfing even renting from a friend airbnb's concept was different and that it was validated before they even created their business model so the founders were actually looking for ways to pay their rent when they realized there was a huge conference in their town and all the hotels were booked up so the founders bought three air beds to the apartment and they allowed their guests an airbnb experience where they then offered them a tour of the city so that one renting just just making money off of sharing their space allowed them to pay their event that pay their rent excuse me and validate their business idea at the same time so coming up with the hypotheses aren't difficult typically so the most important thing here is to define the minimum success criteria for the test so that's not always easy so for example if eight people out of ten would say they'd rather sleep in a hotel than on someone's couch does that mean that airbnb's idea is invalid so when it comes to your for example contact lens business your most critical assumption is whether people are willing to make a purchase online as well as the price they're willing to pay for it when it might be more feasible for them to just pay a higher price out of their optometrists office so this is again developed by hypothesis most critical assumption next we have experiment and revise so this is essentially where you find the fastest and cheapest way to test your assumption in practice so this is where Eric Reiss's lean startup really comes into play because he argues that you need to build a minimum viable product so you're mvp i don't know why i always want to mvp to test your critical assumptions you're essentially picking that critical assumption and asking yourself what early version of my desired product or service can i build to test this assumption before again investing my time and energy into making this huge business plan and spending a lot of money on maybe multiple products before even figuring out if people want it so here's a guideline that Eric Reiss recommends to create your mvp so what component feature or process of your ideal product is not absolutely necessary to test your assumption so an mvp is your lean version of your final product but it's still functional and valuable to your loyal customers so i always like to think of um like a car we're not um so if my end proctor is probably going to be a car i'm going to start with a bicycle because even though it's not as convenient as the car i mean it still works it still gets to your way and maybe my bicycle will after some testing with some of my ideal customers turn into a moped and after i get feedback on this moped it then becomes this four-wheel suv which is the desired product so in opposition um the traditional way of building a business plan is just coming up with an idea without testing it assuming it's going to be amazing so this would be coming up with a wheel and um people don't want just a wheel so you're like okay so after i've spent a couple of months trying to sell people on this wheel all i have now um the base of a car so maybe four wheels and a piece of plywood people still don't want that um and then finally you come to that four-wheel suv so again by testing out your mvp or by releasing your nvp you're able to again save a lot of time and energy make this the easiest thing for you so what are ways that you can kind of experiment and test out your business plan and i'm really curious for those who do have a business or have owned a business did you follow some similar procedures oh mvp stood for um it stands for the minimum viable product so again that is what you're creating um your service or product that tests out your hypothesis yeah so again we're all about saving time saving energy um connecting with your customers which that's another one you're welcome and uh figuring out what they want what you can produce or service that they will actually need so again i'll go back to what i was saying earlier um has anyone when they were making their business plan or people who have owned businesses or do own business did you test your idea on a small target audience small talk small customer base before going forward so i'm very curious to see if that's happened and while you all respond i'm going to continue talking about the rest of the ideation process so what are ways that we can experiment this nvp and show it to others up we have currently using a lean startup and have done surveymonkey to gain consumer input it snaps back fantastic that is so great so yeah surveymonkey is a great way to get feedback from your ideal consumer um you can also create maybe just a fake landing page one example that i love have you all heard of the board game or the card game exploding kittens so this was a comic strip company who used kickstarter in order to essentially create a multi-million dollar card game they didn't even have the product so their nvp was literally just some pictures and a description of how to play the game and people were so excited granted they were already fans of this cartoon artist they were so excited about the game product that they completely blew their kickstarter out of the water um and ended up earning millions of dollars um so without even creating a product uh because using their uh like web channels they had social media survey monkeys sent out to previous customers of their books um they were able to raise enough capital uh raised more capital than initially expected and sell this board game so terry you said you used surveymonkey how did you go about finding the people to ask i'm very curious um so when you're asking people for feedback well if terry would like to respond no pressure uh you want to ask for feedback by getting ideas responses comments looking for common answers to the following themes so you want to see who exactly is going to buy your product that is your target market so who is more most excited when you talk about it with them when you maybe get some information about like what would you consider using this um the basically the demographics of the individuals who are getting back to you with some positive affirmations there's your target market next one is the price so what people are actually paying for it this is another great thing to put in your survey asking them just explicitly how much would you consider paying for this service or product what would be worth the service or product and then lastly demand so you're understanding the people who will keep buying keep paying for it is it are you creating a product or service that is one and done or is it something that people are going to be continually invested in in the future so lastly we have the validate which i'm actually going to cross out validate um i'm pretending to cross it out and i prefer the term pivot here so instead of by validating your product you are going to then decide whether you're going to stay with it or go straight back to the drawing board again saving yourself a lot of time and energy so this is you seeing um honestly just getting out of the building so that's a Steve Blank he's a serial entrepreneur stanford professor and honestly the grandfather of the lean startup movement but he really recommends just getting out of your building really kind of thinking outside of your current headspace and being really honest with what you've so far come up with it's so frustrating and oh okay we have some questions some comments um i'm going to continue this thought it is so frustrating when people tell you no but that is the most realistic thing ever so there's no difference between theory and practice and practice there is which is again another quote from amazing steve blank highly recommend checking out his books but this is just seeing if you need to proceed or pivot so we have two comments terry who would use surveymonkey he used serving money to gain monkey to gain consumer input okay so you used your own address book so neighbors friends peers that you already knew 1500 people that's amazing engaging them to reach out to friends and family yeah offered a drawing for a 100 gift certificate for input yeah i would absolutely participate in that who doesn't want 100 bucks and then someone else i had a semi-successful kickstarter and created a launch page for a month or two to capture potential customers fantastic those are amazing amazing ideas or amazing procedures that you use to get some feedback from your clients and if anyone would like to get a really good list of i have a great resource for like an interview structure example i will follow up this presentation once i send out the recording with that said list all right so does anyone have any questions about the lean startup model and this ideation process before we move on to the good stuff this is still good but i'm excited about filling out our database and you guys using it okay so i'm exiting out canva you did a great job of this i'm still screen sharing i just want to confirm that you all can see um the Champaign public library page i believe you still should be yes thank you so much caroline so champaign.org if you're at a computer i would love it if you followed along with me so you can just start the process of filling out this lean canvas and starting your business plan so first things first we're going to go to business arguably the best page here i'm very biased and scrolling all the way down and these are a list of our business tools that you can use so we're going to use gale business plan builder so i am clicking on this right now and this is just a brief description but the use gale business plan builder so you can see it's highlighting into blue go ahead and click on that note that it's not prompting me to put in your library card or pin number and that's because i am physically in the library building so if you don't have a library card if you need one please contact me i'm happy to get you a temporary card and figure out ways in which you can utilize our resources and again we're opening up to the public on monday so you could also if you don't want to get a library card come into the building physically get on a computer and access this um all right so has anyone kind of played around with this database yet um all you guys put in your responses we're gonna go ahead and sign in so i wonder if my other that's one is still signed in that's good okay i'm gonna sign in to cp librarian this is kind of our test one okay so someone has an urbana library card yeah that's perfectly fine i can hook you up so let's see if i remember the fake login i made and stuff here we go all right so this is what you all should be seeing i haven't filled this one out at all um but this is the gill business plan dashboard it is such an amazing um resource to use because it leads you through i mean it's it's literally a guide you can see this guide me right here and i went ahead and clicked on it and it explains what the dashboard is if you're new to entrepreneurship and what you can fill out so i also i'm switching to my other screen this is a dashboard that i have completely filled out so i'm going to go ahead up not started whoop whoop looks like i'm gonna librarian test okay it looks like i can't log into more than two accounts at once so i think it's gonna be okay do not have a library card okay great yeah i can again help you get a library card if you need one so since i can't have two at the same time i'm gonna go ahead and open an incognito window and do the same thing going to the business page once it loads and plan builder all right so now i'm logging in with the account that i had used to fill out this form okay all right so you can see since i have done the majority of things here everything is complete so i'm going to go ahead and just quickly show you the entrepreneur profile so this is what i've already filled out let me make this bigger so it's easier so if you're not completely sure if you want to be an entrepreneur if maybe you're like oh i need i need some help kind of understanding what i need to do what my resources are what my personality is and if that's compatible with being an entrepreneur so this is what it looks like if you're in there again it's really wonderful the fact that they have prompts so these are just ones that i made so you can see this um purple box right here that is the edit box and i love the fact that gale business plan they give you these prompts to really help you understand and kind of brainstorm how to answer all of these questions you can't see the prompts so do you see this blue box that i just highlighted is my screen frozen i don't think so you know what i think it's yep thank you guys for letting me know it is because my screen share is still on okay now you should be able to see the prompts i changed the screens here yes i apologize thank you guys so much for um shouting that out okay so these are the problems i'll show you again how to get to that so this is a completed i'll actually go back to the beginning so you can see how i got there okay completed dashboard you notice it says complete on the side i'm clicking on entrepreneur profile this is what i had filled out and that's what it's showing so you can edit your profile at any time it's also really nice because if you want to download this it exports it to a pdf or other form you can use so here's what kind of support network can i rely on clicking this here's some prompts that they include so an amplifying questions again it just allows you to kind of think through and this is again not specifically related to lean stacks and business plans but still something i think is worth filling out just because it allows you to brainstorm and think about all the resources you have and how invested you are in your entrepreneurial journey okay so business ideation here is our beautiful lean canvas so this is the finished product i'm gonna go in and edit so if you're able to do this on your computer i really recommend you starting this so is uh i think most people here should be familiar with the lean canvas but i'm just gonna go over it and then we're gonna break it down section by section um i encourage you to just if you don't have access to this at the moment have a piece of paper and just write down maybe the numbers because we're going to be going through each of them and just write down what comes to mind so you'll notice this is not organized correctly i mean for me it's a little uncomfortable because i have okay the problem on the left hand side customer segments on the right i mean my numbers are going in every which way there is meaning behind this this is because the left hand side so if you're also you're cutting that unique value propositions in half the left side is focused on your product or service the right side is focused on your market um so it really allows you to brainstorm this is essentially the blueprint of your business plan so this was popularized by again the lean startup movement by Eric Ries but this one is modified from the Ash Maurya version from the book running lean so this is based on Steve Blank's worksheets and then also Alex Osterwalder's business model canvas again business canvas yeah thanks jamila so this should be you should be able to fill this out in 20 minutes that's why it is so incredible and also it asks you what is really important for all of these specific categories so it's a really transformative transformative process and the fact that it's all in one page you can quickly understand and also um if you're doing an elevator pitch you quickly want to give this to a potential client or customer you can quickly understand most of what you need to know about the business at a glance so this also lets you easily compare and contrast multiple business ideas if you're not positive what you want to go ahead with so okay once we've settled on the ideation let's go ahead we're going to go ahead and fill this out so first things first is the problem or the solution problem solution and i'm gonna go back to screen share the other page so you can see okay so back to my powerpoint so i'm gonna go i'm just gonna stay on the powerpoint for a while so your problems and solutions you're asking yourself what are the one to three problems that you're actually gonna solve so how does your solution fix the problem if you don't have a clear idea of this if you haven't gone through the ideation processes you're really going to start a goal to fill out the rest of this lean business canvas so again building a business will be so much easier if this is clear and if you have it i'd also recommend to limit this to one problem if possible and definitely do not have more than three but with these three problems i want you to only list one solution so if you can fit it if you can't fit it into this small space it's too complex again we're focusing on concise making it really clear um so for example i'll show i'm almost halfway through i'll go to examples later all right so next is the proposition and advantage so this is where you try and get your benefits down to one point so this is where you're using follow-up points to express additional benefits and you're keeping it again to no more than three so another thing you should focus on is the harder it is to copy your advantages the better so we have an example here and this is from um ladder it's a great company that really helps you grow your business they have a wonderful blog great resources if you ever want to check it out so their idea is essentially training people on um how to start their own business so their advantages founding team with lots of startup experience excuse me and they're also uh i love how they have in quotations this is their preposition this is the clear point so this is what it's kind of like an elevator pitch not necessarily but their main benefit from idea to fundable startup and then here's their three supporting follow-up points all right and again if you have any questions please let me know and i will pause all right customer channels and influence so if you have a clearly defined problem and a good idea of what your main benefit is you should be able to picture in your head what type of person would be most interested in that offering also um i have a webinar that's available on our youtube channel all about identifying your customers recommend watching that if you need help kind of figuring out how to access demographic profiles again we have another database for that and it makes it really easy to understand how those customers communicate what channels they use so that's an aspect of this channels it's how your ideal customer interacts with your product your service or even what social media tools do they use so for example in Champaign-Urbana the majority demographic we have here is um they are young adults um with maybe one child but approximately aged 20 1 to 30. so that is our the biggest demographic here they don't have a ton of money but for some reason when you're marketing to them they are most susceptible to radio um i'm right outside of that range and i would not have found i would not have thought that radio was the best way to market to that specific demographic but again we have this amazing tool gale demographics that kind of goes into each of these customer identifying profiles and identifies the channels that they are most likely to be positively receptive to so once you know your customer again so these individuals they have a entrepreneur which i love that i love that phrase um and then they identified they also have a solo founder so another thing to consider is if you have more than one type of customer so in my business example i'm going to go ahead and go over to it okay here we are again uh my customer segments i had two so and this is my business idea is for uh essentially a app slash website uh an event space for young adults so our main demographic in Champaign-Urbana so two types of customers my first one would be business owners organizations and community members who would want to be posting utilizing my portal essentially to post the events that they have and then my other customer are college students or like young adults who don't want to use social media or go to every establishment's website to see what's going on so and that's the case you can tell that these two different customers they're very different people so i would even recommend creating an additional lean canvas just to kind of understand how each of those customers are going to be interacting with your product or service okay do you have any questions about customer segments and i'm going to go back to this okay so next we have alternatives and concepts so this is essentially where you so this is in the bottom of the problem so this isn't ident this isn't really spelled out on um gale demographics lean canvas i think it's important to definitely include the alternatives and concepts though because it allows you to kind of again just have a broader idea of your current market the current market that you're wanting to kind of reach out into so for alternatives you might list a couple of products or businesses that your potential customers are already using to solve the problem that you're addressing so can you also make maybe a popular analogy for how your business works like why would i why would a a young adult um be likely to use my event site over just facebook for example because facebook has i mean that's where i would i typically go for events um and so i mean just being aware of that will allow you to make a better product or service and so then going over to concept so this is essentially again kind of boiling down uh what you're solving so your x for y analogy i really like how that's so it might be um this is a way to convey a lot of information so it might be what for what so special forces training for startup founders um so my concept for the event uh website would be uh intuitive platform for events intuitive event platform for young adults and that would be my concept nice and easy okay next on this we have the metrics cost and revenue so these are the unit economics of your business and at top level you're asking yourself how are you going to be making your money excuse me what do you spend your money on and what is important to track to tell if you're doing a good job or not wow we're gonna good morning okay so you really only need a very high level view of your costs again this is a really easy quick thing just to glance and look at before you go in depth in the business plan so think about what are your big biggest outgoings so i also want you to avoid the temptation of having multiple revenue streams because the best option is is honestly sometimes just to have one because then it gets too complicated and it might turn off some investors and then lastly make sure the key metrics are actionable can you make changes to affect these these numbers so for example for my event planning thing or event portal uh one key metric would be usage especially if it's a ticketed event maybe i'm going to have like a two dollar flat fee that i'm gonna take whenever someone uh purchases a ticket so that would be like my percentage sell rate for tickets um that would be a key metric that i can track okay so i'm going to again switch my screen so essentially that's a that's your lean business canvas and let's go back to this okay so now that we've filled out this canvas so see how easy it is to understand your business venture when you again just focus on what is the most important for every step and see how the limited spaces here they really focus clarity of thought and now it's really easy for you to compare and contrast your business ideas so now that we have this filled out we're going to address the elevator pitch and your business statement so once this is done we can then move on to the business plan itself and again i really want to encourage you to make sure that you're testing out this idea creating that mvp getting a lot of really good feedback um and people genuinely invested um maybe financially invested uh in your service or product before you go on to the business plan because i believe on average it takes about someone four to eight weeks to really do a thorough business plan so again this is a lot of your expensive time and time is money so i'm going back to the dashboard okay this also includes break even analysis which is absolutely helpful so i had already filled it out but let's edit it just so you can see what's going on so again if this is a little confusing they have a guide me right here that will take you through what to input for each of these i also love that the helpful resources right here so we see kind of this little newspaper this will actually open a new tab going into the gale another gale database gale business entrepreneurship so these are just supplemental resources that go into what exactly this means how to calculate this how to figure it out so this is employee payroll and product uh my gosh deductions so maybe how much are you going to put in for health insurance how many employees are you going to need how much are you going to pay them this allows you to figure this out and this whole break-even analysis kind of helps also realistically say like can i actually make money from this so this is with my whole um event planning uh website i figured well i can sell ads maybe like some really accessible ones for smaller places maybe like 25 bucks so like bigger ones for bigger and then event processing fee and then maybe you'll also create like specialty tickets again this business plan was i had to add this in order to break even so these are actually i would recommend this is this is not the best business idea because there might be one too many revenue streams um you're too many different services that i'm offering for this pro not really simple product so again this is the cost so how much of my time would it cost for me to maybe like write one sentence so about three minutes so i'm just gonna say like five minutes if i want to pay myself a dollar an hour or a minute um and then how much would you sell it for and then it calculates the margin so and then it goes on to capital um which is why we write a business plan so we can either get some capital or kind of understand and understand how much debt we're going to need to be getting into in order to make this business idea go off the ground um yeah so this is just an overview of so these are my predicted sales um it also has really great resources on estimated growth i think most commonly yeah for a stable business two to three percent is typical but for my um app website i expect a significant growth in the first year and then it tapering off so that's what i reflected it and then after you've inputted all of these numbers informations we're going over to the report and you can see what your break-even analysis is i have fixed i'm pretending i have a fixed uh rent so that's the only thing i'm paying for in addition to internet service or internet use it would still just be me and my company so that's why i have fixed costs at a solid operating cost isn't really getting any higher sales revenue does taper off but it is still profitable cool okay back to the dashboard and now let's focus on the business plan so like another reason why i love gail um business plans are formal business writing gale allows you they actually have a wonderful template that you can export this into that organizes everything really completely i'm going to go ahead and download it so you all can see what exactly it looks like and while that download is in progress let's go into business plan so i'm also going to be emailing you uh we don't need to do that twice this business plan i made because instead of a traditional business plan i kind of wrote in prompts how you can kind of fill this out yourself so i have my company name and type again it's this it makes it so easy to write a business plan i love it you're just plugging in information so i've decided my company is called sauce because who doesn't love some sauce i wanted i thought of what can be hip to these young adults that i'm targeting so uh sauce sauce it is all right so i'm going back to the business plan you will notice if you click on the business plan icon it's going to take you to a different screen it's essentially the same thing i'm not sure why they have a different platform to access it but i prefer what the dashboard looks like so i can just go into it and see it all together so business plans we're first going into i think the hardest thing for people to create and again it's just asking questions about yourself and your company based off of what you have put in to the lean canvas so i'm going to focus on two things here for this business plan which i think are the hardest to do and that is the mission statement flash summary and then also kind of um a lot of people that that i've talked to they typically have a lot of questions regarding uh marketing and kind of figuring out what to do there i also really recommend utilizing so the guild business entrepreneurship again this i'm gonna just search up does anyone have an example or exactly what their business is about and i can definitely find an example of a business plan so since mine was event planning not really but we're just going to search event planning in gale entrepreneurship it not only gives me 43 business plan examples but it also gives me relevant resources and also different directories so these are actually people who are those and it also pulls out information from magazines and journals even news so this is from 2021 so again this is constantly updated shoes we love shoes so shoes is kind of like a zappos model which that is a fascinating start to their business i didn't know that the founder of zappos he all he literally did was create a website where he took pictures of shoes at physical shoe stores and then um just sold them online before really going forward with his business ideation so he also created this mvp this testing and making sure that the consumers were really into buying shoes online versus in person before going forth so here's a shoe store business plan example thomas and shoes it is great to kind of see yes sell shoes to mid-market customers in the boston area that is a concise mission or that is a concise statement of their concept what they're doing um so breaking down the mission i think sometimes when i think of mission i'm just like well this is so easy for non-profits what what about the shoe salesman because mission kind of implies that it's just this holier than now um what what ideals we need to do or why why we're just so much better than the average shoe store oh we also have organizational stationery i love stationery these are awesome you guys like are catering to my specific interests i appreciate that okay so when you're building out a mission statement i'm going back to my there we go plan builder i believe it's company background so i'll actually just plug in and try to edit this edit link business plan so here is it broken down you can go into summary so elevator pitch goes here company background asking yourself all of these questions all right i'm gonna switch back to sorry about all the switches i assumed that i could just do this on the same one i appreciate your patience okay so mission and values i am of the generation that loves a good ad lib so this is kind of what i found is the best to kind of see so terry my company terry shoes is developing maybe a website to sell these shoes to help um mid-income yeah your defined audience so your exact target market and it could be let's do mid-income families with children um to help stressed out parents um find comfortable stylish shoes with maybe uh your secret sales technique or your sales technique so um i had made my company sauce so that was my ad-lib that i filled in so this is essentially helps you also taking that concept taking your defined offering and applying it to your again defined audience showing um your essentially problem solving the problem that they have so maybe the terry's shoes that he wants to sell the families stressed out parents aren't able to find shoes um that their children will both like easy to put on that's also stylish and then secret sauce what makes your company different why are these parents more likely to buy these children's shoes from you versus someone else so i would also recommend this is this is pretty basic i think you can definitely improve your business your mission um further by maybe taking out a lot of this jargon so the goal is to make this as concise as easy to understand as possible i think if we could transform this mission statement into half the length it would be fantastic so something catchy something that's easy to understand so less of an elevator pitch more of a concept that also conveys your values or what problem that you are solving okay and then the next one i'm going to focus a little bit on marketing so business plans do include just kind of a marketing plan marketing analysis so things to consider um the first one is the marketing funnel is anyone familiar with the marketing funnel so this essentially allows your customers to um it wasn't okay so it is the journey of how someone becomes a customer and beyond so what keeps them being a customer so where do they start uh how do they learn about your product why do they buy your product uh why do they tell other people about your product because we all know word of mouth is the best advertisement and marketing that is out there so this essentially just is a funnel this is where people are starting so tofu not the food but it stands for top of the funnel this is the tactics you use to generate awareness so in your business plan you are going to determine okay so am i using blog articles am i using surveymonkey to get people kind of aware of it am i creating a um just a web page for people to see what's what's in there so interest also is combined with awareness so middle of the funnel mofu these are the tactics that you're going to be using to generate the lead so leads are and essentially you're bringing people to your website to more information about your products so sending emails doing free trials product videos advertisements um and lastly bottom of the funnel so tactics you use to generate customers and keep them satisfied so once someone buys something for you are you going to have maybe a referral program for them are you going to have a customer service appreciation day where you're like hey you bought your before here's 25 off um are you like terry are you going to maybe email the people that responded to your first survey and be like thank you for responding to the survey here's a here's a coupon or here is a special you get this with your first purchase of shoes so going through this uh it just kind of allows you to let your investor know that the person who's reading your business plan um what steps you're gonna take in order to successfully advertise and sell your product okay i'm gonna go back to this is my last share okay back to the dashboard so i had downloaded the business plan i really want to show you what it looks like so we are going to zoom out quite a bit there's my sauce uh these are peppers that my husband dried and grew that's my logo so this is how it puts it all together it has a disclosure statement contact information table of contents again making sure this looks really professional business writing is perfect it includes the summary um your company background direction so it looks beautiful and who you're not so dang it okay thank you so much i'm on a new share again thank you terry i apologize okay so here is the pdf business plan and you all should be able to see this now great okay yes so this is concise information everything that you inputted into that business plan it's outputted into this beautiful format that is incredibly professional looking so again i'll be emailing this to you all just so you can kind of see what to put for your own business plan and again i really want to encourage you all to once you start filling out this information about your company to reach out if you want me or a colleague of mine to look it over even if that's just editing grammatical items um just checking for grammar and even just seeing like how does it look madeleine give me some feedback um so i will be doing that okay screen sharing has stopped cool i am going to lastly share um the statista so i'll show you how to access that let's exit out of this okay going back to the business page on book a librarian i'm scrolling down clicking on statista so one of the main reasons why we write business plans are to get funding from stakeholders so while the lean canvas did a great job of replacing the business model story that you traditionally see you still need to have this long business plan um because your stakeholders want to know how you're going to get those kpis those key performance indicators why they should invest in that um and they also want to know about the numbers so statista is amazing it is let me make sure that it's all working yes it has the most data out of all of our databases and i love how everything is organized it does seem a little bit intimidating but i can assure you it is well worth checking it out okay so to statista i'm going to the top of the screen i'm going to tools business plan export so this is essentially data sets for your specific business plan so what you're going to be doing here is essentially selecting the specific market that your business is in and then it this database has already exported all of the relevant data to that so information on industry pertaining to your region unfortunately one of the drawbacks of statista it's nationally um used so instead of like narrowing down your data to illinois it's just the united states but still very relevant still really great for your business so i'm going to do this real quickly start data export so you're able to choose your market so we had shoes footwear next up region united states and i'm scrolling down summary start data export that's all you do and it is downloading a really nice excel file where it has a lot of great instructions in here and i'm going to go ahead and share that because i've learned now that it won't automatically change okay so here's the data set so at the bottom right hand corner i'm going over to the data so this is all of the relevant information that statista has that will help bulk up your business plan and support why investors and stakeholders should invest in this so i'm out of time but i'm going to quickly finish this up again it tells you exactly what to do and if you have additional questions about utilizing this aspect of statista please feel free to reach out and let me know because if librarians like one thing it's data okay and again you can export this into a really nice pdf and just attach it to your business plan in order to increase the likelihood of you getting some stakeholders and investors okay so my last share of the day okay let's present this oh it's because i can't see it all right well i have some resources here again i will be emailing you all with the books that i really enjoyed the websites that i used um we also have some really great linkedin learning videos that went into uh concisely making your business plan i think someone here might be really interested in learning how to do a business proposal linkedin has a really amazing resource on that and i will be sharing it with you and um to finish up i'm Madeleine Wolske i'm the business librarian here at Champaign Public i had a great time this morning talking to you all about building your business plan making sure your business idea is feasible and ensuring well working to ensure its success and uh i really want to encourage you to join me uh next monday so the first at 7 pm we have a webinar that is all about telling your brand story so Alisa Green is a local photographer and branding expert she's going to be showing us how to push your brand forward through photography so this could include taking images of your products taking images for your website or maybe even um how to set up your social media to promote your products and services to the best of their abilities so i really want to encourage you all to stop by sign up on our website champaign.org/events you're also able to peruse all of our other amazing resources at the library all of our other great events our webinars are not limited to business we also have some great tech options career and crafty adults and that's just the adult that's just for adults i mean kids and teens are incredible as well uh so i will log off this eve this morning it is only 9 a.m
see a big thank you again all for joining uh i really want to encourage you to reach out i am so excited and really eager to hear about your business goals what you're wanting to do what you're doing right now and see if i can help in any way and really utilize our free resources our community resources and help you to succeed and help your overall success so thank you again you all have a wonderful thursday and uh it feels like the weekend's already here so uh i will sign off it doesn't look like we have any questions but thank you all have a wonderful morning
2021-02-06 20:37
