Out of all the well-known skills that MBA graduates can obtain from a good business school, one of the most important ones is learning how to use them.
This will teach you how to ace a business plan for your new company, and the best part is that you can obtain your MBA and set up a successful new business at the same time, with many establishments like Hult International Business School offering MBA courses part time.
A business plan is the most essential document you need to get your new company off the ground and into the echelons of the business world, and a good business plan includes your goals, objectives, and how you will achieve these.
First, you will want to note your idea and what it will involve to execute it. This includes your current cash flow and financial objectives as well as projections from sales that you hope to achieve.
Marketing is essential
Another factor to remember when you are putting together a business plan is marketing. Promoting your new company is the most essential element in making sure your business is a success and that you actually sell the product or service you are providing to your customers.
One thing to remember when you are planning your marketing strategy is that if you do not know your customer, you will not know how to target them. Do they use Instagram or Pinterest? Or are there offline ways to target them, as an example.
Within your business plan then, it is very important that you include a target market analysis and a customer profile. This also helps to inform you of your competitors, but more on that later.
Study your target market
Your target market profile can be done in any number of ways, and the more creative the better. You can even draw them and include annotations, if you like. The point of a target market analysis is to find out what makes your customers tick, so that you then know how to sell a product to them.
One important marketing tactic is to “poke the bruise” for example; if your product or service is solving a problem for any type of person, that makes them a potential customer, and so you know what you need to tell them to make them want to buy into your product or service.
Once you have those elements aced in your business plan, next you can find out who your competitors are and what they are doing to achieve the goals that you want your business to achieve, or go further than.
As by now you should know the age and income your customer has, we can talk to them in the mediums and language that they will understand and want to listen to.
Check out what your competitors are doing and where they are doing it, and find out whether or not that is working for them. If it is working for your competitors, or not, then the likelihood is that it will work for you too.
Compare your competitors
If it is not working for your competitors, then find out why, and then figure out how you can make it work for you. That is how you will get ahead of the market and the competitors who are stopping you from doing so at the moment.
Now that you know all of the above and have your objectives down, it is time to think about next steps.
If you have a business plan for your own reference, you can make it more personalised and creative for your own use.
But, if you plan to use it to attract the attention of investment, it is important that it looks professional and offers the investor tangible evidence that you will achieve those goals and objectives you have laid out.
Presentation can be the key
One way to make sure you present your business plan to potential investors in the best light possible is to include the why and the how beneath every objective and goal, and this is helpful for your own reference too, although not completely essential as you might want to remain flexible.
Note what does and does not work, and why. Note what you have done already and what the outcomes have been. How has this informed your projections and why do you think these goals will be achievable in relation to the evidence you have laid out in your business plan?
With a professional layout, tangible results and evidence, there would be no reason that an investor wouldn’t at least have a look at your business plan, which is sometimes all you need for your new company to thrive.