Thank you, Entrepreneurship 11 and 12 students, for a great first full week back at school. There have certainly been some weird changes made to how we do school - I know I've been finding it exhausting to focus on just one subject for five hours every day, and I'm sure you are too - but you have been so great at making the necessary adjustments happen and I commend you for doing what is needed to take care of each other and keep school open. This week, we started working on a major project for this course: creating a business plan for a hypothetical business that you could one day start up and run. This project is designed to give you a lot of choice as to how you want to apply the ideas discussed in class to an area of your own interest and passion. While there are a lot of parts to this project and it can look overwhelming at first, I appreciate your hard work and participation this week to get this assignment off to a good start. We all work at different paces and, going in to the weekend, some of us might have more work still to be completed than others, so I want to use this post to provide you with the information you may need to continue working on this project at home over the weekend. At this point in the project, we have spent time working on the following aspects of our business plans:
The faded aspects of the project we will work on developing in class on Monday, and you do not need to think about this weekend. Below are instructions and examples for the areas of the business plan that you may want to work on developing over the weekend so that you are up to date on Monday. Business Description:Your business description is going to be approximately one page explaining what your business does, the reason why the business does what it does, who they sell to, and how their product is distributed to the customer. Think of the concept statements we wrote at the start of the week. These statements served to answer four questions in just two sentences:
While the concept statement gave us a really clear and concise idea of what our business idea was to work with, for our business plan we need to add more details so that potential investors can understand what we are doing. If in your concept statement you said that your company makes smart phones, in your business description you should describe what some of the features of your smart phone are that differentiate it from the other smart phones in the market. Here is a great example of a well written business description for the Atlanta Bread Company to use as a template. Mission Statement:The mission statement is an expression of a company's specific aspirations. It is a statement of what the company considers to be success. A good mission statement is specific and clearly states what the goals of the company are. For example, "Our goal when we created Tesla a decade ago was the same as it is today: to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible." - Tesla, Mission Statement "Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." - Facebook, Mission Statement Both of these examples provide a concise and clear statement of what their respective company's goals are and gives them direction to guide decisions. As you write your Mission Statement, decide what your goal is for your business besides making a profit. What would success for your company look like? Vision Statement:The vision statement exists to establish why the company exists beyond making a profit. It may reflect the beliefs and values of the company. Think of it as a statement of how the company would like to see the world look in ten years as a result of the company's existence. For example: "A world without Alzheimer's disease." - Alzheimer's Association, Vision Statement This vision statement is super short and simple, yet it tells us a lot about the organization. It provides a future-focused direction for the company that is challenging and inspiring enough to push the organization to achieve something that is not currently a reality. "Use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis." - Patagonia, Vision Statement Patagonia's vision is that, through the success of their business, they can be apart of enacting positive change to the ongoing environmental problems in the world. Their statement shows a clear belief in making the world a better place. As you write your vision statement, ask yourself, "How would I like the world to look in 10 years as a result of my business?" Competition/Market Analysis:A competition analysis is fairly self-explanatory: it is our chance to analyze our competitors and think about what they are doing. Completing a competition analysis for our company serves two purposes: first, it allows us to see what the market is like and second, it allows us to identify market opportunities. On Wednesday we completed this template in class to organize the important details about three of our competitors: Now that we have completed this template, we need to put the information in to paragraph format for our business plan. When taking the information from this chart and putting it in to a paragraph, focus on answering three questions about your competitor:
Target Customer:In order to sell our product, we need to understand exactly who we are selling to. Unfortunately, it is not realistic to expect that we have made a product that every single person in the world will want or need, so narrowing down a specific type of person can help us develop our product, as well as recognize how big or small of a market we should expect. For the purpose of this project, you should identify 5-8 characteristics of your customers and develop your product to meet their needs. As you can see from the example we looked at in class, the more specific we can be about the type of people who we want to target with our product, the better we will understand the potential of our product. Distribution Channels:The distribution channels will show an understanding of how our product goes from being being an unmanufactured collection of materials to a product that the customer can purchase, take home, and use.
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EntrepreneurshipEntrepreneurship is an opportunity for students to learn about the world of business, finance, and marketing. In this class we explore both practical and theoretical topics in business to help students to understand what the entrepreneurial process is and if it is something they are interested in pursuing as a career. ArchivesCategories |