What to do for next week, Nov. 18

After today (Tuesday, Nov. 12) we have three more classes. For now we're going to drop the journalism entrepreneurs so we can get to work on business plans. Each week will be dedicated to developing a section of our business plans. Then we will pull them all together in a completed business plan that could be used to begin shopping your business to investors. This will be submitted on the last day of class. Development of each section of the document will be cumulative, i.e., nothing will be final until compiled into the final document. I will give a grade and evaluation of each element of the project as they come in.

Among the things we will work on are:

• Market research
• Analysis of any competition
• Content development, including mission statement and “about” page
• Audience outreach
• Revenue and cost preparation

For next week, I would like you to study some of the sample business plans and primers found on the Web. Here are a few:

From Entrepreneur: http://i.oc.gs/herid
From the Small Business Administration
From Forbes
From our friend Guy Kawasaki

There are many more. Have fun exploring. Take what seems to work for your project. Avoid junk sites like ask.com or yahoo.

I will also attempt to dig up the for-now-elusive Points East business plan that we used to shop our magazine around when we were looking for a second round of investors. Search for other business plans online and explore those as well. We didn’t have time to talk this week about market research and analysis of competition because we had a guest, but for Monday I’d like you to try to develop some ideas and publish them as postings on your blog. One blog will be about market research and the other Analysis of competition.

Part I: Market research.

To some degree, some of you have already done this. Before you can launch a business, you need to know what you are dealing with. At Points East, we needed to know how many people owned boats in New England, which we gleaned from state and federal databases; we needed to know where these boaters were concentrated; we needed to know their demographics — ages, incomes, professions, etc. This was a little harder to quantify. Figures from the most recent census could help. We needed to know how long they kept their boats in the water (only a fool boats in winter New England); we needed to know how much money they spend on boating activities each year. The idea here is to collect all the information that you will need to answer questions from potential advertisers and/or investors.

Your work for next week: Think hard about the kind of market research you need to do and how you will do it. Identify as many of these elements (at least 10) as you can and list them on your blogs. Pick five from the list and do some actual research. Report on the results of this research on your blogs.

Part II: Analysis of competition

In some ways, any time we ask someone to do something we are competing with someone for that person’s time. Sometimes it is obvious. In the case of Points East, we needed to study every other boating publication that might tempt our potential readers; we needed to know how much of the the reader pie and the advertiser pie they were eating, so we’d know how much might be left over for us; we needed to know how much they were charging for subscriptions and for advertising; we needed to poke for vulnerabilities so that we would know how much business we could attract away from them; we needed circulation numbers and methods; we needed to know about content — did they concentrate on any particular boaters or types of boats? 

Every business is different. Yours will have its unique characteristics that will shape all the above questions. You may have more questions. You may have fewer. But again the object is to anticipate as many of the questions your investors and/or advertisers will have as you can and prepare answers for them. You will need these answers for both your business plans and for your pitches.

Your work for next week: Research and identify your competition — everyone and everything that could get between you and your customers. Gather any statistics you can find. Be resourceful. Use your reporting skills. Why are they competition and in what way do they threaten your business? What are you up against? What are you going to do about it? In your blog, write about your competition. 

In each of these cases, you could be creating sections of your business plans, so the more work you do now the easier it will be later to polish them and merge them with the plan. 

This should all be done by class time Monday.