All right, you're interested in starting a business. How to start a business? Part  two, write out a business plan. Now I'm going to tell you about how to write a  business plan, and I want you to know what's involved in it, but I don't want you  to do it yet. I want you to understand what's inside of it so you can be thinking  about it. But this is, this is not the first thing that you should do, because you  don't know enough to write a really good business plan. This is after you've gone out, you've made a prototype, you you have a service, you've tried it out, you  mowed a bunch of people's lawns, or you've power washed something, and you  know that's your service that you want to provide. You've done something to  know what the problems are, to know what's involved. And then eventually you  want to be able to figure out this business plan. So what is a business plan? The business plan. Don't worry about perfection. First Draft, sit down and do  something in two hours. So this is after you're starting, you're you're getting  going, you kind of know what you want to do. You sit out and you just crank it  out in two hours. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's not going to be printed in  some book. This is mainly just for you and maybe some interested parties. Show first draft to others. Okay, so you write it down. It's not perfect. You tell them that  look. It's my first shot. I want you to look it over and make some comments.  Write second draft with input from others. So you just get started. I do this with  people that want to get married, I want people to write out their vows, and they  get all freaked out. I can't do that. And I just say, just take a piece of paper, write  down randomly, the things you kind of want to promise. Doesn't matter if it's  good grammar, complete sentences. You just write thoughts as they go. Do that  kind of thing with this business plan thing. Put put business plan into practice.  Okay, parts of a business plan? What's in a business plan? I'm just going to  quickly go through the list, and then we're going to come back and look at each  one individually. First, there's the executive summary, then there's the business  description, then there's business environment analysis, then there's the  industry analysis, competitive analysis, market analysis, marketing plan,  Operations Plan, team and management plan, financial projections. Okay, so the first thing is the executive summary. What's involved in that? First there's the  Mission Statement. This explains to the reader of your business plan why your  company exists. What do you exist to do? What do you exist to sell? The  activities of your company should be guided by its mission statement. It's just a  general summary of what you do. Number two, your Executive Summary should include company information. This is a brief statement giving a historical  perspective of your company. How long has it lasted? When did it start? How did it start? It should include the data formation, locations, company founders,  number of current employees, all relevant information about your company.  Number three, the executive summary should include highlights. This is an  opportunity to tell the reader about profit or market milestones achieved by the  company since its inception. What have you done? How has it gone? You've 

been testing things. What it what did you figure out through this testing phase  number four, products and services, briefly mention and describe the products  or services offered by the company. In my plan, my personalized Bible thing, I  

would mention, okay, we have several Bible products. We have New  Testaments. We have several versions of New Testaments. We have a Jesus  Bible, which is the summary of the Gospels. We have a sampler Bible and  abridged whole Bible. We have a 30 second Bible. We have a tract. We have  these different Bible products, each one of them be can be customized to the  nonprofit or the or the church that wants to use them. So I describe what it is  that I do. Number five, financial information. This section is particularly important for companies seeking financing, and should include mention of bank references and investors. So if you're, if you're, if you've advanced in your idea, and you  actually need money from other people, well, how does that work? If I give you  money, what do I get from it? Number six, future projections explain the direction in which ownership and management plan to take the business. Where's this  business going? What's the dream? How big is it going to get? What's the next  step? Okay, that's the executive summary. Then we have the business  description. What is your product or your service? What is it that you do? Well,  we wash siding of houses. That's what we do. We bought a power washer, and  we're going to go out and clean things. We're going to do decks. We're going to  do homes, anything that needs a pressure washer. That's what we're going to  do. So what is your product? What is your service? Why are you starting this  business? What do you hope to happen with this business? What do you hope  to do for people? What do you hope it does for you? Who owns it and how is it  run? Is it owned by you? Is it owned by a group of people, partners, who runs it,  who's in charge? Is this a collaborative thing? Are you the owner, operator and  dictator of all things? Or does your wife do that? Or how does this work? Who  are the potential customers, and how does the business intend to reach them?  So I have these personalized Bible products. Who are my potential customers  every church, every English speaking church, and then I have a Spanish New  Testament too. So all those churches are potential customers every para church ministry program that's out there that wants to do something. I have NASCAR  people doing it, and Christian firemen and policemen, people that throw horse  shoes, that ride horses on and on and on, cowboy churches, cowboy  organizations. I have a guy that that, that that goes to fares and trains a horse,  like the horse whisperer, and he has his own Bible that he wants to hand out. So those are my that, those are the groups that I think about now. How am I going  to reach them? I can call on churches. I can drive by. I i can send mailings, I can make phone calls. How is this thing going to make money? Okay, how is the  service that you're providing? What's the cost structure of how this is going to  work? How would it ultimately make you money? The business environment  analysis. Why is your business needed? Why do people need something 

washed with a pressure hose? Or why do people need a new roof? Or why  would someone need a Bible product with their own cover? I have to be able to  answer that question in order to sell it to somebody who are the potential  competitors to your business. And why will you be able to compete? Well, so  there are plenty of people that own Bible copyrights. I had to get the copyright  for the New International Version. I have to talk to a nonprofit to get that. Well,  they sell Bibles too, and at the time that I first started this, they were selling the  New Testament, and you could put a cover on it, and they were my competitor.  And then, for whatever reason, I don't know what it is, maybe I put them out of  business. I'm not sure, but they stopped doing the New Testament. They only do the whole Bible. Well, I did the New Testament and the Jesus Bible and sampler  Bible and other products. And so I lost that competitor. But while they were  competing with me, I definitely set my price lower than theirs. What about the  business environment will make it a challenge to your business, and what will  your business do to overcome these challenges? So what are the problems?  What are the the you know the problem might be marketing. People want your  product if they only knew about it, but how are you going to let people know  about it? Whatever the challenges are, you just sit down and you put them out.  These are the challenges. And here's what we're going to do to try to meet those challenges. Next is the marketing plan. And a marketing plan consists, first of all, of your product. What is your product? What is specifically? Is it? What are the  parts of your product or service, then you need to determine price. And price  isn't just what you sell it, but price is what it takes to make it, store it. I used to  store the Bibles that I would print before I'd put covers on them. The printer  would store them for free, and then all of a sudden he wants to charge me for it.  So now, I gotta either store myself, or I have to find someone to store it. Maybe  someone can mail it. And so different companies have suggested different  things, and in the end, I thought they were all too expensive. So I have a barn  that I own with my son, and so we put them there. That's all part of the price.  What is the cost of making, holding, sending, mailing, shipping, all these things.  Have to figure out these prices. Place Where you going to do your business? I  do my business out of my garage. My garage is for my cars. My cars don't go in  the garage. All my stuff goes in the garage. Where's your place of business?  What is the cost of that place of business promotion. How are people going to  know about your product or service, and how much is that going to cost  customer service if you have a product or service, if you want to continue with  those customers in my Bible business, most of it is repeat business. Someone  orders it, and a year later, they order again. But you have to maintain a good  relationship with people like that. You have to produce something that's of  quality that they'll want to do it again. So how do you what's your plan of staying  connected with your customers, your operations plan, positions and job  descriptions. If you grow who's in charge of, what? What are they supposed to 

do? What? What is their what is the outline of their job? What are they  responsible for? What are they not responsible for? If you leave it loose, people  start resenting. One does more work than someone else, and this is true to self,  husband and wife, you've got to have clear things, that this is what you do and  what you're responsible for, the organizational chart. Who's in charge, who's  under whom, and if no one's under whom. How does it work? How do you  decide things? Is it a collaborative thing? Can someone just make decisions  without talking to anybody else? Or do we have to talk about it first and then  agree together? Are we going to vote on it? Are we going to do it by consensus? What's the way that you're going to govern your organization? What's the  management environment? How do we how do we take care of things? Who  keeps track of things? Who decides what is going to happen when? Who  decides that it wasn't done well. The next is financials. How is the money? What  are your assets? For example, what do you own? I own. I own some binders.  They bind. They make perfect books. They glue the cover onto, onto the book  block. Now I have two three blade cutters that cut it when it's finished. I have  them stored in my garage. I have three different cutters. I have two different  binders, okay? And they cost some money, okay, I had to buy them. I bought  them used. And, you know, so that's part of my assets. I own those things.  They're worth something. Also part of my assets is the book blocks I print, you  know, I print 50,000 NIVs At one time, and they go into some storage. And even  though I spent the money on those books because I haven't sold them, it's still  money. It's just money in the form of books, and they sit there and and, and I  could have done something else with the money, so they cost me interest. You  need to know that if you look at your assets, you have to look at your debt.  Perhaps you're buying something and you can't afford it. You got a loan. You got a loan from your brother, your uncle, your friend, and you owe interest on that  debt, money flow. How's it going to go if you're doing a product or a service, lot  of times you have to buy stuff before the customer actually pays you. So with the Bible's, I print a bunch of them, and it takes me three years to get rid of them, so I have to pay that pay for them ahead of time, long before I ever get the money  from the customers. So I have to have enough money to do that. That's the  money flow situation. The accounting. How are you going to account for things,  keeping track of things. And there's different ways of doing accounting. We'll talk about that in another video. Banking. Where are you going to put the money,  interest, all those kinds of things, especially if you get a loan. How's that going to work with your bank credit? Again, it's best not to get credit. It's best to start  small, start with what you have, and gradually grow you get into credit. Credit,  you know, people. People think money is, you know, it's free. You can go to the  bank. They give you money, but that's just money you owe. And not only do you  owe the money that you borrowed, but you owe money on top of that, the  interest. So if you can, and then you don't know if your thing is going to succeed,

why not start small, and from the small profits grow little by little by little. So  those are, those are the things that are involved in, in in kind of a business plan.  There's a lot of things in all this detailed stuff, and it looks overwhelming when  you get a certain way in your business, you get started, you're, you know, you're starting to get serious about it. Just go over this again and just sit down and see  what you can do with this in two hours. You don't have all the facts, right? You  don't have all the figures and so on. You just do the best you can in two hours.  Just set the timer and go and then go and to people you trust and say, Here's  my business plan. It's just. Two hour thing, I just threw it together. Isn't perfect.  Could you just look it over and could you just make little notes about what I  could do or improve, or what what you question, or, you know, where I could be  more clear, because it would be a lot easier to go back and rewrite it with the  help of other people's inputs. Thanks 



Last modified: Monday, November 25, 2024, 1:19 PM