Starting Up a Web Design Company: Step 3 – The Business Plan
Welcome to part 3 of the multi-part series on starting up a web design company. We will talk about the sections I wrote my business plan and how it is useful to define your business. I won’t write the details of the different sections of the business plan. You can find some good resources on writing the plans in Business Owner’s ToolKit or from About.com’s Business Plan.
Many people think that a business plan is not useful unless they are using it to get funding from an angel investor or getting a loan from a bank. I can tell you that it is not true. I believe that the business plan is the single most important document I have written for Beamstyle. Some of the advantages of this document include:
- Letting your partner understand the business to prevent arguments later on
- Defining your business scope
- Learning more about the market and the competition
- Defining your market segmentation
- Knowing more about your financial situation
The first part of the business plan is an executive summary where I basically summarize our entire business in one page. It defines what the rest of the document would be about. In my executive summary, I have written:
- The type of solutions/products we offer
- Our competitors and what they offer
- Our advantages over them
- Our team
- Our goals and future development
I strongly recommend anyone of you writing a business plan to start with the execute summary as it gives you a strong guideline to follow for the rest of the document.
The second part of the business plan is the company history. This section would go in detail about the management team, showing the team’s strengths and weaknesses. It is a good opportunity to set the roles of each person in the company given the analysis of each member in the team. For example, after this analysis, we found out that we got a person who is a programmer, but he got a great deal of experience dealing with clients. We assigned him to be our business analyst and the job really suits him.
We all continue to discuss about the business plan next time, as I have to get back to work on the Beamstyle projects again. If you enjoy this series, please feel free to give me a vote on dzone.
Other parts in the series:
Step 1: The Founding
Step 2: The Naming
Step 3: The Business Plan
Step 4: The Business Plan II
Step 5: The Business Plan III
March 14th, 2009 at 1:21 am
[...] Other parts in the series: Step 1: The Founding Step 2: The Naming Step 3: The Business Plan [...]
March 14th, 2009 at 1:22 am
[...] Other parts in the series: Step 1: The Founding Step 2: The Naming Step 3: The Business Plan [...]
March 14th, 2009 at 11:03 am
[...] Read more: Starting Up a Web Design Comp­… [...]
March 14th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
[...] Go here to see the original: Starting Up a Web Design Company: Step 3 – The Business Plan | Web … [...]
April 7th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
[...] 1: The Founding Step 2: The Naming Step 3: The Business Plan Step 4: The Business Plan II Step 5: The Business Plan [...]
December 12th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
thanks admin