Starting Up a Web Design Company: Step 4 – The Business Plan II
Welcome to part 4 of the multi-part series on starting up a web design company. We will continue to talk about the business plan and discuss on my experience in writing one. Please be sure to check out the first article on the business plan as well.
Last time, we left off writing section 2, the company history. We will now continue with section 3 of the business plan, the business concept. The business concept would answer the following questions:
- Products/Services the company provides
- The target customer groups
- How does the company’s products/service will stand out
- Distribution method/how it will run
For Beamstyle, we initially defined our services to be web design, online shop, and graphics design. We only defined these three services because we would like to first build our branding among the group of services which we expertise in. Our initial target customers will be local SMEs and non-profit organizations because we know projects from this group often are smaller. Due to our smaller team size, we believe that we can create our solutions with higher quality when we work on smaller projects.
We believe our agile development model will make us stand out from our competitors. In Hong Kong, agile development is rarely used because Hong Kong is a market where changes are not easily accepted. It is extremely difficult to have a customer in Hong Kong to adapt to the agile development model. However, Beamstyle uses a modified version of the agile development model that is created for the Hong Kong audience. We believe this will let our customers slowly understand the advantages of the Agile development model and accept this as the mainstream model for software development. In addition, our small team consists of members with over 10 years of web development. Each member has his own area of expertise. We understand a cross functional team is required for a full quality solution.
For our distribution method, we defined out how our company will work with our customers. This would include how we would arrange meetings with them. We defined the main flow on how we approach our customers. For example, we would first give out a sample quote for a project. Then we would write a detail requirement document. If our customer accepts the project, we would start to kick off. It is also a good opportunity to determine when to charge your clients. For example, at Beamstyle, we normally break our payment into three parts.
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 18th, 2009 at 12:11 am
[...] Other parts in the series: Step 1: The Founding Step 2: The Naming Step 3: The Business Plan Step 4: The Business Plan II [...]
March 18th, 2009 at 12:12 am
[...] Other parts in the series: Step 1: The Founding Step 2: The Naming Step 3: The Business Plan Step 4: The Business Plan II [...]
March 18th, 2009 at 12:12 am
[...] Other parts in the series: Step 1: The Founding Step 2: The Naming Step 3: The Business Plan Step 4: The Business Plan II [...]
March 18th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
[...] See more here: Starting Up a Web Design Company: Step 4 – Th&… [...]
April 6th, 2009 at 5:28 am
Ah, nice article. I’ll have to give your other articles a browse. thanks