Business Plan
<< Insert Business Name Here >>
Business Plan
1. Planning
What is your business idea?
What resources will you need to get it started?
What is the name of your business?
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2. Knowing Your Product
What is the unique selling point of your product?
How much will it cost to make (approximately)?
How much will you sell the product for?
How labour intensive is production of the product (approximately)?
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3. Knowing Your Market
Is the demand for your product a one-off purchase/repeat purchase (delete as appropriate)? If
one-off purchase, how will you keep up sales?
Is your target market currently in decline/undergoing growth? Are there any specific reasons for
this?
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4. Marketing Plan
Utilise the plan to consider and explain the following:
The Product/Service – Describe your product or explain the service you will be delivering and how
it works
The Price - with this you need to explain how much the product will cost to make before setting a
selling a price. Check pricing against that of the competition and think about the current state of
the market and the economy.
Promotion - think about advertising, running a promotional campaign and anything else that will
help tell people about your product or service.
Location of your business - you also need to think about how you are going to get your products to
the customer if the customer is not going to come to you.
Product/Service
Pricing of the product/service
Promotion
Location of your business or service
The way in which you can use this table is to help you to prepare your idea to see if you can make
it work. This will help you identify whether or not you can sell your product or service.
In addition you might need to conduct some marketing research. This could be by way of looking
at the current market and identifying what products and services people are buying or you might
want to prepare a questionnaire to issue to people in order to find out what they want. When it
comes to preparing a questionnaire you may want to see your tutor for advice on how best to
design a questionnaire. Useful tips for designing a questionnaire:
 Use closed questions e.g. ‘Do you smoke cigarettes?’ Yes or No. In other words the
respondent must answer, ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, for this question. An open question invites the
respondent to offer an opinion. You might want to ask at least one open question but you
don’t have to.
 Keep the questions short
 Make them easy to understand
 Be clear
 Try not to ask too many questions or people may not co-operate!
Write down your marketing plan based on the information you have put together in the table
above including references to any marketing research you may have conducted.
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5. Knowing Your Customers
Age
Sex
Income Bracket
What will your customers value most about your product?
Why would they choose your product over competitors?
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6. Comparing Your Competitors
My business
Competitor A
Competitor B Competitor C
Product
Price
Availability
Reputation
Strengths
Weaknesses
Unique Selling
Proposition
Promotion/Sales
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My product is better than each of my competitor’s because:
Competitor A
Competitor B
Competitor C
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6. Promotion
Please outline how you plan to promote your product:
Type of
advertising/promotion
Success to be
measured by
Method used by
competitors
Method 1
Method 2
Method 3
Method 4
Method 5
Method 6
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7. Reality Check
Does your product function as it should?
Does your product appeal to your target audience? Attach further research as necessary.
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8. Financial Planning
In your financial planning you need to work out the costs of setting up and running the business
against how much money you think you are going to receive from sales. You should also then be
able to estimate the amount of profit you are likely to make over a 12 month period. If you wish
to offer a longer projection of the estimated financial position you can if you so wish. Please be
aware of the fact that it may take up to two years or more before a new business starts to make
profit!
You will need to present a simple cash flow forecast for 12 months using the spread-sheet
attached. If you wish to provide any other financial information please add whatever you feel is
relevant. You may find it useful to visit the following website www.bized.co.uk for help with
preparing your business plan.
A sample financial template is available on Moodle.
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