Preparing to Launch a New Online Business – The Business Plan

Erik Karey May 1st, 2007 No comments

In past online business ventures, I’ve been known as a fly by the seat of my pants type planner. I’ve jumped right into ideas and ventures without planning. I pick a name and domain for my project and then I start getting a design and script ready for the site. I’ll be honest; it’s not the best way to launch an online business, especially any large venture. Recently I’ve begun work on a new online business which I think has the potential to grow into something great and because of this I’ve reformed my ways. I’ve actually developed a business plan and completed a whole lot of planning before ever paying a cent. Below are a few tips and guidelines to help you in preparing your own business plan. I highly recommend it!

A business plan is generally consists of the following sections:

Mission Statement – The mission statement is a generalized statement about your goal/mission. This doesn’t need to be long, but it should be definitive and to the point. This should be your ultimate goal. (i.e. Company ABC is the leading social network site on the internet)

Description of Business – As the name implies, this section will be a description of the business. Think of this section as the reply to “What is Company ABC?” This is generally a bit less formal and more descriptive.

Competition Analysis – Hopefully you’ve already completed a bit of market research and understand who your competitors are. In this section you would list the main businesses/sites that you will be competing with.

Marketing Plan – The marketing plan is a list of general marketing ideas/campaigns that you have for your business. These can be either ongoing plans or date specific ideas such as website launch ideas. How will you initially get customers to the site?

Sales Plan – The sales plan will describe how you plan on getting customers to buy your product. If your marketing plan works and gets customers to the site, then how will you seal the deal and sell them the product?

Financial Plan – Chances are, as with all businesses, you probably won’t start your website day 1 and be in the green. The financial plan is where you want to spell out operating costs and projected profit/loss. Try to determine when you expect to start making money and how much you will be spending over the next X months.

Team Roles – Although this may not seem too important to define team roles, it’s actually crucial. By defining roles within your staff (assuming you will have a staff) everyone on staff can hold each other accountable. If task X didn’t get completed its easy now to see who was responsible for it.

There are certainly other ways to write up a business plan and certainly do extra research on business plans before launching your business. I’m hoping that this is a good brief introduction to the concept of the business plan and its importance. I know that launching previous sites without one has been hard and I’m hoping that with my upcoming project, my business plan will ease some of my troubles.

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