Business Plan part 1

Preparing a Business Plan Part 1

Identifying the Target Market and your Competition 

Now that you have a great business idea, it is time to find out if you can actually make MONEY with it.   Of course, to do this, you will need to conduct some market research.  This research will be of paramount importance in completing your business plan!

Task One:  Work through and answer the following questions to determine your target market.  Use the internet, magazines, your textbook and other Secondary sources to get your data

n  Who are your customers? (individual or businesses)

n  What demographic are they (income, location, how do they spend their time)

n  What need/want will the product satisfy?

n  How many customers, how densely packed are they? (You will need to do some digging to get REAL numbers, don’t make them up.  Look up city population levels etc)

n  Where do they buy?

n  What price are they willing to pay for your product or service?

Task Two: Now that you have an outline of who your target market is, it is time to get some Primary data

n  Come up with three questions for your target market.  They must be Yes/No questions. 

n  You must then ask 15 people your questions (preferably the people you ask will be your target market but for simplicity’s sake they can be your classmates)

n  Record their responses in a chart like the example below…..

Name:	Q1: Would you be interested in a personal servant at school?	Q2: Would you pay someone $10 to do your homework every night?	Q3: Would you pay $50 to have someone carry your books to class all year?
Bill	Yes / No	Yes / No	Yes / No
Janice	Yes / No	Yes / No	Yes / No

Do you need to make any adjustments to your business idea now that you have some data? If so what?

Task Three: Use the information from tasks one and two to create a customer profile.  To see a sample customer profile just look at page 132 in your textbook or look on-line. 

Task Four:  Create a detailed list of both your Direct and Indirect Competition and then answer the following question as best you can.  This will help determine if you are going to be successful or not.

What can be my competitive advantage (what am I offering that is different)?

 

IMPORTANT:  Remember that you will use this information again for your FINAL BUSINESS PLAN, so save it and keep your work!!