My intention is to allow for significant flexibility on how you want to draft/craft your business plan. Just make sure it covers the key areas which have been discussed in class (and you saw in one of the discussion posts and critiqued).
That said, the intention of the assignment is to understand what you have picked up in class as to what should be covered in your business plan for an idea you are passionate about (i.e. key areas to cover, value proposition, pain solved, executive summary, market, model, high level financial projections, etc). but I did intend on providing a detailed list of topics to cover, beyond its general length (4-8 ppt slides / word pages plus an appendix ).
This is not meant to be an exhaustive business plan but a high level beginning plan which you might share with investors and possible partners/management team members to allow them to get interested in the idea and spend more time digging into it.
One more follow-up on the business plan. The financial projections are simply high level revenue and expense assumptions for a period of time you wish to show (three years, five years, etc).
You figure out what is reasonable for your own idea and go from there. I am not grading for the accuracy of whether or not you think you can sell your hypothetical idea or product for $100 or $1 million dollars per unit (so long as you note how you arrived at this figure), but simply want you begin to understand what growth projections may look like in a business plan. Again, not very detailed but enough to get someone interested.
Wanted to try and address a few thoughts on the business plan and rather than one off responses, figured, would share with everyone.
The choice is yours on whether to do it in word or ppt.
There are no absolute “musts” nor is there a detailed list that you can go down for each and every idea or business plan.
THAT said, the concept behind this exercise is to translate your knowledge of reviewing business plans which we have focused on this course into something interesting and hopefully inspiring to you.
So thinking about this construct, what have you evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively this quarter. What you have learned to date? We discussed 6Ms, We discussed SWOT, we discussed VOS, we discussed valuation.
Yet, what are key aspects of your idea which make it unique and possibly exciting for a potential investor. I don’t want to mandate a detailed market discussion if its a small market, growing slowly but it could still be attractive to you and investors, if you have an idea on how to dominate that niche market. It could be a rapidly growing market, then maybe you want to spend more time on it. Are there a lot of competitors in the market that you think you are better than or are there just a few? Again, your call on what and how much to include.
Overall, there are broad areas which should be included in each plan and which tie back to what we have evaluated and discussed during the course. But again, as each idea and plan is unique so hence the lack of a detailed description of what and how much to include varies.
How this is will be graded and evaluated is less about accuracy and must haves but rather an evaluation of the thought and effort you put into it.
Did you think of a novel idea, does the passion you have for that idea come through in your descriptions, do you understand what makes this is an interesting opportunity as a business or investment, can you synthesize a potential mountain of information around your idea and concisely convene this information in the relevant points
