The goals for this lesson are:
1. To write a rough draft for your business
2. Save your business plan to a business folder on your USB drive.
Writing Your Business Plan
Here are the questions you need to answer for your new business.
Q1. What field are you interested in and why are you interested in it?
Q2. What is your business idea?
Q3. What is your business name?
Q4. How will your business meet an unfulfilled need?
Q5. What products or services will your business provide?
Q6. How is your business different from other similar existing businesses?
Q7. Marketing... How will you let others know your business exists?
Q8. How much will it cost to start your business & where will you get the money?
Q9. How much will you have to sell your products/services for to make a profit?
We will spend Class Session 4 working together to help you develop more detailed answers to each of the above questions.
Important Business Plan Terms –
Products – Things that can be bought and sold.
Services – Actions that one person can do to help another person.
Product Business – a business that sells products like cups of lemonade, food, computers, cars or phones.
Service Business – a business that produces and sells a service like cutting hair, repairing computers or washing cars.
Equipment – Items you only need to buy once and can use over and over.
Supplies – Items you need to buy again once they are used up.
Startup Costs – The initial costs incurred in starting a new business. A combination of equipment and supplies.
Break Even Point – The number of products that have to be sold in order to recover the startup costs.
Return on Investment ROI – The percentage of profit that can be paid to investors who supplied the money for the startup costs.
Profit – The amount of money left over from income after paying all expenses. In a family budget, this would be called Savings.
Operating Margin – Profit as a percent of total sales.
Sales Forecast - an educated guess of how many units of products you will sell and what your expenses and profits will be if you sell those products. (The unit of measure for a product business is different than the unit of measure for a service business.)
Revenue – All of the income that comes into your business typically through sales.
Accounting - A way to keep track of your financial information using income, expenses, assets (things that you already have) and liabilities, (things that you still owe). Usually done at the end of every day, every month and every quarter (every three months) to know if you are making money, like keeping score at a game.
Reflection – Periodically thinking back over your experience about what you learned, what you did right, and what you can do better next time.
What’s Next?
In the next lesson, we will learn about how computers work.