Business Plan 1

Write an initial draft of a business plan.  

The business plan is a document that spells out to investors and
others exactly how you plan to be successful in this business.
Success for this class includes profitability in the financial sense.

The world is filled with opportunities for service.  Your business
plan should identify a set of customer needs.  (Maybe only one need,
maybe several.)  These needs are opportunities that your business will
strive to fill.  In exchange for filling these needs, customers will
give you money.  How will you convince the customers to give you
money?  How will you collect the money?  How will you deliver the
product for which the customers are paying?  All of these issues
should be addressed in your business plan.  Explain the key features
of how your business will operate, and how it will make a profit.
Predict (to the extent you can) how much money you will make, how much
product you will sell, etc.

Because this is an initial draft, rather than the final draft, you can
get by with crude estimates of many things.  But your plan should be
very clear on the need you are trying to serve, and the amount you
expect customers to pay to satisfy that need, and why you think that
is reasonable.

A typical first-draft business plan might be one or two pages, single
spaced, designed to convince your funding source to lend or invest a
small amount of money in your project so you can complete the final
draft of the business plan.

You will be graded on how convincing your plan seems to be (even
though it is not complete in all its details), as well as how easy it
is to understand, including how clearly it is laid out.