#100Days [003] Business Plan. What for?
June 28, 2022•346 words
Business Plan. What is a business plan really? What is the use of it? What part of it do you indeed find helpful or useful?
From my past experience and with my current level of knowledge regarding the topic of "business plan", what I have found handful are the introduction (who we are, vision, mission, goals, activities), customer identification, market study, financial projection, and business model canvas.
What usually tends to happen is that we forget about the business plan after we start executing the business. People create business plan to (1) organize their thoughts and structurally design their business, (2) to make sense of their existing business, and (3) to raise fund or seek for investment.
The best way to learn to make a business plan is to make a business plan. It doesn't have to be supper accurate and perfect. Then you can jump into implementing it. There are two ways to make that happen. First, you find a program that hires you to create a business plan, execute it from scratch, make mistakes, struggle, reflect, adjust, and learn. This is the best way because the pressure is lower. You aren't putting your own money at risk. The worth case is that you lose your time and energy in exchange for experiences and knowledge. Second option, you jump into running your own business. This is a lot more risky, and has more pressure because if you make mistakes, you will lose not just your time and energy, but you money as well.
We don't create a business plan and wish for it to stay true forever. We create one to give use a guidance and a mental image of how your business will operates. It allows us to somehow feel some level of peace in mind. It is not like we're heading into our business blindly head first. Throughout the execution of the business plan, we need to regularly revise our business plan. Doing so will allow us to reflect on our current business and reflect to come up with better strategies or models.