I guarantee that most people have tried to come up with that ‘million-dollar idea’ and unfortunately most of these ideas will probably never come to fruition.
To create a high quality and successful business, you must have a water-tight plan in place to oversee and construct your business accordingly.
The business plan assessment centre was designed to teach us how to effectively and informatively write a plan for a business concept. We could choose to use a completely independent idea or to re-use the idea we had for the Dragon’s Den and properly plan for it. I chose to re-use the Dragon’s Den idea as it is similarly to the plan I hope to recreate in the future while opening my own business and this gave me the opportunity to get a head start on the planning process.
Where do I begin?
I began with reviewing my business model canvas (BMC) that my team and I had created during the Dragons Den. This gave me an overall summary of what I wanted to achieve and how I was going to plan it out in a word document. The BMC is ideal to any entrepreneur wanting to begin the planning process, it reveals a lot of the infrastructure to a business and allows you to plan nearly all aspects of the business on one sheet of paper.
What do I need to know?
It may be a bit extreme but I am not kidding when I say this. You need to know absolutely everything about your business, after all, your meant to be the owner/co-owner, right? You have got to be able to think ahead and forward plan for everything that may arise during a business’s lifetime and I mean every little thing down to the number of rolls of toilet paper you will need to account for!
Maybe a tad of an over-exaggeration but I hope you get my point here. I mean, I think a general rule of thumb you should aim for is that if anyone else can tell you something new about your business that may affect its economics, cost, market, etc. then you haven’t planned properly…
What has this taught me?
It has taught me the value of careful planning and research, especially if you were to consider planning and pursuing a business idea. The amount of money that you invest can either make your business sink or swim. There are many other aspects to this but that is the main one, the potential of losing everything you have tried to build is a very real possibility and can be crushing, both financially and mentally. There is a lot to consider and the idea to open a business cannot be done half-heartedly or by cutting corners. I think if this workshop has taught me anything, it is to wait for the right time and opportunity to come by before running into things head first. I will always be grateful to this workshop as it has introduced me into the business world, in which, hopefully I will stay.
Thanks for reading,
Cian.
Cian's Blog 