This class was about writing your business plan. It was a little advanced and I felt we could have done with two classes for doing this. The goals of the course are to ultimately fulfill the following: get the FETAC award while writing your own business plan & eventually start you own business. In my case, for my business, I don’t need a business plan at the moment… so I feel my time is better spent on not generating a document that is going to sit of a shelf.
The writing of a business plan is very beneficial for various reasons. It is good to map out the goals of the business (estimates, profits, structure etc) early on, it helps you create a strategy for your business and you quickly learn if you have a viable business or not also it is always good to have the business plan on standby should you decide or need to grow you business in the future as you will have the bones of it completed.
The majority of people on the course were trying to answer questions on the business plan which they felt they were not at an advanced enough stage to answer properly. The best part of the class I felt was coming up with your elevator pitches. Most of the people you meet that are “pitching”come across very bad, either overloading with information or trying to sell themselves too much. It is really good exercise for anyone to write up a couple of sentences about themselves and their idea / business. The best thing to do is to be almost probing your audience as you talk to them, not everyone wants to buy…. but your lasting impression if it is good and not pushy might open a door further down the line.
Looking back it would have been good if we had two classes for this part of the course and everyone was required to write parts of their business plan and present their elevator pitch. It would have made for some interesting responses from the class…
This class was the second day of financing. The emphasis was on balance sheets, double entry and how to charge for your product or service.
The most interesting part was actually trying to cost your product or service. The things that you need to factor in when calculating your workable hours are: holidays, travel, sick leave, meetings etc. These things coupled with the costs of labour, rent, insurance, rates, tax and other fees leaves you thinking that you need to charge as much as the market can bare without loosing out to the competition, just to break even is a fine balance to say the least.
There were some other interesting observations from the examples that we did. In the current climate it is really worth investigating if you should rent or buy the equipment that you need for your business.
It is obvious from a business perspective to function well involves having as much cash as possible…. this is very cliche but “Cash is King”, it is better to have a much longer credit time with any of your debtors whilst getting the money owed to you in as soon as you can, your bank balance will always look healthy, not to mention that you will have money should you need it.
Seems simple from the outset, in reality is it not that straightforward.
This class was entirely based on legal issues surrounding setting up your own business. There are various types of businesses that a person can setup and various differences between them, the main ones are : Sole Trader, Partnership & Company.
It is evident from the outset that setting up some parts of your business will require the services of a solicitor. It is always good to have a friend or family member here to save yourself some money.
The lecturer gave some excellent examples of partnerships that turned out to be costly, most notably The Smiths law suit, to be honest I never envisaged legal matters to be interesting but I was pleasantly surprised.
Patents, trademarks, & copyrights were discussed in detail. It appears that patents are time consuming to acquire and unless you have a really unique novel ideal you really need to consider if it is worth pursuing a patent.
There are many other things that people would need to consider: Premises, Rental, Employing people, contracts and terms of payments with consumers and customers (yes don’t forget these are different), this leaves me with lots of reading material and forms to go through.
Our second day of marketing, this is where we really got down to the nuts and bolts of what we should do to market our business. This included primary and secondary marketing, investigation and research i.e. competitors, competitive advantage, why would someone choose us over our competitors, what bodies are useful for starting up a business, not necessarily marketing: Ibec, Isme.
Some really good tips on questionnaires and examples of them out there: Google doc, Survey Monkey. These are usually a requirement for information to ultimately go into a business plan.
It was really impressed upon us is that referral’s are the best way to generate business. At long last I finally got to use some of the business cards - everyone seemed to like the simplicity of them.
Really liked some of the idea’s presented in this day of marketing, I am not going to give away too much, also the one to one session with the lecturer helped generate contacts, leads & angles that people would never have looked at.
One thing really clear from the session is that everyone is working lots of hours to get his/her business off the ground, but the question was posed:
Are we managing our time efficiently??
We should be setting smart goals, this seems trivial from the outset, but when it comes to actual time estimation… most people couldn’t give an accurate answer.
