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1. Introduction

An Introduction to My Start-Up Plan

Once you have come up with an idea for a business or a social enterprise, one of the biggest challenges that you face is getting your ideas down on paper. Whilst your ideas may seem clear in your head, they can become fuzzier when you try and explain them to other people. This book and visual planning tool has been designed to help you overcome this problem by purposefully breaking down your ideas into nine areas.

These areas are: Vision, Products and Services, Benefits and Impact, Customers and Competitors, Marketing Activities, External Environment, Operations and Risks, Me and My Team, Costs and Income.

Each area is then approached with a series of short questions which aim to help you develop your ideas and capture your thoughts on paper.

With the aid of this book we would like you to develop SMART(F) thinking, so that when you are making plans for you and your business you set goals which are specific (S), measurable (M), achievable (A), realistic (R), time-bound (T), but also flexible (F) when required.

We would also like your thinking to become focused and simple. Steve Jobs, the late co-founder, chairman and CEO of Apple Inc., once said:

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

Ultimately, we would like to equip you with the tools and confidence to write an effective, dynamic plan for your business. Being big believers in accessible education for entrepreneurs, we have made every attempt to avoid business jargon and to keep the text as concise and direct as possible. Anyone considering starting their own business should be able to benefit from this book.

How to Use My Start-Up Plan

It is up to you how you use this book and its visual-planning tool. You could read the book from beginning to end and then start to work on exploring your ideas. Or you could dip in and out of the book and answer the prompting questions as you go along. It’s up to you.

Once you have written answers to each of the questions in all nine sections, you will have a complete and comprehensive business plan. Remember that a business plan is for you – it is a working document that not only helps you to develop and communicate your ideas with potential funders and other relevant stakeholders, but also enables you to monitor the progress and performance of your business once you are up and running. So you should be sure to answer the questions – and write your plan – in a style that suits you.

Some of the people who have used My Start-Up Plan in the past have taken advantage of the visual-planning tool to capture their ideas by writing down notes, drawing mind maps, making lists or drawing images with information responding to each of the tool’s nine areas. Others have preferred to write responses to the book’s questions on sticky notes and then stuck those to the relevant areas of the visual-planning grid. Some users have been happy to write down their ideas directly onto our accompanying business plan template. (As a purchaser of this book you can download our business planning template from www.enterprisenation.com/startupplan. Navigate to the Appendix for your exculsive download code.)

The book, visual-planning tool and business plan template can be used flexibly in any number of ways. There is no ‘right’ way – only the way that works best for you.

As well as answering the questions for each section, it may be useful if you write down things you’ll need to do for your business as they crop up through the process. This could either form a simple ‘to do’ list or you could record the tasks on a timeline. You may even wish to develop a more formal action plan, incorporating your key goals and objectives.

The Story Behind My Start-Up Plan

My Start-Up Plan has been developed by two business support practitioners (Clare Griffiths and Brad Crescenzo – that’s us, hello!) who work at the University of Brighton.

We are responsible for the management, delivery and operations of the extra-curricular entrepreneurship programme (called beepurple) aimed at the university’s students, graduates and staff. The aims of the programme are to develop the enterprise skills and entrepreneurial ideas of the university community via enterprise workshops, entrepreneurship master classes and one-to-one business support.

During time spent delivering entrepreneurship education at the university and beyond, we identified a need for a user-centred, accessible tool that not only helped practitioners to teach their clients about the business-planning process and its importance, but also acted as a practical guide for those who wanted to get their ideas down on paper and write their first business plan themselves.

In response to this need, we applied for a grant from the Higher Education Entrepreneurship Group (www.heeg.org.uk) to invest some time in researching what such a toolkit might look like and whether anything like it was already out there. We assessed over 40 business plan templates, resources and books but found nothing that had the combination of content and usability we were looking for. So, in the end, we took up our keyboards and developed My Start-Up Plan ourselves.

My Start-Up Plan is suitable for anyone who wants to get their ideas down on paper and then turn them into reality. It is also useful for those who have already started a business but never embarked on writing a business plan when they first set up their business.