Question

Writing a business plan is your map to how you are going to operate. Regardless of whether you are interested in taking over an existing business or starting a new one; they both have challenges that you will need to overcome in order to succeed. Discuss one of the challenges in starting a new business and how you may be able to address that challenge with a well-designed business plan. Your challenge can be unique to either a start-up or on-going business or both.

Answer 1

If my start-up is based on a technology and we are building a product to sell it, then the biggest challenge is the product development. Technology is very dynamic these days and it keeps changing from one application to the other. The basic concept might remain the same but the application of the technology changes. If I consider a business intelligence platform for the manufacturing industry then the biggest challenge would be to make the platform gather data from different supply chain management data sources efficiently. This data should be analyzed using the KPIs and help the businesses make better business decisions. Below mentioned are ways to solve this challenge while starting a new business that depends on a technology a lot.

• Before deciding on how many customers we need to sell in the next two years, first decide who are the customers for this product.
• Understand the strengths and weaknesses of the product and use them to create a business plan where only the businesses that are suitable to use the technology will be contacted.
• Conduct ana external analysis and make sure that they will accept the product. Without confirmation, the company cannot afford to enter the market. So the business plan should be based on this analysis and data.
• The company then needs to combine the internal and external analysis to identify the gaps in the business plan and make the required changes.
• Check the business plan and compare it with the vision of the company to check whether they both fall into place.
• Identify the people who are capable of handling the technology and provide them with required time and resources.
• Conduct focus groups few times in different markets and see the response to the product and consider this as an input to the product development.
• Start the marketing activities with just one geographic region and see how the target customers react to the technology. Based on the results make changes to the platform to make it technologically more efficient and customer friendly.
• Identify the competitive advantage early in the business to create a business strategy around it and teach the same to the company sales force.