Thursday, October 21, 2010

Business Planning Homework

I'm currently doing some homework for a course I'm attending in Business Planning. The homework assignment is to write a sort of business plan draft, with a believable budget. It's kind of tricky, and I must admit that I've sort of been a bit afraid of this part for some time, but now when I sit down with it I find it to be... kind of fun!

What product do you plan to produce? What market do you want to penetrate? Who are your customers? What benefit does your product offer customers? Why would this product sell? What competition is there?

...and so on. Short questions that sort of explode into long answers. What competition? Well, it depends on platform and what customer group. I'll have to fight with one bunch of companies for one type of customers, and another bunch of companies for the other type of customers, and so on.

I won't go into details of what I'm writing here, however, as I'm partly playing with actual business ideas.

Now, I'll dig into the budget part. Probably difficult as holy hell.

EDIT: I made some error in my liquidity calculations (prediction) that seemed to propagate to the balance calculations in some way, but only in the 3rd and 4th year for some reason. It was difficult, but... fun! It was the final step to see exactly how the business model would work if it worked as intended! And to see what margins are there; for example how many copies of a game you'd have to sell for the company to survive with reasonable wages. The numbers are quite astronomical for a simple guy like me, but at the same time not when you see them churn around in your business plan.

1 comment:

tony said...

I always enjoy writing budgets - just remember to give yourself a 10% extra just in case of emergencies.