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Framing Your Business: Business Plan Development RECAP

ENTR Workshop with Stephen Auvil Recap and Slides

  • “Entrepreneurship is a discipline”

    • Entrepreneurial thinking can be applied to a lot of situations, especially engineering,

      • If you understand the bigger picture of why you’re designing features, that’ll take you a long way

    • As a faculty member, running a lab is like running a business

      • grant competition

      • staff management

    • There are business plan competitions all over and your entrepreneurial skills can be a source of won cash.

  • The Purpose of Business Plans

    • About planning (you wouldn’t go build something you haven’t designed first

    • Establish your budget

    • Find out if your idea is even feasible

      • You need to be able to convince yourself the idea is worth it

        • That’s money and time that you don’t want to waste on something that won’t pan out.

    • Convince investors your idea is worth their money and time

    • Most often used as a sales document

  • Characteristics of a business plan

    • You get what you put in

      • If you spend more time building a plan and researching, you get a better finished product

        • He’s referring to spending more time researching and developing, not editing grammar.

    • Expect modifications

    • There should be a natural succession and it should read like a story

    • Effectively convey information with bullets and diagrams (visuals)

    • 25-30 page max

    • Needs to answer questions they will have.

    • No confidential information

      • Don’t detail your secret recipe and then swear every investor to secrecy

  • Basic Business Plan outline (plenty of examples on the internet)

  1. Cover sheet

    1. name, contact

    2. revision #/date

  2. Table of contents

  3. Executive summary

    1. 2-3 pages

    2. only thing they’ll look at

    3. critical points

  4. Define a problem/need

    1. magnitude of problem

    2. current approaches

    3. how those approaches fall short

  5. Describe solution

    1. talk about what tech does, not how it works

    2. focus on advantages and degree of disruption of how we do things

    3. A good solution

      1. fundamental tech

      2. disruptive tech

      3. intellectual prop protection

      4. clear translation into products or service

      5. cooperation of the inventor/technical expert

  6. Describe company

    1. type of company

    2. founder info

    3. mission statement

    4. History

    5. product description

  7. Market analysis (industry analysis, tarket markets, customer profile, competitive analysis)

    1. research (dialogue with cust)

    2. References

  8. Operations

    1. Where you are to where you wanna go

    2. Time-money

    3. how will you scale-up

    4. how will you get product to customer

    5. post-scale responsibilities

  9. Marketing strategy

    1. revenue model

    2. market entry strategy

    3. Partnerships

    4. expansion strategies

    5. The 4 P’s

      1. Pricing

      2. Positioning

      3. Promotion

      4. Place

  10. Management

    1. investors invest in people(teams), not products

    2. bios on key people

    3. at least have a team of advisors in different areas of expertise

  11. Financing

    1. “Bootstrapping”

    2. “non-dilutive sources”

    3. “dilutive sources”

  12. Exit strategy

    1. how will they make money at the end?

  13. Financial statements

    1. for 5 years

    2. balance sheet

    3. income statement

    4. cash flow

Posted: October 29, 2016, 4:52 PM

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