Tuesday April 22, 2014

Over Easter weekend, I was with my grandparents in Boston.  I had a really nice time with them and even went job-hunting for this summer.  While I was up there, I also did a lot of reading in Managerial Accounting.  Despite it being very informative on the financial aspects of business management, it is geared more towards companies that are already up and running.  Meaning that much of the math needs hard numbers, which is something I am lacking.  So I came back this week feeling as though I was off track.  (And stressed because I felt as though I was off track.)

So I did a lot of research today trying to get back on track.  Which at the end of the day, I think I did.  I think I have been spinning my wheels a little bit, which is disheartening and frustrating to say the least.  Spending time on the Internet doing research is difficult, because you invariably get something completely wrong.  I have resorted to searching specific websites, such as NOAA, then following their hyperlinks.

Back to what I was saying before I got distracted.  I went onto SBA.gov to look up business plans and how to write them. (The .gov websites are much more helpful.)  The website told me that the first step in creating a business is the business plan.  It also outlined various parts of business plans and what information they should contain.

These are the general sections that should be in your business plan.  Depending on how you would like to organize it, some things can be rearranged, but not the executive summary or the appendix.  After reading through the articles, I searched for examples of business plans, since I felt that still had questions after I read the descriptions.  It took me a while to find business plans that were similar in nature to mine.  Many of the ones I read initially were for restaurants, probably because that is such a common business to want to enter.  After a while I found a website that creates business plans for you.  It had many different examples, and I found several that were for farming and agriculture that I though would be similar to the one I will be writing.  I think what surprised me most about reading them was how repetitive they were.  I would have expected the business plan to be more straightforward, but each one I read had a mini sales pitch at the beginning of each section, that would often say the exact same thing with different adjectives.  It was interesting how the effect of this could either bore me or convince me that the business sounded like a good idea.