This section of the business plan should cover at least the following items:
- Research methods
- File and data storage
Research methods
In this section, write about how you will conduct market research. You don’t need to actually do the research yet — just figure out how you will do it. You’ll need to do some research for a different section of the business plan.
For example:
- Buy industry reports from professional market research firms. Costs money. Save time and effort. Reports are usually detailed and reliable.
- Open source research using free tidbits that various companies and journalists and government agencies make available for free. No cost. Takes time and some effort. Sometimes you find exactly what you need, sometimes you’re left with information gaps.
- Original research — create a survey or poll and ask people to complete it. Cost ranges from $0 to thousands depending on how you do it. Takes time and effort. Takes expertise in formulating questions and answer options that will provide reliable results. Likely to get you exactly the information you need.
- Attend tradeshows and talk with people. Costs money. Costs time and some effort. Requires social skills and a flexible calendar. Sometimes you end up with amazing insights, sometimes people don’t have any new information for you.
You’re not limited to these examples, and you’re not limited to picking just one method.
Here is an example plan:
Start with open source research. Identify gaps. Use contacts to find someone who works in the same industry and offer to buy them a coffee or send them a lunch delivery in exchange for their time and ask them a lot of questions about the industry (not about their company). Do some free original research with a single-question poll in an online community such as LinkedIn or Reddit or Facebook. Identify remaining taps. Do some low-cost original research with an online survey (might need to pay for the survey or the ads to bring visitors, or both). Find industry conferences and register for the next available one that is reasonably priced and in an appropriate region (but don’t wait for the conference to complete the rest of the business plan — use the information learned there to update the plan that will already be created by then).
File and data storage
You will need a place to store documents and data about your business. Like the research methods, you don’t need to set it up now — this section is just to think about what you’re going to need later.
Most businesses create and store documents they consider confidential. Will this information be stored in the office? Will your business be paper-less and store everything as digital files or will there be file cabinets in the office? Will the file cabinets need a lock? If your business will be paper-less, or even if there is some paper but many things are digital, will the files be stored in computers in the office, or on each employee’s laptop, or on a cloud file sharing service?
Some businesses have information that needs to be protected at a higher level, such as a special recipe, or manufacturing details. If your business will have secret information like that, how will you protect it?
Compass
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