What’s in an idea?

Business Planning with the Business & IP Centre Sussex

Ah, business planning! If you’re thinking of starting up or have been plugging away at your business for a while now, the idea of sitting down and writing a business plan might very well fill you with dread. For some, just the terms involved are really off-putting: Executive Summary, Market Research, Marketing Plan, Financial Plan, and Management Bios. 

Let’s face it, if it takes longer to learn how to talk about your business than it does to do the business, chances are you’ll pop the whole ‘Business Planning’ stage on the back burner, strut off with a jolly good improvisational attitude and have a vague sense of anxiety around the notion that, if you just sat down and worked some of these ideas though, you might know what your business was and, frankly, why.

Do you need a business plan?

In some existential sense of us not really needing anything in life, no. You could get through your business life without ever having to sit down and write a business plan. That’s true. 

And there’s certainly some truth in that adage that ‘one person’s business plan is another person’s back of a cigarette packet’. If what you do with a business plan is stick it in a draw and never look at it again, then probably no, you don’t need one. 

Except, if you ever want to appeal to investors, communicate your ideas to your partners, or understand how your core product or service is valued by your customers… well, then a business plan starts to look like a useful tool. 

And, when we think about the business plan informing how you position your products and services in the marketplace, honing your USP, and increasing your revenue, then business planning starts to look like a pretty good idea. 

Market Research

If business planning was a movie, then your product or service idea would be the premise – the ‘what if’ – your customers would be your audience, and market research would be the plot. It’s what everything hangs on. It’s what makes your business different from the others. To take that metaphor further, market research also keeps you within your genre too. It helps you stop your idea from spiraling off in five different narrative directions and confusing your audience. 

You might well have a fantastic premise but no idea how to turn that into a movie. 

Sometimes our customers come to us with it all mapped out, having worked in a similar business or industry for years. 

Either way, at some point there’s a moment where your product or service idea hits a wall because you’re lacking a key bit of knowledge or even – and this is so common and needs to be talked about much more – you don’t even know quite what it is you’re missing because you don’t know what you don’t know. 

Maybe you’ve been a barista for years and you’ve always dreamed of setting up your own coffee shop. You might know everything about customer care, how you want your café to look, even the suppliers might not be a mystery to you. But how to even begin to finance a commercial property? That could be your particular stumbling block. 

Whatever your sticking point, or your edge, be it where you fit in the market or how to finance the whole idea, market research is your friend.  

Market research might mean doing some desk research by taking advantage of our 10 business databases and looking at consumer and market trends, competitor analysis or checking the legalities of your industry. 

Or it could be about taking the time to focus on what customers really want and need, through field research where you speak to your ideal customers or even run a trial version of your product or service. 

Breaking it down and making it simple

Here at the Business & IP Centre (BIPC) Sussex, we can help from the idea-stage and onwards throughout your business journey. Everything in business starts with a story – a ‘what if’. 

At our one-to-one Information Clinics, we can use a visual planning method to help you uncover your idea, find what assumptions you have about your customers and uncover the tools you’ll need to help turn those assumptions into provable hypothesis.

Your business plan should work for you. It can become an evolving document that allows you to build trust, if only if that trust is in yourself. Sometimes it’s hard to even know where to begin. Here at the BIPC we can help you untangle the overwhelm, ask the right questions and point you right in the direction on your business journey. 

Get in touch with BIPC Sussex for more details on business planning, to use our free business databases, or book a free one-to-one session with a BIPC Information Specialist.

Visit www.brighton-hove.gov.uk/bipc or email bipc@brighton-hove.gov.uk