Hello and welcome to the second part of How to Start Your Business. I'm Albert Colomer, consultant and advisor in business creation, I'm a business angel, investor, entrepreneur and I've helped many people create their business plan. In the module starting today and throughout this second part of the course we'll explain how to create a business plan and we'll start with this module on definition, goals and structure. As you've been seeing, we've gone from the entrepreneur, to the idea, the set of entrepreneurs and this idea, which is a seed, can be developed minimally with a canvas to arrive at our minimum viable product. This is what will allow us to develop our first iterations to see if our business idea has a future. Once we've done that we come to the decisive point of creating a business plan which will allow us, you'll see what goals it has, especially seeking funding, to know what funding we need for this business plan and, finally, to set all the conditions and variables under which the business will work. These conditions are gathered in a written document. When we say, "business plan" we could say "business plans". A business plan is never a finished document and it's never one single document. It identifies and analyses the viability of a business opportunity and it sets all the conditions and hypotheses that allow us to run this business and convert it from an initial idea to a reality. This business plan is never finished. As we're continually working on it, time changes and many things need to be reviewed. It helps us with 3, 4, 5, 6 things. I'll explain step by step. First, it helps us have a place where we can store all the information about the business. See these folders? When someone creates their business plan and I help them, they need to present a stack of papers. With clippings, web articles, a USB stick, newspaper sources... Gathering all this information in an ordered fashion is the first goal of the business plan. So, one of the things we'll see are possible indexes and scripts of this business plan. It's a work method that will include different options and we'll be narrowing it down. We'll create decision trees in each of the spaces so we can see the decisions we take and the conditions that we set for the company for it to work will be the correct conditions. It's a very important tool for decision-making but it's also a very important support tool for when our business is run by multiple people. When we have a team of people it's important for each person to take specific roles, simulating a real company. So, a possible recommendation is for each of the sections learned in the different modules of the business plan to be taken up by a specific person who is an entrepreneur and who will take on this role in the business. It also helps us see how people interact when working. We've done our canvas, we're excited, we've developed the idea, now it's time to get to work. We've done calculations, market research, and we need to gather a whole set of documentation and we need to get organised. The more partners there are, the more partners we'll be, the more important it is our business plan includes all the decisions we'll be taking and our road map. The important part of this relevant info, which is one of the third functions, is the adjective "relevant". We don't need to start our business plan with a description of the country. We don't need to describe Spain, Catalonia, Barcelona and us here. There's no need. We already know all that. The information needs to be relevant, decisive and curated. It needs to be easy to read and it needs to help us make decisions through a series of arguments. It's a document that will be useful for various things: to attract partners and others we want to hire, to seek the required resources, to have a list of resources required, to seek funding and also, we'll use it for other purposes. The document will be in Word or Excel format. We'll use it for presentations, for when we visit an investor, for when we visit public administration when we need help, for when we visit our mentors so they can see where we are, what we want and how we're going to achieve it. These different objectives will have different styles and finishes. They can be a Power Point presentation, a text document of 5, 6, 10 pages, or a document with slides to be presented... All this will come from the same place and the references in the sections of the business plan are the key part. Lastly, the business system, method or plan is a tool for taking decisions. How will we know if we should do A or B if we don't write it down? Sometimes we can have it all in our head. Many people who have approached me with a business idea have said: "I know all this already, it's in my head". If we don't write it down, it doesn't exist. If we don't write it down, our thoughts on Friday will be different to our thoughts on Monday morning. Our thoughts on Monday morning will be different to our thoughts on Friday afternoon. And if in addition there are several of us and we need to take decisions, what better than to have a specific document to help us? Here's a model, a script, a possible index for this business plan. You'll find many online, in public administrations, at universities, resource centres... There are many tools to create a business plan. The important thing is that it explains what the company is and that it's created by the company itself. Avoid copying and pasting which rapidly fills pages but doesn't allow for reflection. A business plan has the following structure. An executive summary, a strategic plan, SWOT analysis, a description of the team, a marketing plan, an organisational plan, a production plan and then we start doing calculations. An economic plan, a legal summary of the situation the company is in, and all the annexed documents that help us communicate the business plan. Remember that its weight is irrelevant, it's a positive exercise, it's not about doing it as quickly as possible, it's a work method to work on with our entrepreneur partners to define exactly what our needs are and it will show us the way to develop our business idea until it becomes a real company. Many thanks.
