Last night, Mollie and I attended a workshop on how to start your own business, put on by the Tennessee Small Business Development Center. Now, I’ll admit, I feel a bit silly attending these workshops – it seems strangely akin to attending a workshop on “How to Ask Someone Out”…if you can’t do it somewhat by instinct, maybe you aren’t cut out for it altogether. However, sometimes you pick up a morsel or tidbit that might help, and sometimes it just makes you think a bit deeper – and that’s well worth the price of admission (which, in this instance, was free 
)
So, what I took out of this particular class was a renewed urgency for writing a business plan for launching this product. I’m not new to writing summaries, plans, abstracts and all that – I’ve done half a dozen of them for various business ideas I’ve had along the way. The valuable part of it, for me at least, isn’t to get funding. I could care less about funding/loans/investors. This is a debt-free startup that will be bootstrapped from the ground up.
The valuable part is instead the feasibility testing that writing such a plan allows. When you start to write out a detailed plan of action about how you’ll develop, market, sell, postion, and grow your product/business…you start to see any holes in the net, and you can start plugging them. This is precisely what I hope to accomplish by writing out a plan.
I’ve got a nicely abstract view of our development/marketing/sales approach to this product. That said, I haven’t gotten down to actual numbers, true marketing strategy (down to the detail level of which media outlets to utilize) and real sales projections. Since I have a goal for leaving the 9-5 for my own company by the end of this year, it’s paramount that I assure the numbers will support the idea by Dec. 31. Enter the plan.
So, that’s what I got from the workshop. Did I learn anything new? Nah, not really, pretty basic stuff. However, it made me think, and that’s worth a hell of a lot.
More updates later.
