Welcome to Our Business Plan Section!

Maybe if you ask really nicely, a really rich person would give you tons of money so that you can start your own business. Uh huh... You bet! And while you're visiting the moon, have a piece of moon cheese. No one, we repeat, no one will give you money if they think it's going to tank. So you have to convince 'em that your business is going to be a complete and total success, run by competent individuals. That's where a business plan comes in.

Unlike Chihuahuas and those little paper umbrellas they put in Singapore Slings, business plans have two major purposes in life:

• To provide you, the entrepreneur, with a detailed roadmap to Successville as you make your new venture grow.
• To convince people who have lots of money that you're the sort of person on whom they may confidently unload it.

I've put together the information I've taken from my years of experience to take some of the legwork out learning to work with a business plan. With luck, intelligence, charm, experience, connections, and a little help from JDA Publishing, soon you'll be at the head of you own home based e-Commerce business..... the one you've always dreamed of !!

*NOTE* I am assuming that you have at least a tiny bit of knowledge about the business world. You're not setting up a lemonade stand; you're making a road map of your future !!

First things first: before you put fingers to keyboard, you need to take a moment and learn about the folks who'll be thumbing through your 50 pages of brilliant strategies and mind-numbing statistics. Typically, a business plan is created with the following money-holders in mind:

The "Family"
The "REAL" Money Guys

The "Family" are wealthy or otherwise moneyed individuals who become personally involved in fledgling ventures, lending their expertise, experience, and money. Often, this is someone who has a personal connection with YOU, the entrepreneur (and is therefore more willing to accept your subscription to Home Based Business Opportunities in lieu of actual business experience), but they can also be outsiders on the lookout for a winning business model that just needs a little push in order to make it fly.

If the person you have in mind is a wealthy relative or someone you've played raquetball with for twenty years (or both), you have some latitude when it comes to your business plan (heck, you may get lucky and get them to help out with it). If you're shopping around for outside money, on the other hand, you have to approach the this person just as you would approach a venture capitalist - with chocolate and handcuffs...... Just kidding. The point is, if you know this person, your business plan may not need to be as perfect as if you were proposing to a stranger.

The "REAL" Money Guys

If you don't have a rich uncle, then you're probably going to try to get your business funded by venture capitalists. Venture capitalists, or VCs, eat eager entrepreneurs like you for lunch... unless you can earn their respect; they're basically individuals organized into large firms that will give you money to fund your business if they think that you'll be profitable.

In exchange for their giving you money, you have to promise them a percentage (that is, a share) of your company. VC firms often specialize in a certain industry so that the various companies in their portfolio become mutually supportive. Their funds range from a few paltry million to billions of dollars invested in a variety of globe-spanning ventures.

Venture capital is all about high-risk, high-return -- real playing on the edge to see how close you can get kinda thing. The catch is,these people will be strangers, so the only way you can convince them to give you money is if they are persuaded by YOUR business plan.

The managers of these firms look at hundreds of business plans every year, and they reject almost all of them. So even after you've managed to get a VC firm to return your phone call (or paid some lawyer a bazillion dollars to refer you to them....), the chances of your plan ending up on the scrap heap are large indeed.

Isn't there anything you can do to improve your odds? Well, even the most exciting business model bogs down a little in the cash-flow projections and technical specifications; a VC won't slog through your entire business plan until you've completely and totally impressed him/her with a stunning, exciting executive summary. I'll give you some pointers on how to do this later.