There are a lot of things you need to do before starting your business plan. Before I start mention about what information you have to gather, I would like to talk about your spirit. No matter who as for it from you, you need to think that it is for your own good. Business plan is your business strategies. Business plan is the best tool for you to monitor and identify your long-term goal.

First thing and maybe the most important thing is business concept. Business is to serve need and want for people. You can’t make them buy your products or use your service so you need to learn to know what they need. That thing is the thing you will produce. Here are answer for what to produce to satisfy the need and want of people.

- New things. Hard to find but valuable to have. Do all new things satisfy need of people? Simply the answer is NO. Study your target market to learn what they need. The thing they need may exist or not so you need to get yourself close to the.
- Old but better. Nothing is perfect so you can make a different. The different can be with quality, convenience, reliability. These are changes. People need changes.
- New market. There are so many kind of market segmentation. It may be hard to understand what I am talking about but let’s me begin with example. A restaurant is looking for new market segmentation. They announced that all factory workers will get 40% off to have lunch there. In this case factory worker are new market segmentation and may be not many people have noticed them.
- New delivery technology. If you are talking about new delivery technology, you may talk about internet. Internet has brought a big change to all mankind today. Many new things come with many new opportunities. Many companies have spent a lot of money for online service by launching their websites and online store where their customers can make order. More than this internet is also the best place to have their announcement of new product or service fly high.
- Produce and sell: The circle of delivering your product to your customers is very important. Everyone involves in this circle will get benefit from it so if you can be the one who produce and sell the products by yourself then you can earn even more.
Another thing is to understand your customers. In business customers are king. We need to do our best to serve them with care. How can we do to care them? It is not easy to produce one goods that will suit all. Customer’s need and want keep changing everyday and time. In different occasion, they have different desire. The company must be flexible to make sure that they won’t fall behind.

A company may come up with new idea or new product but should the company produce it now?

To make sure that the company won’t risk the money with the new product, they need to conduct a research to make sure that the market is ready for the new product and willing to buy it. There are many companies fail to do it.

For example, ATM was introduced up to ten years before bank customer trust in it. The company produces that produce ATM first has suffered ten years failure.

Research on your market is very important but what would you do if the result of your research shows that your customers will ignore your new product? In this case the company can try it to introduce the new product with newsletter or sample to the target market to see their reaction. A brief explanation and a few samples would make them change their mind.