I was looking over sample business plans at www.sba.gov. The market analysis exercises looked like something I'd really have to think about. However, since I don't plan to make this my full time job, I will leave placeholders for some of the components of a business plan and fill in more of the conceptual ideas. I'll pour through different articles about small businesses when I have the time. Maybe I'll get some help from SCORE, a retired executives help group sponsored by SBA.
I'll do the business plan in the same way I will do the business. That is:
- Write up a document modeling the business.
- Test the business model. I will work on my two case studies: My mother's Spa Floridian and my friend Tony's LockAndKeyID.Com site. Spa Floridian will be a study
- Refine the model.
Some thoughts:
A good marketing ploy would be a information systems themed "Small Business Make Over". We'd have Spa Floridian as a case study of using business intelligence to market to your existing customer base and to get new customers in the door. We'd use LockAndKeyID.com as a case study in building a web presence to attract people to your product or service.
Maybe I'll do these makeovers for nothing at first in my sparetime. I intend to keep my day job and can't promise predictable timeframes on deliverable completion. I can only promise as I have bandwidth, you get access to someone with 10+ years professional experience (actually more that I don't count since I've been programming since age 12). As I do more and more of them, my deliverable times will be more predictable. At that time, I can start to charge maybe a project fee and a retainer fee for any work needed after I deliver. How would the retainer work? Maybe something like $20/month and $20/hour to do minor changes.
Another idea would be to do the first few for free and develop a system that I can teach my nephew in the Philippines or other Filipino programmers. This is how I will be able to keep my prices low enough to meet the small business market and what they are willing to pay for custom software.
I need to make sure I can make money from other sources. This includes but is not limited to book and article writing about the small business makeovers, reselling of code libraries developed in their making, consulting to larger companies using the makeovers as a marketing too to be coupled with my professional experience, a franschise business teaching others to do the same where they can overflow their excess projects to me.
Doing it for next to nothing in the beginning has it's advantages. I just have to be organized enough to put it all formally together. I need to give myself a deadline and some formal things I need to have done by certain dates. In the meanwhile, I need to get my website content looking real, more practical, less lofty.
