How to Conduct Market Research for a Business Plan

A short introduction to business plans

When making a business plan keep it is crucial to keep in mind whether it is internally or externally focused. If you are doing an externally-focused plans you should draft goals that are important to outside stakeholders, particularly financial stakeholders. These plans should include detailed information about the organization or the team making effort to reach its goals. When we are talking about for-profit entities, external stakeholders are investors and customers, when the non-profit entities are involved external stakeholders refer to donors and clients. In the cases where the government agencies are involved, external stakeholders are usually the tax-payers, higher-level government agencies, and international lending bodies such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, various economic agencies of the United Nations, and development banks.

If you are aiming to make an internally-focused business plan, you should target intermediate goals required to reach the external goals we mentioned earlier. These might cover steps like the development of a new product, a new service, a new IT system, a restructuring of finance, a refurbishing of a factory or a restructuring of the organization. It is also advisable when making an internally-focused business plan to also include a balanced scorecard or a list of critical success factors, which can then allow the success of the plan to be measured using non-financial measures.

There are also business plans that identify and target internal goals, but provide only general guidance on how they will be met. These are often called strategic plans. There are also operational plans, which describe the goals of an internal organization, working group or department. They often include project plans, sometimes known as project frameworks, describe the goals of a particular project. They may also address the project’s place within the organization’s larger strategic goals.

Preparing a business plan is a complex activity that draws on a wide range of knowledge from many different business disciplines, among which are finance human resource management, intellectual property management, supply chain management, operations management, and marketing, among others. In order to make things less intimidating, it is quite helpful to view the business plan as a collection of sub-plans, one for each of the main business disciplines.

We could conclude this short introduction to business plans by saying that a good business plan can help to make a good business credible, understandable, and attractive to someone who is unfamiliar with the business. Always keep the prospective investors in mind when writing a business plan. The plan can’t guarantee success by itself, but it can quite useful in many different ways and can reduce the inherent unpredictability of the market and the odds of failure that go with it.

• Highlights and characteristics that the likely clients could consider valuable

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