Small business owners: Did you start with a business plan?   

Of course we have have plan before do a business, but first thing you should you do is find and examine your market. After you do research who is your market , next plan is make a product, promotion, etc. The point is " find and examine your target market" for the first.

Hi Oreo,

I have not tried anything like this, I was just up tp selling some stuff to friends..lol! But, I have known a lot of people who will hire people for them to make a business plan, it gives them an idea if the place is perfect and the product suits in the neighborhood!

Hi oreo i have just started selling cardboard playhouses so it's not a business but i did do a business plan beforehand i also did research as to what price people would pay if they would buy them etc I noticed they were very popular in the us but that people who were selling them over here were very expensive. I thought it was a fantastic idea and then stumbled across a site where i could buy them and sell them on so i have. Sold a few so far and at £20 ($40) plus £6-8 post and package they are much cheaper than any of my competitors. Are you looking to set something up business wise?

I have a small business I do on the side from my home...I travel to art festivals and crafts sales....I didn't do it in writing....and it's very small but hope someday to expand it so I can leave my day job and just do this. I sell greeting cards...painted windows and other foo foo stuff for the home and when I do a sale I do quite well....and of course I do sell my books. I got a business account and after that things fell into place...

HI Oreo

My husband and I have several websites which I run from home. It all started because I was staying at home with the kids, but needed something to keep me from going mad! So, hubby developed firstly a website for me, selling my services as a Virtual Assistant. The business plan wasn't the problem, although we should probably have had a more devinite plan in place. Well I quickly I worked otu that with 3 children under the age of 3 it would be impossible to offer a decent service.

So, I centered my attention on the kids for a while more ... then we got involved in Internet Marketing - this time with a rough business plan in place. From there we moved into the Retail Market and are now running a few websites, the first of which sells Ladies Lingerie (check my profile for details) - use the code 'Dreams' for a 10% discount if you are interested.

We are also working on 2 other sites which should go live soon. Again, with these 2 we have a rough business plan in place. You know, Website, suppliers, advertising/marketing, promotion, etc...

Good luck with your venture, I wish you all the best.

Violetdreams

i work for myself and whilst of course i did have some sort of a plan,i believe that if i had thought too much about it then i would have chickened out.Im glad i didnt though as it has been great

Well as you know Oreo my dream is to have a successful home-based on-line photography business....so not exactly as if I'm planning to buy a shop/store and open up for business, but even home-based businesses have to have a "plan"..and believe me I'm still working on it. Prior to my so-called hiatus from my photography work in which I had to stop in 1996 (due to a lot of reasons...many you know about) I was a fairly successful freelance photographer, mailing off my portfolios of photo work to prospective "clients" to get published. It wasn't until a few years ago, that I decided to give it a go again even though many of the circumstances that made me stop my work still exist. However I was in for a rude awakening of just how much the photography world had changed. By then digital photography took full force...many of the same companies that formerly viewed my slide work now wanted everything in the digitized format, either as email attachments, Photo CDs, or to view a website displaying my photo work...Problem? You bet...as I didn't even own my own computer to do any of this...
Then I read what I consider the "Bible" of the new aspects of photography and how to break into the business...it's Ron Engh's sellphotos.com...chock full of ideas and all were great but I was still hindered by the fact that I didn't have my own computer system, nor a scanner that could transform my slides and negatives into the digitized format. I was able to accomplish a few minor things using the library computers and/or go to an internet place...but yes, I did have a "game" plan in my mind of what and how to go about trying to get back into the world of photography....still there was just no way I could do diddly squat without my own computer and scanner system...That's when I began looking around for applying to grants with the idea that I could secure money to fund my computer/scanner needs.
Some people had suggested to me to have my work professionally scanned and placed on Photo CDs but the cost would have been astronomical....probably thousands of dollars in itself.

Then by a weird twist of fate, my mother passed away...she had no life insurance, no savings/checking...nada..I had no idea if there was any money to even provide for her funeral costs...I lived on the phone the week she died (will be her second anniversary as she died Aug. 27, 2006).

It turned out there was some money, not grandiose but enough to pay for her funeral costs other bills, and seized the opportunity to get my computer and scanner....I've created two websites, to show off some of my work and am still working on one in particular, but I long for a more pro looking one and have a photo webhost in mind but pricey (one of the reasons I'm again trying for that grant) I've now scanned quite a number of my photo work but no where near all that I want to yet...it DOES take time..the scanning is the easy part...it's the retouching at photoshop that is the time consumer. I do have the capability to make my own photo CDs and all it costs is the cost of the CDs itself...a LOT cheaper than getting them professionally done...I do long now for a BETTER film scanner like the Nikon CoolScan (another reason for the grant). My targeted goal is to have a successful on-line photo business where clients can download my photos and pay for them and I prefer Rights Managed licensing over Royalty Free (I had to learn a whole new jargon of licensing rights...LOL) I'm currently on and off even writing an "e-book" about how to market photos. As for now I'm self-promoting my work by emailing a lot of places ...the one real drawback is the competition one faces with those microstock photo on-line agencies like iStockphoto where clients can download photos for only a buck or two...We pro photographers HATE those places and also as a result of them the market is saturated with images...So it's like I have to have game plans to WOW people and convince them that my work is worthy to be used....can often mean being a real annoying nudge to remind people and send samples of my work on a regular basis...LOL.
My one major fault is that I probably don't devote as much time to my work as I should, since I often write up articles to make extra money NOW...it's sometimes hard juggling both photo work and article writing at the same time...once I'm finished with my grant proposal which right now is my first priority...going back to doing more scans of my photos and put them up on my website. There's still a lot of work for me to do in fulfilling my goals...but at least I have the tools to do so where formerly I didn't

When hubby was made redundant from his job in the battery factory 20 years ago we made a big jump and opened a fruit and vege shop. Unfortunately we leapt straight in without checking the market for the shop.

It wasn't very long before the business floundered and we lost a lot of money through it. If I was to look at a business again I would be very sure to do my homework thoroughly so as to avoid the pitfalls.

HUGZ from Kitten1954

I did not write an actual business plan, but I did have goals about how many customers I wanted and how I was going to advertise.

There were a lot of hassles, surprises and emotional outbursts when I started my business, mostly came from my husband who was not sure that I was ready. But aside from marketing plan, you can say everything else I had done my homework. I was going to start a convenient store, nothing fancy, just selling things people want or need daily. I went to see a business advisor, telling him my ideas and my budget and he told me what are requirements and possible weakness in my ideas. Through him I met a business owner who had been through a lot business wise and personally that she lost hope and interest in running her business. Things went smooth at first, we were negotiating the price to buy her business, until our lawyer asked her to provide some papers that she never did provide. Long story short she went bankrupt and her inventory was sold to us a month after I opened my own business. I felt cheated at first and didn't want to have anything to do with her, so I went registering my own business name and started looking for inventory myself. But a month after the liquidator called saying she gave them our name as potential buyer and so we came anyway. Now to add to confusion, I was planning to start the business at home, but my husband didn't agree so we go a lease and that was the biggest mistake we have ever made. The shop location wasn't awfully bad, but the lease was dragging our shop income to minus. So I got an accountant in to find out the truth of our financial position and based on his experience, he also talked my husband into moving the shop home because somehow he wouldn't listen to me (who knows why?) well it's been 2 years I have the business, first year of mistake here and there, second year as budget-tight small business at home.
So to answer your questions: I did some researches and met professional people that could help, before I started. In the beginning I just wrote down ideas and talked to the business advisor, but when it comes to the current business I have now it came as a surprise to me so I did research about my competitors, their prices, and what people say about them (this is how I know what to provide and what to charge) but other than that I had no plan aside from surviving the first 4 years. I am running a wedding business I provide mostly decoration, some gifts and invitations. I love colors and when I was shown decoration pictures done by the lady I mentioned above, I fell for it I know I can do it and be one of the best in it (well thats long term plan) I do web marketing and mouth to mouth because this is a small town and we only have tight budget now we can't do big promotion yet. We got a bank loan but having learned from mistake in the first year, we focus on paying it off and keep a tight budget for now.
One thing I can say about having your own business, is that you have to make assessment on yourself first. what is it that you like to do, what kind of person you are and such. Because you can hire accountant to do your bookkeeping, lawyer to take care of those big words in your contracts, business advisor to run to if you need advices, advertising agency to market it or even a web deleveloper to develop your website - but you will be the one that spends nights and days thinking and making decisions about it, lives with its success and failures. You are not only the business owner, you ARE the business. You can blame everybody else if it fails and demand them to fix whatever is wrong, or become a tycoon and get your own autobiography made, but in the end it you are what the business is all about. just my long 2 cents.