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Every successful business is the result of serious lessons and planning, and effective planning starts well before your business opens to the public. It’s crucial to understand your product, customers, competition, and how to effectively communicate with others about your business. For your business to be profitable and sustainable, you need to grasp several key aspects: the needs of your customers, the strengths of your product or service, how it uniquely connects with customers, the strengths and weaknesses of your business model, your competition, and how your business differentiates itself from competitors. Understanding these elements is the first step in creating a solid business plan, which is a written document containing important details about a proposed business, its goals, and strategies to achieve them. A well-thought-out business plan not only helps you make informed decisions but also prepares you to discuss and promote your business with potential financial supporters.
As part of this lesson, you will engage in online lesson and gather information to prepare for writing a well-informed business plan. Your tasks include lessening your target market and competitors, gathering your lesson in a document, organizing your findings to prepare for writing your business plan, and adding a table to analyze your competition and their strengths. The examples given here focus on listening to a pet care business, but you can adapt these techniques to any business you are starting, planning to start, or would like to start. Although this lesson uses Google Docs, you can apply these skills and concepts in any word processing application or even on a piece of paper. To begin, sign in to your Google account, open a new tab in your browser, and navigate to Google.com. If you’re not signed in, do so now, or create a Google account if you don’t have one. Then, in Google Drive, create a new document in Google Docs, rename it, and add a title at the top of the page where you’ll collect and organize your internet lesson. Keep this and another browser tab open – one for conducting lessons and the other for taking notes. Now, it’s your turn: Create and title a new document in Google Docs, and open another browser tab to navigate to Google.com.