The next stage for our startup now the concept had been market tested was to develop a business plan. This meant dusting off my old MBA notes and reviewing some of our previous business plans.

Let me tell you that while the idea of a new business is exciting, writing a business plan is not. All I wanted to do was take action steps towards our goal of establishing the new business. The writing of the business plan feels like a burden that takes you away from this new adventure. I struggled for weeks to get anything reasonable down on paper. Financial modelling was guesswork at best, organisational structure was beyond comprehension and the sales and marketing plan… well I hate sales!

It wasn’t until I followed some old advice to “eat the frog” that I got some momentum. This philosophy suggest that you take on your worst task first (eating the frog) so that everything after that is easier. So I sucked it up and tackled the sales and marketing plan first.

The traditional way to approach marketing is to break it down into the seven “P’s”. The seven are: people, product, price, promotion, place, packaging and positioning. I’ll talk more about each of these areas in a later post. Ultimately by breaking down the plan into these easy to digest categories I was able to conduct some effective planning.

There was still a lot of work to do but we were on our way to designing our new screen business.