Week 6, Friday
Small Business Planning
Tracey Kobayashi
50 Phelan Ave, NGYM
San Francisco, CA 94112
(415)452-7311
tkobayas@ccsf.edu
PE 9A: Fit or Fat
College & Career Ed
PE 50: Fitness Center
IM Me!
AIM - TKatCCSF
Yahoo - tkobico
ICQ - 155909399
The skills you learn in this class not only help you work in other people's offices, they can help you to organize your own business. Your task today is to research small business planning, and begin developing a plan for a fictitious business. In general, the business plan itself will be written in Word, and financial calculations and graphs would be done with Excel.
Getting Started
Follow the link below to the the Small Business Administration's Web site at
http://www.sba.gov.
Peruse the sections under Starting Your Business on the left, particularly the Starting Kit and Business Plans sections -- you don't need to read them thoroughly. You are going to create a Business Plan using the SBA's template, so the most important section for you to read at this point is the one on Business Plans.
Open a new word document. Format the document so there are one inch margins all the way around (top, bottom, left and right). Save this document in the class work folder of your floppy disk with the name businessplan. On the first page, type your business name (use Tammie's Auto Repair or Madonna's Catering if you can't think of anything else), address, telephone, and name of principals (you and your partners, if any). It may look something like:
Hit Enter/Return at the end of your last line, then Insert a Page Break. On the second page, type the titles for the main and sub sections as outlined in the example below. Format the main sections (The Business, Financial Data, and Supporting Documents) in the Heading 1 Style (remember -- a Header and the Heading 1 Style are different), and the subsections in the Heading 2 Style. Why use Styles instead of altering the text format? For one, using styles is a one-step process, whereas altering the text format to look the same as the Heading style is a multi-step process. Secondly, when you have subheadings and subheadings for the subheadings, it can be a little difficult to remember which font, size and style you used at each level. Lastly, when you hit Return/Enter at the end of a Heading line, the next paragraph goes back to the default paragraph style -- you don't have to reformat the font back.
When I created the above document in Word, I typed the main headings, selected them, then changed their style to Heading 1. I then typed the subheadings under the appropriate main headings, selected them, and changed their style to Heading 2.
Put your insertion point at the end of the Description heading and hit enter/return. On this line, type a short description of the business. This step is actually easier than you may think: describe what the business does. After the general description, add specifics such as the location, the type of customers you are targeting, how and why you think your business will attract or benefit them, and of course, why you think your business will be profitable. For the purpose of the business you choose, 1652 Sunnydale can be a bustling downtown location, industrial park, shopping mall, or some other appropriate place.
Put your insertion point at the end of the Competition heading and hit Enter/Return. On this line, describe direct competitors or possible indirect competitors and your advantages over them. For this assignment, make up one or two competitors.
Put your insertion point at the end of the Personnel heading and hit Enter/Return. On this line, describe why you are suited to run a successful business. Describe your background in this particular area or in business in general. Feel free to make something up and embellish it for this assignment (heck, say you have an MBA from Harvard if you want -- I and possibly your classmates will be the only ones reading your work).
You will not finish this assignment today. This assignment will cover the next 2 or 3 weeks so that your Word and Excel skills don't become rusty as we move on to other topics. When you either finish your personnel description OR have about an hour left in the lab, attach your business plan to an email and send it to me at:
tkobico@yahoo.com
OR tkobayas@ccsf.edu
Last, but not least, if you have time, please practice Mavis OR any of the other skills introduced this week. These are some of the topics we covered in the past two days:
- Creating a new PowerPoint Presentation
- Opening an existing PowerPoint Presentation
- Creating and editing PowerPoint slides
- Editing a slide background for: solid fill; gradient fill; pattern fill; background picture.
- Adding text to a slide.
- Adding stylized text (Word Art) or pictures/clip art to a slide
- Downloading pictures from the internet to use on slides (backgrounds or clip art).
- Knowing the difference between a picture or media file that is stored on disk and one that is embedded into your presentation.
- Navigating between slides.
I recommend you practice the above skills if you feel unsure about any of them.
Have a good week-end!
- Tracey