Business Plan in a Day: Book Review

A few months ago I was browsing at a local bookstore looking for something interesting to pick-up.  Lately I’ve been very interested in Business topics because I hope to convert this blog into a money generating stream.  I stumbled upon a book called “Business Plan In A Day”, by Rhonda Abrams.  It promises to help the reader create a business plan.  The author says that it will take 24 hours  (non-consecutive 24 hours because you will have to do some research) to get craft your plan). The book covers  “The Anatomy  of a Business Plan”  (9 steps total) and has a chapter devoted to each step.  I’m going to specifically review Step 3 which is about understanding your Target Market.

This is a great chapter because the author points out some resources that are free such as census data to show your customer demographics. She also mentions reading market and industry reports, researching trends and using customer surveys to get a good grasp of your market.

This section goes over:

• Targeting your market location and reach your target market
• Describing the demographic characteristics of your target customers
• Explaining customer patterns/motivations
• Determining market size
• Evaluating market trends

I found the book very easy to understand. It is laid out in a way that you can work on each chapter independently so that you don’t become overwhelmed with the process.  There are worksheets that can be filled out by hand the reader can keep notes in one place for reference later on.   Ms. Abrams doesn’t illustrate how to access the data so a tutorial on the process would have been helpful.

You can find the book here and wherever books are sold.

Why I Set Up This Site.

I realized a few days ago that I didn’t write a a post about why I launched this blog.  So I’ll take this opportunity to write about why this blog was created and what you will get out of it.

In my professional life I work with people and organizations who are looking for data to beef up their grants, reports and business plans.  Either they are in the process of starting a business/grant writing or they already have a plan in place and need to fine-tune it.  This is where I come in and educate them on the types of data that are available for them.  I always steer clients towards free data as there is a plethora of them waiting to be used.

So this blog will be a stage to showcase what I have used in the past and what I discover during my own research.  I’ll discuss government data, business data and GIS/mapping resources that I think will be beneficial for the public to be aware of.    So bookmark my site and sign-up for updates,  you won’t want to miss a post!