Page 126 - Business Plans that Work A Guide for Small Business

Operations and Development: Execution • 117

Expansion

To date, all company stores have been opened in July and begun servicing
customers at the start of the fall semester in September. This has been based
on our belief that the start of a new school year is the optimal time to sign
up customers. However, it would be extremely difficult for our organization
to support rapid growth if all new franchises must be opened simultaneously.
Therefore, we intend to test different opening dates for these four company
stores: three in July 2009, and one in January 2010. We will choose six potential
locations for the additional three company stores by May A Gantt chart would
2009. capture the timing of
We will then perform detailed investigations of the these activities.
potential sites, investigating the demographics of all nearby colleges, contacting
the administrations of those schools to assess their willingness to sign
cooperative agreements, identifying specific facility locations and facility costs
near the schools of interest, and determining whether we have any known
qualified candidates to open and manage the locations. We will down-select to
three specific company store locations by July 2009.

Chapter Summary

Although the operations and development plans tend to be shorter in the
standard business plan format, these sections deserve attention and will
be considerably longer if you are writing an operational business plan for
internal use. Also, as illustrated by Lazybones, service organizations tend
to have more detailed operations plans because they are able to outsource
less of their business. The activities covered in these sections have direct
cost implications. The more homework you do, the better you will be
able to plan your cash flow. This has direct implications on the amount
of capital you will need to raise and on how you make strategic decisions
once you launch. Even if you are outsourcing most of the production of
your product, you need to spend the time understanding the operational
process so that you can evaluate and chose the most appropriate part-
ner. Making a bad decision on a production partner will have potentially
large cost and time implications. So make sure you have the deep under-
standing needed.
The development plan is also an important exercise. Planning all the
details needed to successfully launch a business is imperative to success.
In Chapter 2, we provided you with the Business Planning Guide, which
is basically a template for you to lay out all the actions that you need