Concept Development Worksheet

The first step in creating your business plan or feasibility study is to outline your concept and begin to define the nature and scope of your venture.  This worksheet will help to guide you through an initial exploration of different aspects.

1.         Venture Overview

2.         Product/Service Description

3.         Market Analysis

4.         Marketing & Sales

5.         Operations

6.         Start-Up

7.         Big Picture View

In this early stage, you may have very little of the information needed to build a solid business plan or feasibility study.  Nonetheless, use your best judgement to answer all of the questions.  During the rest of the term, you will be investigating and developing these issues in more depth.  Please remember:  nothing you write here is carved in stone!   Flexibility in the light of new information is a hallmark of a successful entrepreneur.

As much as possible, the entire venture team should work together in completing this worksheet.  If you assign different sections to different people, then be sure the team as a whole gets together to discuss the completed worksheet before you hand it in.

 

Venture Name:

Awesome Tree Printing Solutions  (ATPS)

 

Advisor:             

I strongly encourage you to identify someone from the business community who can give you useful feedback as you develop your ideas.  It could be someone who has start-up experience in a similar sector, a potential buyer in your target market, or someone with lots of relevant industry experience.  Make sure that they are willing to sit down and discuss your venture twice during the next 6 weeks.  Here, please provide their name, position and organization, and a brief (1-2 sentence) rationale for why they are a good advisor for you.

1.  Venture Overview  

1.   What is the name of our venture?  What are important considerations in choosing a name?

        

At this current moment in time we have decided to name our venture Awesome Tree Printing Solutions, although we are still working on changing the name around and we are in the midst of throwing some different names around, making sure that our name in unambiguous to our business operations.  As of right now, the official name is still Awesome Tree Printing Solutions and our venture idea will revolve around opening up a business that provides printing/copying services to Small/Medium Sized businesses around downtown Toronto and later expanding on the Greater Toronto Area.  

When choosing the name of our business it is important to have a catchy name that grabs the customers’ attention, express legitimacy, and is unambiguous to our operations,  and we feel this is achieved by our current business title Awesome Tree Printing Solutions.  We also feel that having the word solutions in the name will label our business as providing consumers with a solution to problems that they face when it comes to printing and copying.

2.     What is our value proposition?

Our venture is based on providing a printing brokerage service to consumer.  Although there are printing/copying shops around Toronto, different shops will have different prices for different products/services and it is often too tough for our clients to go from shop to shop negotiating/find the best deal for every different print job.  With regards to smaller organizations/businesses, it can also be tough to go out and spend the time/resources to print out thousands of flyer's and/or booklets among others, especially on limited time schedules.   In addition, smaller businesses would not have provide a large enough demand, compared to those of a multi-national corporation, to have buying power and negotiate reduced prices.

We are going to work for these small, independent organizations and businesses to meet their full printing needs.  This will involve everything from going to different shops to get the best deals for specific jobs, to picking up the print copies and either delivering them or keeping them in our downtown office for convenient pickup.  We are also going to work with print shops around Toronto to enter into deals where they provide us with the best deals possible as well as providing us with retainers, allowing us to purchase “bulk” copies by taking the orders from multiple groups.  This will not only allow us to receive a greater profit on our services, but to also provide lower prices to our clients.  

3.     What is our entry strategy?

Because of our business venture, we will not require a lot of capital to start up our business and enter the market.  We will begin by entering the Toronto market and targeting University groups, small organizations and small/medium sized businesses.  Our main start up costs will involve having our sales staff aggressively target groups in order to build a customer base that we can build upon.  We will also have an office in downtown Toronto where our sales force will work from and where we will store orders from pick up.

4.     What is our long-term growth strategy?

We will begin by targeting groups around the core downtown area.  Our initial growth will come from building a loyal customer base that will then allow us to move into the other areas of Toronto and hopefully the GTA in the near future.  This will require more sales personnel as well as more office space/a potential warehouse to store products.  In the long term we hope to expand to other major cities in Canada such as Montreal and Ottawa, followed by entry into U.S. markets that market research will lead us to.

5.     What additional information do we need to decide how we’ll enter the market?

We will need to go to many of the printer shops in our area and see what their prices are in order to see which shops provide the best deals on what different print jobs.  We will also have to talk to management in these shops and work towards getting deals set in place where we are provided more discounts based on how much business we bring the print shops as well as other factors.  We will also need to conduct market research on our potential customers and their willingness to pay for our service as well as potential competitors in the area and how we stack up against them.  

 

 2.  Product/Service Description

1.                 What is our product or service?   What isn’t it?

First and foremost, we are not a printing company in the way we physical print consumer orders.  We are a print brokerage, acting as a medium between the fragmented individually owned printing shops and the consumers, being able to negotiate low prices with individual vendors with our large buying power.

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The printing industry is fragmented with many individually owned print shops.  All print shops do not have the feasibility/capital to undertake all orders.  As an example, if a consumer needs business cards, calendars, and brochures,  these jobs would require different machines which print shops can ill afford to have.  Usually, print shops only have one or the other.  (Note: we'd also have to build close relationships individual print shops)  With the network of all individually owned print shops, collectively, we can provide all the print jobs needed for the customers without the hassle of customers needing to locate multiple ...

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