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How to Successfully
Apply for Business Grants
Your
Business Grant Proposal
Page 2
Keep your audience
in your head
Throughout the
writing of your business plan you want
to keep in mind who your intended
audience is going to be and why you are
writing the plan in the first place. For
example if you are trying to attract
equity investors you are going to want
to emphasize the big upside of your
business’ profit potential.
While doing this, you
will also need to be particularly
careful to make sure that you choose to
adequately disclose the risks and
uncertainties that are involved in your
business, because investors will often
look for someone to blame if their
investment disappears.
If you are trying to
get debt financing for your business
then you are going to want to emphasize
not the huge upside profit potential but
rather the certainty that the debt can
be repaid. In fact, when you talk of big
profits you may just scare away debt
financiers because high profit potential
usually means high risks as well.
If you are writing a
business plan that is meant to help you
run the business better you may want to
skip or write very simple sections with
all of the general background
information on the company and the
industry, and instead focus most of your
plan on the areas of your plan that are
currently most important to you.
Strategy is
Important
Basically the first
half of the business plan is going to be
geared towards helping you to develop
and support and solid business strategy.
This is where you will look at the
market, the industry itself, customers
and competitors. You will also have to
look at your customer needs and the
benefits of the various current products
and services that are available to you.
You will have to
really look at the strengths and
weaknesses of each competing like
business in your area and try to find
any opportunities for your and your
ideas in the marketplace. All of these
steps are largely aimed at helping you
create a strategy for your business.
The second half of
the business plan is going to be used to
execute your selected business strategy.
Your pharmacy’s products and services,
your marketing and your operations
should all closely tie in with your
strategy. So while it may be easy for
you to choose a well thought out
strategy for your plan, I would
personally recommend you give a lot of
thought to the strategy that will set
the course for your business.
Think in a
Competitive Way
In today's crowded
marketplace, you're probably going to
have serious competition no matter how
creative and original your own business
concept is. That is why you are going to
need to think as competitively as
possible throughout your entire business
plan.
You need to be able
to realistically identify where you will
do things in similar manner as your
competitors, as well as where you will
do things differently. You will want to
acknowledge where you have real
strengths and where you have real
weaknesses.
You should also fully
understand that in order for you to try
to run a major aspect of your business
significantly better than your
competitors may be a very difficult
challenge; especially since there are so
many of them out there today. Because of
this, you are better off if you focus
your planning on being different than
your competition rather than just on
competing with them less directly. For
example: Can you find a particular
market niche to focus on? Can you find a
unique strategy to build your business
on?
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