Cooperations: Goals and tasks

It is important that all goals and tasks are clearly defined in advance in any cooperation. This is because it is difficult to implement and make changes in the ongoing cooperation. So anyone who has already negotiated a minus deal in advance will not be able to correct it afterwards. If you distribute 10,000 discount coupons of a cooperation partner in your packages, but he or she only mentions you in the newsletter in return, both actions are not equal, the cooperation principle is broken.

The cooperation between two companies can, however, go even further. For example with the symbiosis of two brands. The classic chocolate, peppered with a brand of biscuit, the ice cream, coated with a certain type of chocolate, the modern, electrically driven delivery service and the car brand, the car rental and the flight provider or even car sharing. Both sides profit from each other, not only through advertising, but also through discounted conditions and positive image transfer. The car manufacturer has its new models constantly in the street scene, the car sharing provider has high-quality vehicles and good purchasing conditions. A win-win situation for both sides.

Cooperation Principle in Companies

Have you already planned cooperation partners or cooperation models?

If so, here is the place for it in your business plan.

• Both sides benefit
• Precise formulation of goals
• Expectations and objectives
• Actions, Dates, Costs
• Distribution of tasks and competences
• Cost and earnings distribution
• Same rights and obligations for all partners
• Willingness to compromise
• Relative / Equal commitment
• Employees must know goals and support

Opportunities and Risks

Congratulations, you’ve done it all! You know your business idea inside out, you have validated it against various data, customers, competitors, market and price. You know your marketing concept but also your sales strategy. You know every single cost center and of course the entire personnel planning. Now you close your business plan with the big question, what are the biggest opportunities and risks for your company? No more, no less. Here you have to deliver a realistic self-assessment. Not only full of praise for your business idea, risks also play a role here and have to be included in the concept accordingly. Here you show banks and investors for the last time what they might get involved with.

1. What are the three biggest opportunities that could positively influence the further development of your company.
2. What are the three most important problems that could hinder a positive development of your business?

Everything described, everything explained. Now comes your financial planning.

Guideline: Setting up your own business & business plan

You want to start your own business as a real estate agent or with another business idea? Learn more: estate agent guide. We support you with tips on your business plan and concept. Whether self-employed full-time or part-time self-employed: If you want to set up your own company, you have to think about a lot, in advance and in the operative business. From the right idea to health insurance – what needs to be considered if you want to become self-employed?

There is no training or further education for entrepreneurs. Managing director is you or not. Your own ambition is always important, because this is the only way to improve, every day.

The topics at a glance:

Do you already have reference customers? Image transmission

Image transfer marketing is a very popular tool to improve one’s own brand awareness, which means perception / attention for the brand. But reference customers also show every reader of your business plan that you know about the business. Reference customers are also strong proof of your business idea in the pitch. That creates trust.

Media and press references are also very supported. For example, anyone who speaks as an expert on TV or is occasionally interviewed about topics in newspapers or online media stands for know-how. Not only know how, but also in the area of public relations and network this person will be well positioned. Time in the media is scarce and is therefore filled with people who can provide the desired information on the one hand and provide entertainment for the reader or viewer on the other. A good mix for entrepreneurs.

The business plan should therefore always mention reference customers, even if they are not directly from this project but from similar predecessor projects – this also speaks for your experience and quality, if you were involved in a leading role. Similarly, relevant media references should be provided if they additionally confirm your status as an expert or experts.

Even when talking to investors, reference customers are worth a lot to you, because they show that you have already designed a profitable business model or that your current model already works in a way that makes expansion more likely and safer.

Guideline: Setting up your own business & business plan

You want to start your own business as a real estate agent or with another business idea? Learn more: hiring an agent. We support you with tips on your business plan and concept. Whether self-employed full-time or part-time self-employed: If you want to set up your own company, you have to think about a lot, in advance and in the operative business. From the right idea to health insurance – what needs to be considered if you want to become self-employed?

There is no training or further education for entrepreneurs. Managing director is you or not. Your own ambition is always important, because this is the only way to improve, every day.

The topics at a glance:

Business idea – Market analysis with search engines

So before you waste time conceptualizing, trust search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Duck Duck Go Go. Here you get the best and fastest market analysis ever available to you as an entrepreneur. In the past, entrepreneurs had to scour phone books, request product catalogs from wholesalers. Find out how big your competition is and what their activities are, from product development to marketing. Pricing also plays a big role, because if you are too far above the market price, it will be hard to attract customers. So you need to align yourself with the existing market price.

Business idea – market analysis through competition

At the same time, you should develop a sense for the situation of the competition. Of course, everything always looks positive on the outside, but are appearances really true or are there problems? Learning from the mistakes of others will save you a lot of time. If you discover weaknesses in your competitors’ business models, you can use them profitably for yourself in two ways: You can adapt your product or service accordingly so that your product is the only one that no longer has this flaw / offers the missing function and you can of course use this circumstance in your marketing concept to create a USP for yourself! The most important questions of the competition check at a glance:

1. Are there other developments in “your” direction?
2. Who are your competitors?
3. How much do your products cost with the competition?
4. What are the biggest strengths and weaknesses of your competitors?
5. What are your company’s weaknesses compared to key competitors?

→ How can you counter these weaknesses?

Success: No one believes in you

In fact, somehow everything has been there before. Many let the competition out of their sight or talk down the performance of the competition. “There’s no point!”, “It’s all bullshit!”, “We do it much better!”. Fact is, rather learn from the mistakes of others than make mistakes yourself.

Extrapolation: 0.5% makes the difference

Therefore, you should always keep an eye on the competition. Never think you are more brilliant than everyone else. The difference in success in the long term is often only 0.5% performance between top people with the same starting conditions. Whoever manages to be 0.5% better than the competition in the long run will get the most orders and customers over the years. The secret recipe. If you earn 10,000 € every week and manage a continuous increase of 0.5%, the return is amazing.

• Week 1: €10,000
• Week 2: 10.050 €
• …
• Week 20: €11,048.96
• …
• Week 56: €13,222.07

After one year, you have already earned over 3,200 € more than your competitor every week. Calculated on a monthly basis, you now have 13,000 € more at your disposal, and in the coming year, if conditions remain the same, you will already have over 150,000 € extra. That is for “only” 0.5% more performance.

Development, errors and learnings

That’s why it’s so important to look at developments in your own market, not only with your customers but also with your competitors and rivals.

At the same time, you should not only look at the mistakes of your competitors, but also learn from their successes.

Learnings from mistakes and successes can not only be derived from the direct competition but also from other companies that offer a completely different product, e.g. through similar concepts (logistics, recruiting, personnel management, marketing, etc.). It can be internal to the industry, just as the muesli bar can profit from the protein shake marketing concept, but also external to the industry, e.g. adopting the bonus system for customers of a bank for your own household goods start-up.

1. Take your competition seriously
2. Learn from your competition
3. Ignore your competition

Ignore your competition? A third of your mental work should go into freeing yourself from the competition. Sometimes you have to completely free yourself to find new ways. That’s why it’s also important to learn to forget about others for a little while. Focus on you and your business model. If you constantly orientate yourself on other companies and products, your product will experience little innovation and will therefore hardly differ from the competition. Keyword USP.

Current status, development and positioning

Before it now comes to marketing and advertising, you reflect once again very carefully whether your business idea with the new knowledge gained through the customer analysis and the market analysis really delivers what it promises.

1. Does the idea fit the development of the industry?
2. Are you entering a growth market?
3. Have you actually found a market niche?
4. Know the pros and cons of your idea from a market perspective?
5. Do you know your potential customers?
6. Are there enough buyers in the market for your idea?
7. Do you know your edge over the competition?

Reality Check: Market and Sales! Last but not least in the Reality Check, three questions that determine the success of the market launch:

1. Are you prepared for possible reactions from the competition?
   → Ex. trademark and lawsuit
2. Will you be able to get your price in the market?
3. Do you know how to shape sales and marketing?

The transition to the topic of marketing, advertising and winning customers. Now that you have cleared up the last doubts, it’s time for your marketing.

Guidebook: Setting up your own business & business plan

You want to start your own business as a real estate agent or with another business idea? We support you with tips on your business plan and concept. Whether self-employed full-time or part-time self-employed: If you want to start your own business, you have to think about many things, in advance and in the operational business. From the right idea to health insurance – what do you have to consider when you want to become self-employed?

There is no education or training for entrepreneurs. One is or is not a managing director. What is always important is your own ambition, because that is the only way to improve every day.

The topics at a glance:

1. Business Plan
2. Founder and founding team
3. Product / Service: USP
4. Increase customer satisfaction
5. Market Overview: Customers & Competition
6. Reference customers: Positive image transfer
7. Market analysis / validation: business idea
8. Site selection
9. Marketing concept: Sales
10. Advertising: Google Ads, SEO, Newspaper, Radio?
11. Marketing: Media advertising, costs and CPM
12. Marketing: trade fairs, training courses and trade advertising
13. Marketing: sales talk, telephone call and psychology
14. Marketing: promotions, discounts and special offers
15. Marketing: Social Media and Online Advertising
16. E-business: electronic commerce in the enterprise
17. Cooperations: Cooperative Principle
18. Financial planning: capital and financing

Here you come back to the overview:

• Form a company
• Legal forms: OHG, KG, GmbH, AG & Co.

Today we start with part 1 of 14!

Must I write a business plan?

A business plan is a structured overview of your business model. It covers all of the aforementioned points, from the founder and your skills to the product, the business idea itself, marketing, staff and, of course, financing.

Business plan – what is it?

All parts of the business plan are neatly structured, like a little book. In this book the reader learns everything important about the business idea and business model.

For yourself, you don’t necessarily need a business plan. A business plan is usually for third parties, from sales staff who are familiar with the matter to banks where you need credit for your growth, from investors who want to invest in your project to advertising agencies who need to quickly understand your business model, for designs, videos or websites. Depending on the adressee, you can change certain data or remove individual parts of the business plan completely.

That doesn’t mean the business plan won’t help you. After all, you’ll learn to sharpen your business idea and it’s a bit like with the cheat sheet back in school. You have to memorize an entire book that has the content of an entire year. Contexts, calculations, names. The summary helps you on the one hand that you have a red thread as far as the topics are concerned, but on the other hand you also remember the individual information by summarizing it compressed.

Understanding of the business model for third parties

However, a business plan helps above all third parties who should understand your business model. Here it is the same as in school, depending on the subject the contents differ. If you haven’t had physics yet, you have to explain the basics, the big context. Someone who doesn’t know anything about your business, e.g. a bank clerk from Lebensmittel E-Commere, should understand within a very short time what you are doing and how profitable your business model can be. It’s impossible to read an entire book. A business plan in a clean presentation, quickly made. Accordingly, the business plan is your little cheat sheet, for him and for others.

Short form or in detail? Elaboration

Your business plan includes everything important on the subject, in short form. After the business plan comes the short presentation. At the end of the day, your entire business model is just a slide with three key points. Your entire funding, two slides, two graphics, and a few dates.

The business plan already looks like this in its shortest form (short presentation). Anyone who pursues more complex business models, e.g. financial transactions through an app, must of course go a little further. Here the business plan is no longer just a presentation, but a paper. Here you explain the basics on up to 10, 20 pages. You give the answers to the question, how your business model works and how it is established economically, successfuly in the market.

In short, your business plan is a detailed collection of ideas, followed by validation (audit and evidence) for banks and investors. As described above, the scope of a business plan varies extremely depending on whether it is used internally, e.g. for your own team, your advertising agency or externally for bankers and investors.

Scope and type of business plan

• General applies to the business plan, no matter in which size: improvement of the own idea and orientation for third parties
• Sketch / mind map
• Short presentation with a maximum of 10 slides; 3 key points each
• Business plan in text form on 10 pages + analyses
• In addition (optional) the financial plan for 3 to 5 years: includes all planned expenses and income, including profit calculations

To get the loan from the bank or the desired amount from your investor, you definitely need a business plan. He helps you improve your own idea. It helps to orient third parties, such as banks and investors. While you are editing page 8, you notice that one point is missing in the risk assessment on page 12. As you adjust the risk assessment, you notice that I’m making a completely new option in distribution. Immediately you adapt this place on page 14 and so on. Constant optimization, also concerning your business plan itself.

When your business plan is ready, you are well prepared not only for your business, but also for all forms of questions that will come your way.

Business plan in practice

With your business plan, you will now have a functioning business model in place. Your proof of concept. In the next steps it is important to summarize all your considerations in short and concise sentences. So that your business model is easy for third parties to understand. The entire business plan will be a brief overview of you, your ideas, the USPs, an insight into potential customers, team, capital needs, risk analysis and sales volume. So far we have had many theoretical thoughts, now it is time to put everything into words.

Business Concept (short): Structure

This is how you describe your business idea in the shortest possible time:

1. Name of the future company? → unimportant
2. Name(s) of the founder(s)?
3. What experience / knowledge qualifies you for this start-up project?
4. What’s your business idea?
5. What is special about it?
6. Which potential customers are eligible for your offer?
7. How should your offer reach customers (keyword: marketing)?
8. What total capital requirements do you need for your project?
9. What sales volume do you expect in the next few years
10. How many employees want to employ after three years?
11. What goals have you set for yourself?
12. What risks is your project exposed to?
13. When do you want to start your project?

Guideline: Setting up your own business & business plan

You want to start your own business as a real estate agent or with another business idea? We support you with tips on your business plan and concept. Whether self-employed full-time or part-time self-employed: If you want to set up your own company, you have to think about a lot, in advance and in the operative business. From the right idea to health insurance – what needs to be considered if you want to become self-employed?

There is no training or further education for entrepreneurs. Managing director is you or not. Your own ambition is always important, because this is the only way to improve, every day.

The topics at a glance: