Chapter 2. Plan to Succeed

In This Chapter

• How to choose a business identity

• How to establish a legal identity

• How to define your market in your business plan

• How to manage your business in your business plan

• How to detail your capital requirements

E-business "has become just business," said Louis Gerstner, the CEO of IBM. And he's right. If you think that doing business online is different from doing business offline, you're making a mistake. Planning a formal full-time business requires a formal business plan. In this chapter, we discuss the most important components of a formal plan and what they contain.

Your formal plan must include who you are and what you sell; how you'll market your product or service; how you'll manage your company's people, time, and events; an estimate of how much funding you will need to launch, grow, and run your business; and where you plan to find the funds to do it.

We do not have room in this book to show you how to write a complete business plan (we cover only the most essential parts of the formal plan in this chapter), so we refer you to another book by Que that is an excellent no-nonsense tool for writing business plans: Write a Business Plan in No Time (Que, 2005) by Frank Fiore.