AlanBarber.Org
Friday, February 11, 2005
There's a lot to starting a business
Well it sure takes a lot to start a business properly. Since the last post we’ve made some good progress.
In general planning we’ve worked on creating a mission statement. It may sound silly but it’s important to create a mission statement. The point of a mission statement is to define what your business is all about. It’s usually just a sentence or two that tries to incorporate three major points. Those being:
- What do you plan to do?
- Who do you plan to do it for?
- What will you do to succeed?
We answered the three questions but haven’t put it together in an official statement yet. We should be able to get that done tonight. Along with the mission statement we created four goals to have for the company. The idea of having company goals is to give tasks to make the business a success. Just throwing up a website to sell something will not make you a success. You need tasks to focus on and work to improve the company. Goals like actively promoting your business in order to get featured in a fashion magazine.
Finally, we just glanced over starting to write the business plan. A business plan is basically a big document that includes everything you need to know to run your business. Products you sell, industry overlook, marketing strategy, business operations, competition, finances, etc should all be there. The average business plan runs anywhere from 20 to 50 pages in length. This is going to be a major undertaking!
On the technical front I’ve managed to find the right shopping cart system for us. After some major time spent playing with demos, reading feature lists and reviews I picked Zen Cart. Zen Cart is free open-source shopping cart system with a nice feature list. It supports plenty of different payment systems which is what was probably the most important feature.
We’ll be going with just Paypal out of the door. Paypal recently changed their system so you could accept credit card payments without having to have people create Paypal accounts. In the past everyone had to make a Paypal account before they could pay you. There was enough demand from businesses that they finally changed it.
So, the plan is just to use Paypal for payments as long as it works out. Should Paypal become a problem to deal with then we can easily switch to a standard merchant account/payment gateway without having to switch shopping carts. It’s as easy as changing the backend payment options.
I’ll be working on page design and layout this weekend and hopefully this next week it’ll be finished and I’ll get the page content finalized as well. Then it’s just a matter of getting the new website setup and configured and upload all the pages, shopping cart, etc. When we’re ready then we can just switch DNS to point to the new website and watch as it goes live.
Man I can’t wait!
on 02/11/2005 at 11:34 AM