Back to Business Plans

[Jack Coats]

Back to Business Plans

For those interested, bplans.com have several free business plans, and
also paid for ones. They also have payfor software to help develop
business and marketing plans.

I suggest looking over several of their free ones, and NOT using them
directly.  But build your own that meets YOUR needs.

Another good resource for starting businesses is sba.gov and score.org
(the volunteer group that trails the SBA). They are both good
resources, but mainly USA focused. IMHO, don't take anything they say
as 'gospel' but weigh it with what you know and learn elsewhere, that
being said, they still have lots of good (and free) information and
classes (some cost sometimes) available.

I took a business plan writing class years ago, but the small business
accounting class by a retired small business owner was worth more to
me personally.

One of the big things they preach is to get a 'relationship' with a
'team of advisers'. If things were perfect, a couple of small
business owners (that don't compete but know your industry), banker
(loans, checking acounts, lines of credit, separation of personal and
business activity advice), insurance person (yep, there is a liability
to just hang a name out there, but they can help not just get you the
right insurance but to tell you what NOT to buy), real estate adviser
(to help find and evaluate properties, traffic flow if that is
important, etc), and of course the required lawyer that understands
small business and preferably your industry. You can do
incorporations, llc's, partnerships, using online service, but their
advice can be helpful )

[Jack Coats]

http://i.materialise.com/

Will do your 3D print and return a bronze object. ... Yet another niche market.

Also he normal plastics, plus silver, gold, titanium, and more. Interesting.

><> ... Jack
Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart... Colossians 3:23
"You don't manage people; you manage things. You lead people." —
Admiral Grace Hopper, USN
"If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the precipitate"
- Henry J. Tillman
"Anyone who has never made a mistake, has never tried anything new." -
Albert Einstein

[Joseph Chiu]

Right now, I work a full-time job doing computer systems work.  It's a career I've enjoyed for several decades, but in recent years, I've decided that I wanted to get back to "making" things - both for other people, and ultimately for my own business.  I wanted to share a few books/resources out there that I've found to be helpful and/or motivational in my quest to go into business being a prototyper/inventor, and also mention a little bit of my own experiences down that path.

First, the US Patent and Trademark Office is a great resource for inventors, even if you don't have any immediate plans to patent your work.  In recent years, they have started to organize regional conferences for inventors. I went to the one last year in Pasadena.  There were various keynote speakers as well as breakout sessions.  The ones that I particularly enjoyed include one woman's experience of taking her idea, finding a manufacturing/licensing partner, and getting the product into Costco (and the problems she faced); another was a product development specialist sharing her insights on the proper steps to make before committing to a large order, and then marketing and branding techniques to make the product more attractive/valuable to potential buyers   

There are a number of inventor's group out there -- they vary in structure and style.  The San Francisco-based Inventor's Alliance has organized a few events in Los Angeles, and I've found the talks to be informational as well.  Those events are primarily "seminar" format - and Andrew Krauss (the President of the Inventor's Alliance) always starts with the same talk: with the right idea, you can invent and make money without making huge investments in time and money.

The book, One Simple Idea by Stephen Keys reinforces the same message and elaborates on the steps to coming up with the product ideas, test/develop the idea into a viable product, and to license/market the product.  (Krauss and Keys are partners in a business that coaches inventors on how to get their products to market.)

I recently read the book $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau.  Besides the collection of inspiration stories, there are some practical advice about how to go about offering the right product/service, and to successfully market it. The "resources" section of his site (http://100startup.com) is worth a quick view.

Another useful thing (for me) was taking an evening class on product design sketches -- while I'm nowhere close to the beautiful product sketches of seasoned product design artists, the class taught me a few basic things and (more importantly) got me into the habit of working out ideas with sketches before modeling them in CAD.

To go into the business of prototyping for others, it's important to get your name out there.  I accidentally had my start when I was in college -- I wrote a program to scan/decode barcodes on a PC, and posted it up on the school website.  A local guy (who made his money inventing and selling arcade games and equipment) needed some help figuring out a barcode reader which his other designers couldn't figure out.  He was not shy about asking for what he wanted -- he e-mailed anyone he could find, including me (he just found me by chance through google) -- and when I answered his question on the spot, he invited me over to take a closer look at his problem.   I did, and I was able to fix his problem.  He then paid generously for the next several years because I could keep solving his problems.

More recently, another client from my past asked for some help building circuit boards with Altium Designer (an electronics design package).  As I was starting to wrap up that project, I asked if they had any more work for me.  They didn't -- at least not any more work in electronics, but "oh by the way", do you think you could do a little mechanical modeling work?  I said yes, and I was given a "small project" to model the placement of circuit boards inside an enclosure.  (I used Alibre, which is similar to Solidworks.)  That project then kept growing in scope until I ended up designing a number of original parts, some of which I validated with my Thing-O-Matic before sending it out to prototype machine shops to be made in aluminum.   That process "stretched" me -- but it was a  great experience - and I now have something else in my portfolio!

Joseph

[66tbird]

Lots of good info, thank you. It should help many in going the right direction.

[Adan Akerman]

Thanks so much for sharing all that, Joseph. That's an excellent example of all the types of things I hoped to learn through this group... your history, interests, methods, favorite resources, associations, habits... Really excellent.

There's a lot of great followup reading to do here.

Adan

Joseph

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