Building a Business Plan: The ENTR Capstone Course
I am currently in my last entrepreneurship course, the capstone of the minor Entrepreneurship and Venture Planning. With such a general title, you probably have no idea what this course is about. Essentially it is all about the business plan. But not just another Lean Canvas or short writeup. By the end of this course, our professor Jake expects a twenty page business plan full of operation specifics, financial projections, and more. The course itself is actually listed under the business course and accounting is encouraged as a prerequisite. As a computer science major, I was a bit nervous about the expectations, but as I am now a master of PlanGuru and finishing up Caja Que Crea’s business plan, I am proud of all I have accomplished so far.
So what goes into a business plan? Well first you need a business, so Jake started our course by having us brainstorm ideas and form teams. With such a big task ahead, we started right away doing market research, investigating our product competition, and making decisions on what we will create. Ultimately my team, Caja Que Crea, decided to create a subscription box service that will promote Spanish literacy across the United States and abroad.
As I mentioned previously, a big aspect of the business plan however is accurate financial, which was the main focus of lectures over the course of the semester. We learned how to use PlanGuru, a business planning software that offers budgeting and forecasting tools to determine cash flow, the breakeven point, and more. For our business, we also got to use a subscription wizard within the software to help us extrapolate the number of sales for our product quickly and easily. I seriously recommend this software for anyone looking to do similar calculations as it is such a time saver.
Jake also brought in a ton of guest speakers to break up the lectures on business plan topics. Some of my favorite classes this semester were from this course in part due to the amazing guest speakers, some of which I have discussed in other blog posts.
All in all, this course has taught me how to create a business plan - a much more complicated task than I had realized at the beginning of the semester. Not only were there tons of little details to figure out, the collaboration among team members and learning how to do certain financial estimates and evaluations are all valuable skills that I can carry with me for years to come.
-Kylie Moden
So what goes into a business plan? Well first you need a business, so Jake started our course by having us brainstorm ideas and form teams. With such a big task ahead, we started right away doing market research, investigating our product competition, and making decisions on what we will create. Ultimately my team, Caja Que Crea, decided to create a subscription box service that will promote Spanish literacy across the United States and abroad.
As I mentioned previously, a big aspect of the business plan however is accurate financial, which was the main focus of lectures over the course of the semester. We learned how to use PlanGuru, a business planning software that offers budgeting and forecasting tools to determine cash flow, the breakeven point, and more. For our business, we also got to use a subscription wizard within the software to help us extrapolate the number of sales for our product quickly and easily. I seriously recommend this software for anyone looking to do similar calculations as it is such a time saver.
Jake also brought in a ton of guest speakers to break up the lectures on business plan topics. Some of my favorite classes this semester were from this course in part due to the amazing guest speakers, some of which I have discussed in other blog posts.
All in all, this course has taught me how to create a business plan - a much more complicated task than I had realized at the beginning of the semester. Not only were there tons of little details to figure out, the collaboration among team members and learning how to do certain financial estimates and evaluations are all valuable skills that I can carry with me for years to come.
-Kylie Moden
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