A few years ago, a market research analyst I know named Joanne Dove decided to quit her dead-end job and become a freelancer. She knew she was very good at what she did, and friends had always encouraged her to go into business for herself. However, she was a bit timid and lacked drive, so once she had thrown a good deal of money into setting up her business, she felt that the services she offered were so good that her market would come to her. It didn’t.

At about the same time in a neighboring city, a friend of hers, Harry Beecham, also a market research analyst and also wishing to be his own boss, decided he would go into business for himself. He set up meetings with a tax consultant and a business manager, and offered the same kind of services Joanne was offering. But Harry knew the value of marketing, and his business flourished.

Before he even left his old job, Harry had made an appointment with his tax attorney to discuss whether to incorporate or not, and how he might arrange his equipment purchases and invoicing so as to avoid problems with the IRS. He wrote a business plan, which is helpful whether or not you want venture capital funds or a loan. The plan required him to think through who his market would be, how he was going to reach them, what he would do with the income he received and what his actual business was. Through the business and marketing plans, he was able to decide how he would market his services so that very little time was wasted trying first one thing and then another.

Harry’s tax attorney referred him to a Public Relations expert, who helped him decide what kinds of publicity he wanted, and all his decisions had been made by the time he started work on his first contract proposal.

Writing Your Business Plan

This article will be an investigation into some of the tools you, as an entrepreneur, might consider when writing your own business plan. You can do a simple plan just for yourself, clarifying your mission, stating exactly what service and/or product you want to provide, who you might expect to purchase those services or products (your target market), where these customers might be found and how you might connect with them, and how you’ll treat the income your product or services will generate.

You could also purchase software that will help you to write a business and marketing plan if you want something more complex, or if you wish to use the plan to generate capital. You can find this software in office supply stores or online, or you can hire a consultant to write a plan with you.

A small business consisting of one to three people most likely doesn’t need a 40-page plan, but do write your goals and your mission statement down, however simple or complex you feel it needs to be. It will be very helpful to think through your first year, and you’ll probably find several areas you wouldn’t have considered without the formal process, which may save a lot of wear and tear on yourself in the future.

Market Yourself

You’ll want to be clear about how to market yourself, how to spread the news about your new small business, and how to put yourself forward as a professional.

Some of the tools you might employ to market your business and spread the news about it include newsletters, flyers, direct-mail, fax/electronic mail, telemarketing, newspaper and magazine advertising, and/or publicity. Here’s a brief exploration of each of those tools.

• Direct-mail – You can write, or have a professional writer prepare, a persuasive sales letter that can be sent to your prospective client list by snail-mail, fax or email; but remember, a sales letter ALWAYS asks for the sale.
• Telemarketing – You might purchase a list from a professional list service, according to demographics you specify, and then hire friends or students who can make up to a hundred phone calls a day offering to set appointments for you to discuss your products or services.
• Advertising – You could prepare a display ad (or simply a Yellow Pages or classified ad) that would appear in one or in every issue of a newspaper or magazine that goes to your target market (the specific types of people you are targeting for your product or service).
• Newsletters – You can write articles about the kind of work you do, items that summarize recent studies in the field, and ask friends in the same or related fields to contribute ideas, columns, articles or fillers that your target market would appreciate. This might be a one-page newsletter prepared with an inexpensive software program, printed in black & white at your local printer, with clip art and your own mailing list labels applied, all the way up to a glossy four-color six-page newsletter, professionally produced and mailed to a large, expensive, professionally developed mailing list.
• Flyers – You might prepare black & white or color flyers and arrange for them to be direct-mailed to a targeted market, included in local newspapers, stuck under windshields or even stuffed into mailboxes. These might announce your debut as a service provider, or they might offer a big discount on a special deal.
• Website – You might want to hire someone to prepare a website that you will contribute to regularly (once a month would be fine); these contributions might include articles about what you can offer, how-to articles, or interviews of local entrepreneurs, etc.
• Publicity – You might decide to hold a fund-raiser, sponsor a charity, teach a class, publish an article about your services or have someone write an article about your business – in some way, make yourself visible in the community to draw the attention of prospective customers to you. You should consider writing a press release and sending it to local newspapers.

You might wonder whether you need publicity. A Public Relations consultant can give you guidance as to what their assistance will result in. But be careful – not all publicity is good publicity; the difference between publicity and notoriety is that publicity is good, although maybe more difficult to get.

Be Seen As a Professional

You can be perceived as a professional in a variety of ways: Your business card and stationary will say a lot about your professionalism, as will the brochures, the website and the flyers you prepare. You can also join one or more trade associations related to your business, and make yourself visible within them, or you might choose to become a member of your local Chamber of Commerce and attend their networking meetings, or both. You might consider joining a group of like-minded small business owners and professionals in a networking group, where you’ll likely be encouraged to share your expertise and will learn methods of quickly introducing yourself and your business. These groups are also great sources for referrals.

In the long run, our friend Joanne was probably as good a market research analyst as Harry, and might have had a pretty competent business head on her shoulders. But she didn’t know, or she forgot, that it was her responsibility to go to her customers, and not theirs to come to her.