The National e-Commerce Extension Initiative
Southern Rural Development Center
Internet Strategies to Improve Farm Business Management
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  menu_item The Internet and the
      Manager

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  menu_item The Internet as a
      Communications Tool

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  menu_item Business Planning and
      Market Research on the
      Internet

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     menu_item The Business Planning
         Process

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        menu_item Developing Your
            Mission

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        menu_item Performing Situation
            Analysis

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        menu_item Defining Goals and
            Objectives

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        menu_item Establishing
            Strategies

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     menu_item Using the Internet to
         Conduct Marketing
         Research

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        menu_item Industry Analysis
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        menu_item Market Analysis
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        menu_item Competitive Analysis
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     menu_item Module Summary
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  menu_item e-Commerce
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  menu_item Developing and
      Maintaining Your Own
      Website

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MODULE 4


Competitive Analysis


A business plan is a critical component of your success or failure as a business. Recall that the business planning process has four steps. Each step is crucial and the Internet can help you as you progress through them.

  1. Develop your mission – You must have a reason (or reasons) for moving the business forward. Your reasons may include your love of agriculture, your desire to work in a family-operated business, or other important values that you hold.
  2. Perform situation analysis – It's crucial to have a starting point. During a situation analysis, you'll assess your industry, your markets, and the general economic environment. You'll use this information to determine the strengths and weaknesses that you have as an organization as well as the opportunities and threats that you face outside of your business. This culminating assessment is referred to as a SWOT analysis.
  3. Define objectives and goals – After determining your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, use that information to define where you want to take your business. Think about what you hope to accomplish with your business. Some common measures of success include productivity, profitability, customer satisfaction, employee retention, etc.
  4. Establish strategies – Once you have determined where you are (through situation analysis) and where you want to be (by setting objectives and goals), you must plot a path to get there. If your goal is to increase your company's profits, there may be many different ways to do that. Will raising prices do it? Will increasing product quality do it? What other options do you have? Look at all of them and choose the one that gives you the best opportunity to achieve your objectives.

After you've decided upon your mission, or your reason for being in business, you'll need to do a good bit of research to assess your current situation. A lot of that background research may be accomplished simply by talking to people in the industry. For example, if you want to start a farm market, you should talk to some farm market owners. But that will get you only so far. When you've gone as far as you can, the Internet provides a wonderful resource to gather further data and information. In other cases, the Internet may be the very first place to search for industry, market, or competitor information. Regardless, the web should play a key role in your market research and business planning.


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MODULE 4



Web site and all contents © Copyright SRDC 2009, All rights reserved.
CSREES These materials were developed as part of the Southern Rural Development Center’s National e-Commerce Extension Initiative. They are based upon work supported by the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under Award No. 2005-45064-03212

Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture or the Southern Rural Development Center.
 

For Questions or Comments, contact Shannon Turner.