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.