“Why do I need a business plan to start making gift baskets? Can’t I just let my design work sell itself?”
That’s what I asked myself when I began thinking about a gift basket business in the late 1980s, but then I got smart.
At the time I worked at Dean Witter in New York’s World Trade Center.
“No way did this company start without some type of plan,” I thought while typing a report.
You, too, may want to take a shortcut to success, but many former gift basket business owners have learned that lack of planning is often a shortcut to failure.
There was no way I could write How to Start a Home-Based Gift Basket Business and not include a sample business plan. which you’ll find in chapter 2. It includes each plan component (marketing, competition, start-up costs, and more), and also provides a sample cash flow projection statement.
The latter item is one that’s very difficult to create because you’re not sure how revenue will be generated. But I made one for myself because it would, at the least, help me plan sales during special occasions and end-of-year holidays.
The book’s business plan and charts are a mirror of my own documents, which I created because nothing was available for our industry.
Another place to find a business plan specifically for gift basket businesses is through Business Plan Pro, which you’ll find through this link. I became one of their affiliates because I’m always searching for resources that streamline the administrative side of things so that you can spend more time meeting prospects, expressing appreciation to customers, and testing new design skills.
If one of your first steps, outside of finding baskets and snacks, was to create a business plan, how much do you believe that the plan was instrumental in your overall success versus starting your business without a plan?
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