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Personal Business Plan

Definition, Explanation

Business starters are generally advised to make up a business plan for their company. Supports like the starting subvention are never granted without a detailed plan describing products, market and competition, marketing and distribution, chances/risks and a financing scheme. However, while it is compulsory for the starter of an own business, it is generally a useful tool guiding your ways into occupational future. So, make up your own personal business plan.

Product

The product is you. Just like one can describe a product's or a service's features and properties, you can also name your abilities, qualifications, interests, your strengths and weaknesses, your relations or networks. Your product description can take the form of a CV, a personality test, or the picture of a network of relations.

Market and competition

Like a product, you want to place yourself in a certain market. Sectors, professions and jobs define that market. That is what “medics shortage”, “jurist abundance” or generally “job market” refer to. You compete with others for a job, or for being promoted into an executive position, for being included in salary increases or for not being one of the people who are dismissed. For that competition you should know your market value and unique advantageous features. This is what is called unique selling position, USP. The better you work out your USP, the more likely you will dominate your target market. And most of all, you must keep developing, educating yourself, feature employability.

Marketing and distribution

A product that is not distributed is virtually worthless. Correspondingly, also as a person, you have to spend some effort to sell yourself. You must determine your price and to who, where, for what and how you offer yourself. Gain information about your clients resp. employers, make contacts and cultivate them, enhance your self-selling methods. Possibilities range from recruiting fairs, application letters, business networks, employee evaluations through your own homepage.

Business apparatus

One question here is what you are going to produce yourself and what you buy in. It might make sense to consult a coach. Another is the place of your business and your mobility. Can you, do you want to, perform your work at a certain fixed place, or are you going international and heading for changing workplaces all over the world? What do you think your work-life balance should look like? And, last but not least, what standard of living, that is, what expenses do you wish to have?

Realization plan

Making career for becoming a multinational concern manager is so little a one-day job as a business start-up with a profit of billions is done in two weeks. Many steps and arriving at certain milestones are required to achieve such overall goals. There might be detours to be made.

Chances/risks

This topic is often neglected. But e.g. changes of people's interests, like when they start a family, move to somewhere else, and also an insolvency or a joining of companies affect your personal business plan heavily. Just like in a business start-up, these chances and risks can greatly influence your occupational future. To think about those in advance can help to make alternative ways and then take the sudden chance, or alleviate the damages of a risk that has come true.

Financing

A career, today more than ever, requires certain pre-investments. With your education, you engage monetary means to gain abilities and qualifications. An unprofessional-seeming application will not succeed and not reward the spent effort and costs. Marketing actions have to be well prepared and executed. All that costs time and money.

Try it and write your personal business plan!

Last update: 06/15/2010