Business Plan for Studentevents.com - Essay Example

? BUSINESS PLAN Events.com ……………………… College………………………………. …………………. Table of Contents Table of Contents 2 Introduction 2 StudentEvents: The Business Rationale 3 Business Objectives 4 Mission Statement 4 Success Measures 4 Marketing Plan 5 Marketing Mix Elements 5 Targeting and Segments 7 Business Operational Issues 7 Financial Projections 8 Conclusion 8 References 9 Introduction StudentEvents.com will certainly be an amazing experience for students to rejoice events and parties by sharing it with their friends online. When students leave the campus for weekend or holidays, StudentEvent.com will take them back to memories of their campuses. It will be a place for them to entertain with others around the world. It aims at generating good numbers of traffics from students, develop ideas and convert them to profitability and eventually commercialize the opportunity. This piece of paper presents a brief business plan of studentevents.com, describing the business objectives, mission and vision of the business and analyzing projected financial performance. This paper addresses the conceptual framework related to various components in a business plan and are applied to the example of studentevents.com. StudentEvents: The Business Rationale An effectively prepared business plan must be able to describe the proposed business venture in terms of the products or services it provides, available resources and business opportunities (Leach and Melicher, 2008, p. 74). It means that the what, where, and why explanations about a business is critically important aspect in a business plan. As far as StudentEvents.com is concerned, it is small start-up company with six full time employees. Five of them are expert and qualified in computer engineering and software development and one is an educator who can update the company regarding trends, seminars, events, academic sessions, syllabus components, tuition program, etc that are important to education and students around the world. Though plenty of websites attract students for chat with friends, none of them are found user-friendly and convenient for online sharing of events and parties. StudentEvent.com is not just an alternative to a social network, but an extremely useful database wherefrom students can obtain information about competition, event and programs that they may benefit attending. The image and video sharing of school-programs also will certainly attract wide numbers of customers to the website. Business Objectives As a critical component to business plan, the business objective need to cover both long and short term expectations and these need to be measured in terms of money or other tangible means (Ochtel, 2009). The primary objective of the company is to provide students with opportunity to get connected with others and to share their memories of school-events. From a business point of view, it will target students, design a service wherein they can entertain, increase the traffics and commercialize this with a view to benefit the investors. Mission Statement This is meant with a view to continually add vitality to students’ life. We would like the students get connected with others and share their feelings of happiness and mishaps they experienced with various events or celebrations within their school or college campuses. Success Measures StudentEvents.com will take measures to ensure greater success in its business. The company aims: To facilitate access for students to the website to update with parties, events and celebrations, To help students organize birthday or valentine parties to friends online by automated-email messaging, To arrange summer campaigns, study tours, graduation ceremonies etc through specific online gaming arrangements To take dynamic business strategies to retain the visitors and increase traffic to get more marketing advantages. Marketing Plan Marketing Mix Elements Today’s business environment is rigorously competitive. No matter whether it is a multinational company or a small network business, the ultimate business perception is that it should deliver high-level customer values and satisfaction than the competitors provide (Armstrong and Kotler, p. 72) and therefore StudentEvents.com is also required to research and find out what specific features, facilities and usefulness can add values to the online-service to be provided to students. For this, the marketer needs to carefully coordinate and integrate between the four marketing mix factors, namely product, price, promotion and place. StudentEvents.com will be concentrating on providing highly attractive online facilities for students to update with events and programs. Main attributes of the service it provides are attractiveness, convenience, easy access to them, clarity, uniqueness, use-friendliness etc. Customers are the students and they will repeatedly visit only if the website can provide them with a zeal of campus feelings. While designing and developing the website, software team will check whether the portal and its contents can attract students repeated visits. The login and registration, events-updating, image and video uploading and sharing, summer campaign, games and all other services will be full free of charge. The website may charge moderate prices of $ 1 to a maximum of $4 for services such as study tours, school-funs, smart-class rooms, birthday celebration etc. With smart-class rooms, the software team of the company proposes to target those who are much concerned about their studies, academic performance. Smart-rooms will appeal first-class seekers, whereas other facilities such as tour, fund etc would attract those who visit the website for time-pass. These wouldn’t cover the costs the company may incur in developing the website, but only the traffic that further can be commercialized. The company is not planning any extensive advertising or communication programs except emails and invitations sent by users for earning credits. Students who obtain 25 credits by sending 20 mails will be permitted to join paid services such as study-tour or smart-class room etc. One of the main advantages will be its potential to attract students from around the world. The place element is an advantage as it is worldwide. Targeting and Segments Company segments its total market in to mainly 1) school students, 2) College students and 3) other students who come to seek information, share events, store images and videos of events etc. Initially, the company will target students through school or college websites. For this, the company will contact a minimum of 50 schools and colleges for facilitating a link in their websites to connect to StudentEvnets.com. Our software team is developing specific software for time table, library, school administration etc that can be free-distributed to schools and colleges. These will also be provides in c.net.com for free-downloading. All these software can redirect students visit to SudentEvents.com. This will be primary strategy for targeting the students. Business Operational Issues The web-portal is main channel to keep relation with the customers. Quite different from most other companies, StudentEvents.com will have complete details and information about students’ feedbacks about the services the company provides to the. It is because, the software team at StudentEvents.com can anytime check the traffic status, students’ visits to certain functionalities, their key areas of interests etc. This team can also recognize how and why more students prefer a particular functionality rather than the other. Information security and data storage will be challenging to the company. The team has to take security measures against hacking and other internet attacks. Financial Projections Setting up a website with latest software and technology will be of high cost. It will cause again huge spending to dominate the internet market for students. Creating and increasing the traffic is the main way company can generate profits. Apart from this, company can also, in long run, generate profits by selling services of study tour, school-fun programs, smart-class rooms etc. It is projected that the company will lose money for the first two years, but can gradually maintain reasonable amounts of profits to benefit the investors. The initial cost for building the website is estimated as $10,000, and the expense for initial software development and other managerial activities is estimated as $23,000. Conclusion This piece of paper presented a brief business plan about StudentEvents.com, a website business aiming students who would like to update with events and school or other programs. The mission of the company is to help students rejoice their events evermore. The website will continually provide unique services the students from around the world can get connected with friends and others sharing images, videos, memories, information about events, celebrations, programs etc. In order to create traffic, the software team of the company will initially design software to freely distribute to schools and colleges and students can be redirected from these software to the website. This plan has also presented a brief financial projection of the company for the first three years. References Armstrong, G and Kotler, P, 2005, Marketing: An introduction, Prentice Hall, Pearson Education Inc Leach, J. C and Melicher, R. W, 2008, Entrepreneurial Finance, Illustrated second edition, Cengage Learning, Ochtel, R.T, 2009, Business Planning, Business Plans and Venture Funding: A Definitive Reference Guide for Start-up Companies, Illustrated edition, Carlsbad Publishing Read More