Business Plan 101: Market Description

The third page of the business plan, Market Description, is covered in this week's Business 101: How to Effectively Write a Business Plan. It will teach you the importance of the Market Description page, what information should be included, and provide an example of a successful Market Description page I created.

The Market Description page is extremely important part of your business plan because it is the culmination of your market research in one nicely worded page with supporting figures to make the information accessible.

Potential investors need to know why this market specifically was chosen and if it will support an investment and growth. This is why you do primary and secondary research into various possible markets your business can go into.

Always make a top five list of best markets for your business to operate. With Full Tank Petroleum, I had Lake Norman as my primary Market Description with four other lakes (Lake Lanier, Lake Wylie, Lake Gaston, Cape Coral, and even Lake Erie) as backups. [MAKES: FRP]

You never know which market will play to a potential investor because of familiarity and/or connections with that market. I ultimately chose Lake Norman because of my familiarity with it (lived there with my Aunt) and the investors familiarity with it (family vacationed there).

To have an efficient and effective Market Description page, you must include the correct, relevant information in your Market Description page and have figures and diagrams that make the information in this section easy to read and understand for potential investors.

Remember the potential investors do not know what's up in your brain, you have to translate these ideas and thoughts into actionable statements.

Market research and as a result the Market Description page is usually where if the potentials are still reading they stay losing attention around this section. Statistics, trends, and data points, all this can be extremely boring and hard to consume.

Potential investors need to see this information in ways that make reading this information easy and may I say fun. Text in this section should be displayed in graphics, figures, and charts as much as possible.

An effective Market Description page includes information about:

• BUSINESS LOCATION [BL] - Where will your business operate? Where will you interact with customers?
• MARKET INFORMATION [MI] - What is the basic market information? Market size? Market specifications?
• MARKET TRENDS [MT] - What trends make this market an attractive market to start your particular business?

As you can see, most of the information you will need in your Market Description page will be found during your market research phase. Some of this information will need to be general and broad so the potential investors can fully grasp the growth potential, and other times the information needs to be very specific such as the amount of boat owners in each country part of Lake Norman.

With my life, my investors needed to know exactly how many registered watercraft were on Lake Norman. Since this is not a number you can easily look up on Google, I had to do a lot of primary research to finally come up with an accurate number. You may have to do the same. this information is sometimes not easy to come by and may require unconventional methods to get it.

For example, when doing market research for Full Tank Petroleum I called in to every major fishing and boating radio and TV personality in the Lake Norman area. Finally, Capt. Gus, the most popular Lake Norman fishing personality, answered and we had a two hour long phone conversation that ended with me receiving all the boater registration information of the four counties that were apart of Lake Norman.

In this section, you will see an original, successful Market Description I wrote and receive a comprehensive analysis of the information you should include in your Market Description page. The analysis includes tags that links to the three types of information described above in Part One that you need in your Market Description.

FIRST PARAGRAPH
Initially, Full Tank Petroleum will be headquartered in the greater Lake Norman, North Carolina area, located 18 miles north of Charlotte and target individual watercraft owners and boat storage facilities residing on the over 520 miles of shoreline on the lake [BL]. The geographic location of Lake Norman can be seen in Figure 2 and includes the cities of: Cornelius, Davidson, Huntersville, Mooresville, Statesville, Troutman, Denver, Sherrill’s Ford. [ML]

Source: LakeNormanMike.com

The first paragraph effectively states the company's Business Location and provides relevant Market Information to the potential investors who maybe completely unfamiliar with the market. The first sentence tells the potential investor where the business will operate (Lake Norman) and where it will interact with customers (lake individual boat owners and lake community businesses). The second sentence provides relevant market information about the main areas and target markets of the market. This is wrapped all together with the above image of Lake Norman so the potential investor can see it visually.

SECOND PARAGRAPH
This graph displays the extreme population growth rate with in the Lake Norman Area. The area grew from 100,767 people in 2000 to 160,453 in 2010.[MT]

Source: PlanCharlotte.org

The main purpose of this second paragraph is to reveal the major market trend that supports your business operating in this specific market. Lake Norman's biggest market trend supporting my business entering it is the extreme population growth in the region and it has only increased. Paired with a graph as seen above is the best approach to ingraining this main market trend into the potential investors mind.

THIRD PARAGRAPH

SmartArt graphic (Word is not letting me transfer my SmartArt onto Steemit, working on a solution) that includes this information:

Why Lake Norman? [MT]
- Recreational Epicenter of Lake Norman Region
- Opportunity to be First Mover in New Niche Market
- LKN Population Growth Rate: 59.2% since 2000
- Close Proximity to Charlotte Migrates Business, Medical, & NASCAR Professionals to LKN
- New Business & Medical Centers and Waterfront Communities are Currently in Development

All visual representation of the necessary information in this section. Use SmartArt as a tool to visually highlight text information in a reader friendly way. This paragraph lets the potential investors know the other main trends that support your business operating in this particular market. You could use paragraph form; but in my experience potential investors are way more receptive to SmartArt and visuals.

This concludes the third installment of @chiefmappster 's Business 101: How to Effectively Write a Business Plan. Stay tuned for next week's post describing page four (4) of your business plan, Market & Competitor Anaylsis.

How to Write Page Two (2), Company Description go here: https://steemit.com/howto/@chiefmappster/business-plan-101-company-description

How to Write Page One (1), Executive Summary go here: https://steemit.com/howto/@chiefmappster/business-plan-101-executive-summary

Just do one section at a time and you will have your business plan done in no time :)

Thank you as always for your time and attention.

Namaste

@chiefmappster