Great Way to Build Our Business Plan

Although business experts say a business plan is required for starting a new business, it’s not always true. For every business that fails because of poor planning, another fails because of too much planning. As the great Michael Jordan said, “Just do it!” Here’s how to jump-start your new courier business:

The secret of a successful courier service is providing services not available from the bigger firms like Fedex and UPS, such as local, same-day service, or finding a profitable niche, like medical specimen deliveries. What delivery services should you offer? A business plan can’t tell you that, but your customers can. Instead of wasting your time and energy coming up with an elaborate business plan, just get started. Have one of the many web-based printers (just search “printed notepads” to find them) print notepads to hand out to prospective customers in your area. One marketing tip is to offer new customers a gift certificate for one free pickup/delivery. This let’s them test your service at no cost, and makes them much more likely to call you the next time they need a same-day delivery.

You’ll quickly learn who will be your best customers, as they now have your contact information and will call you when they need packages or documents delivered locally the same day. This takes care of the biggest problem a startup business has – cash flow. Once the money is coming in from deliveries, you can prospect for more businesses in your area that are similar to the customers you now have.

Regardless of how much planning you do, it’s only a hunch – an educated guess about how well your business will do. The danger is, by spending too much time on planning, you’ll have less time and energy to try new marketing ideas to find paying customers. The secret is to test your ideas as quickly and cheaply as possible, then improve and refine them. Handing out notepads with your contact information and a catchy slogan is a great way to do that.

Here’s another “quick & cheap” way to do a simple courier business plan for your new courier service business. If you plan to borrow startup money from friends or relatives – the most common source of funding for new businesses – do an “executive summary” business plan to show them that you’ve done your homework. It should cover the business plan basics, with an overview of the business, a market analysis with a look at the competition, and an estimate of your first year’s sales. It assumes that you will not have employees to start, or buying or leasing property and equipment. Here’s a sample:

ROADRUNNER COURIER SERVICE – BUSINESS PLAN

Business Overview: Roadrunner Courier Service is a new courier service based in Bend, Oregon, specializing in local, same-day deliveries. Roadrunner can transport documents and parcels to customers within a 40 mile radius of town. Our customers are medical professionals, attorneys and local businesses who need reliable, same-day services not offered by the larger service providers, such as Fedex and UPS.

Market Analysis: The demand for reliable, cost-effective delivery services has been growing in the area for several years as the town’s population continues to grow. In addition to a growing population, there are more customers who require faster service, ranging from “stat” medical specimen deliveries to time-sensitive legal documents to “just-in-time” parts deliveries to local manufacturers. There is only one other local courier service in the area, and we believe there is ample room, due to our growing local economy, for another reliable courier service.

Marketing Strategy: The marketing strategy of Roadrunner Courier Service is to provide dependable and exceptional delivery services to businesses and professionals who have a regular need for pickup and delivery services. This will insure that Roadrunner will have a regular, steady income from repeat customers. The second part of our marketing strategy will be to gain customers who need courier services occasionally, such as last-minute parts and supplies delivered to a contractor’s job site, plans deliveries for architects and engineers and documents and materials for local government agencies.

First Year Goal: Based on the size of the local delivery market and the fact that Roadrunner will be a one person business, our sales projection for the first year is $45,000. We plan to build our customer base through direct contact with prospective customers and word-of-mouth referrals from happy customers to continue to grow our sales, focusing on the most profitable types of deliveries.

The root goal of a website business will ultimately be to generate targeted traffic and monetize that traffic. This can be done via on-page and off-page search engine optimization, the use of videos, images, and a constantly updated informative blog. As more content and products are created, newly optimized pages can be created to house that content and those products.

Stage 1: Infancy

The very first thing in our strategy is keyword research. Using popular and effective keywords on your website will help to assure that it will be visible in the search engine results instead of being buried under thousands of other websites in the search results. In order to gain a better understanding for how potential customers will find our website, we look at what keywords are related to our product/service, and try to decipher which ones have the highest number of searches. We use Google as a tool to do our keyword research because Google holds a very large percentage of searchers in comparison to other engines.

Once we’ve done some extensive keyword research, we now know what to use in our title tags, image’s ALT tags, meta data, as well as what to name our files. When deciding what keywords to use where, one thing that must be kept in mind is relevancy. We want to rank for our keywords, but we do not want to over-use them, or use them in an irrelevant fashion. By understanding what keywords we are trying to rank for, we now have a decent idea of what types of content our potential visitors are searching for. This leads us to the next stage in our website business plan.

Stage 2: Design and Implementation

It’s good to understand design and SEO implementaion before you start your site. That way, instead of updating an existing site for search engine optimization, your site will be created from the ground up with search engine optimization as a priority. Your site potentially could have easily become a flash website, but instead will become a XHTML/CSS based site. All your web pages will contain 100% unique content, and will target different keywords. Visuals should be kept relatively simple, although hopefully aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Every link needs to have been carefully placed with intended anchor text and destinations. Every image should be tagged and every bit of information should go through a personally conducted “relevancy test”.

Stage 3: Traffic Driving

Every aspect of search engine optimization boils down to a methodology to obtain more traffic from search engines. Traffic can be converted into money, and we want traffic! We have developed a checklist of operation to complete after when your site goes live.

o Site will be submitted to the major search engines.

o A press release will be submitted.

o Video content will be submitted to YouTube and various other video sites.

o Industry related articles will be written and submitted to EzineArticles and GoArticles, as well and any additional article services that are found to be credible.

o Small-scale testing will begin with pay-per-click campaigns.

o Multiple social networks will be explored, with a link back to our site in each profile.

o Questions will be answered on message boards with links to relevant information our website provides in the form of tutorials.

o Images will be submitted to image-based search engines.

o Website will be submitted to relevant Google Directory listings.

Stage 4: Ongoing Maintenance

We’ve come up with a weekly regimen that will help both build traffic over time, and keep the site maintained:

o Write and submit one article.

o Make 1-2 Forum postings containing a informative post and a relevant link back to your website.

o A new blog post will be posted or new page created on your website.

o A request will be sent to another reputable and relevant website for a one-way link.

Conclusion