We’ve created our courses to suit your busy life! The duration of this course is based on a student guide where one 300 – 500 word article is read per day, and the assessment is done on a separate day after the relevant articles have been reviewed. But you can do the course in your own time and at your own pace. If you choose to do two readings per day, it will take you half of the estimated time, four readings per day means doing the course in a quarter of the time etc. We leave that decision up to you!
What this course is about?
This course extends the thinking done in Introduction to Business Planning, to explain what a full blown business plan ought to look like. We look at the reasons for drafting a business plan and the standard format of such a plan. Subsections of the plan include: infrastructure, marketing, operations, management, and finance. Thereafter we look at some of the practical problems associated with drawing up business plans – and how best to deal with these.
Who should be doing this course?
This course would be open to people interested in starting a business. You might be unemployed, or currently employed but looking to start something on the side. Alternatively, you might want to cash in your pension and invest in a business full time. Lack of education is no issue. Many great business leaders are university drop-outs because the pull of a business opportunity is too strong.
Learning Outcomes
After completing this course, you should be able to:
- Understand the basics concepts of the course –how businesses create value and why finance is often required in order to develop a business such that it can create value for the customer. Recapping the Business Canvas and extrapolating it to a full blown Business Plan.
- An overview of what a typical business plan looks like.
- Examining the Products and/or Services Plan.
- Examining the Marketing Plan.
- Examining the Operations Plan.
- Examining the Management Plan.
- Examining the Financial Plan
- Identifying key problems when drafting plans – and how we can solve these.
HOW YOUR COURSE MARK IS CALCULATED?
Your course is mark is calculated using the average mark obtained in each of the Chapter tests. In order to pass this course, you must obtain a final course mark of at least 50%. This means that even if you fail a few of the chapter tests, if your test marks in the other chapter tests are high enough you will still be able to pass the course. Good Luck!
