1 Practice and theory

While it’s tempting to dismiss theory and go straight to creating your product or service, you may quickly run into problems with cash-flow, HMRC, suppliers and customers, amongst others, if you haven’t first established your legal status and your business model. A little planning and preparation now will help those around you to be clear about how to set things up well, and about the contacts and infrastructure you will need. It will also help others to know who they are dealing with and how to respond efficiently.

In Session 2 you concentrated very much on managing the business (remember the three essential activities):

• Running the business (e.g. those ‘must do’ activities that mean you can create and settle invoices, pay your taxes, comply with regulations and so on)
• Getting the business (e.g. find, attract and keep customers)
• Delivering the business (i.e. create the product or service that customers want to use or buy).

In this session you will go into a little more detail about the business model – how it will actually operate and how you will go about getting and delivering the business.

The benefit of the models used in this course is that they can be used in a very practical way as a checklist or framework on which you can quite quickly create a visual outline of your business. This will be useful to build the business and to explain it to others who can support you.