Final Capstone Project

Today I am going to talk about what I learned throughout the semester through the three
sequential phases to devise, develop, and propose an action plan/scenario for my entrepreneurial
project.
For entrepreneurs and small business owners, the first step in successful business planning
involves creating a formal business plan, of the type commonly used to attract investors and
secure bank loans.

Business Plan is often considered the first step in setting up new ventures or growing
existing businesses. The conventional wisdom embedded in most formal business plans is the
assumption that new businesses should be planned in detail prior to their startup and that those
details will serve as an important step toward success. Many studies, however, indicates there is
little concrete evidence that formal business planning leads to business success.
Many successful corporations, such as Intel and Microsoft to Dell and Wal-Mart, did not devise
initial formal business plans prior to their inception.
A Typical Structure of Formal Business Plans
depicts, commonly starts with product description and proceeds with a series of sequential
stages such as market study, sales estimate, capacity of production, facilities planning,
personnel estimate, and financial analysis. Business plans follow linear paths, sometimes
with linear feedback from financial analysis to sales estimates. Real-life ventures, however, are
rarely linear, and they always face unknown and unpredictable events. Formal business plans
culminate with the estimation of the total amount of financial capital needed to accomplish the
ventures goals, usually from external sources such as venture capital investors and banks.
Product Description
Market Study
Sales estimate
Capacity of Production
Facilities Planning
Personnel estimate
Financial Analysis
Find Investors
Market
Study
1Q.
Imagination is thought to be a mode of memory which brings images from the memory and so
represents sense objects not actually present. Secondly, the imagination is thought to be the
power which originally links together different impressions to form images of things that do not
exist in the sense. For example, the mythological characters are the products of imagination.

Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Walt Disney and Steve Jobs had one exceptional and extremely rare
talent in common:
They applied imagination to technology and business.
While many had their feet planted firmly on the practical terra firma of business, hands in their
pockets, this small but legendary pantheon of innovation led them up the staircase to
imagination.
It was only a few steps away that magical land where the commonplace becomes amazing. A
short journey, that for too many takes a lifetime.
2Q.
There can be no doubt that he has had a material impact on our world perhaps more than any
other businessman in modern history.
Five Lasting Lessons
The road to success as an entrepreneur has five lasting lessons you must learn along the way:
1. Work hard.
2. Expect failures.
3. Think.
4. Learn while you earn.
5. Be the best person you can be.
1. Work Hard
2. Expect Failures
In addition to hard work, you should expect failures along the way.
Thomas Edison, one of the foremost inventors of our time, was a colossal failure in his effort to
commercialize the incandescent light bulb failing thousands of times before he finally
succeeded.
He explained it this way:
I have not failed. Ive just found 10,000 ways that wont work.
Edison also believed in hard work and spent countless hours in the lab, despite frustration and
failure. He said of his fellow businessmen:
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Thomas Edison failed over nine hundred times before he finally invented the light bulb. He
didnt give up, he merely reassured himself that his idea had merit, and that each failure brought
him closer to success.
3. Learn to Think
Most significantly, Edison adopted the view that most people ultimately fail because they have
never learned how to think. He came to this conclusion:
Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eightyfive percent would rather die than think.
There are lessons to be learned from Edison's life. Although Thomas Edison obviously had a gift
of mechanical abilities, he had learned skills that others can apply to their lives. He was:
Curious about the world around him
Knowledgeable about scientific method
Meticulous in his planning and record keeping

 Ambitious and hard working

An organizer of others to assist him
A promoter of new technologies
A good businessperson
On the negative side, there are characteristics of Edison to avoid. He:
Was overly competitive
Worked too hard, thus neglecting his family
Took advantage of his workers
Did not give credit to others
Edison once said, Many of lifes failures are people who did not realize how close they were
to success when they gave up.
3Q.
In some ways, an action plan is a "heroic" act: it helps us turn our dreams
into a reality. An action plan is a way to make sure your organization's vision
is made concrete. It describes the way your group will use its strategies to
meet its objectives. An action plan consists of a number of action steps or
changes to be brought about in your community.
Each action step or change to be sought should include the following
information:

What actions or changes will occur

Who will carry out these changes

By when they will take place, and for how long

What resources (i.e., money, staff) are needed to carry out these
changes

Communication (who should know what?)