Blueprint

This is the stage where you learn how to design your business by creating a business plan. It’s the first practical step towards realizing your vision as a business.

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Objectives

The goals for this stage are:

• Learn how to expand your vision into a business plan.

• Test your plan on others.

• Either continue with your plan as is, refine it, or find another idea.

• Provide the basis for a formal business plan, if you need one.

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Design your business

The thought of designing your business may seem daunting, but we have made it as simple as we can. We’ll teach you how to start thinking about your idea from a customer perspective before considering how you’ll launch and operate your business.

 

To help you do this, we provide both a template and a guided tool to help you complete a Lean Canvas, which is like a business plan on a page. It looks easy to do, but may require quite a lot of thought.

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Your Lean Canvas provides the basis for creating a formal business, which may be critical later, if you want the support of funding providers.

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Using the Blueprint phase

On the webpage, the stage is broken down into several steps, with each step containing:

• A description of the step and how it works

• Learning resources like guides, blog posts, templates or tools that can help you with this step. Click on the buttons to access the resources as needed.

• Links to resources elsewhere on the web that can help you with this step

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We recommend that you follow each step in turn and use the resources that most suit how you like to work.

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Conclusion

The Blueprint stage should provide you the understanding of how to begin constructing your business, some allies who will support launching your business, and the confidence to decide your next step. This decision is important. If you decide to proceed, you’ll be committing to investing time and energy in the next step of the Toolshed framework, Goals.

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We want to make your start-up journey enjoyable, successful, and as easy as possible. If you find any aspect of the site confusing or lacking, please let us know on our Contact Form and we’ll improve it.

 

Finally, if you’re feeling lost, head to the Toolshed Community, and get some help from a fellow founder or an expert mentor.