The recession has hit two groups disproportionately: the over-50s and the under 20s. The over 50s are increasingly turning to self-employment as employers are often blind to their talents and experience and find jobs increasingly hard to find and eBusiness, trading on the internet, is ideal for those with skills to sell.

But our generation is the last generation for whom the computer and the internet were an ‘optional extra’ for our formative years.

So does my eBusiness, with its low start up costs, its access to a world-wide market, really need a business plan? Wouldn’t it simply waste time and effort better used to launch a business?

Well, if you’re simply going to sell off the junk in your loft and garage on eBay then a business plan would be a waste, but if you’re thinking about earning a sensible living this way then you’d better give your business plan some serious thought. And that’s the point: the process of thinking out the business plan is probably as valuable as the plan itself.

In working on the business plan of a youth organisation providing youth clubs to a deprived group of children it seemed enough to make shelter, organised games and access to the internet but what was the real purpose of the organisation. Well their results are confidential but one could suppose that providing 1. positive role models to young lives, 2. a sense of stability in a chaotic world, and 3. a view beyond their immediate cultural surroundings, might figure in any list of objectives.

We came to see that the pool tables, the computer terminals, the leadership were the ‘inputs’ to the system, the ‘outputs’ the organisation was trying to achieve were quite different, and our recruitment policy moved away from seeking active, fun-loving young people towards more mature motherly types likely to stick around for the long term.

The Business Planning process helps the entrepreneur to focus, to ask the right questions.

1. What is my business? What does it do? Who does it do it for? To what end?
2. Who are my competitors? How strong are they? Have they left a gap in the market I can fill?
3. How will I sell my goods or my services? How will my customers come to me?
4. When my business takes off, how will I exploit it? What will that cost?
5. How I deliver my goods or my services, where will I buy in my products, store them? How will I organise my business, keep my books?
6. How much money will I need? Where will I get it?

On this last point, if you’re using your own money, think of yourself as your own banker and ask when will I make a profit, and what is the cost of failure?

So, even if you never write down your answers the process of thinking them through will make your start up better organised and targeted.

Better to ‘waste’ a few days in some basic research than to waste a few months on following the wrong trail. It may be your own money, but you can only spend it once, and when it is gone…