I'm neck deep in coffee beans. I lived up in the
Pacific Northwest for 12 years and learned how to buy coffee. It’s a
thing up there. Maybe I would even call it a saturated market. But
there is some great coffee. I never considered selling it myself. I
brewed some and I knew the best way to order my favorite stuff at the drive
thru windows. I was only ankle deep in coffee at that time. Now
it’s all changed.
I am nearing retirement from the military and
preparing for my "next career". It my world that would usually
mean a contract job with the Department of Defense or maybe teaching something
somewhere. But, guess what? Those things are looking less promising than
they used to and I kept thinking that there is something else out there for me.
We had thought about opening a drive thru coffee place near Fort Bragg. Being from
Washington State we were missing our coffee thing. We started looking
more and more into it. We got books, read articles and researched the
industry. Then we got serious, and wrote a business plan.
A business plan is a funny animal. I have read a
lot of them, looked at many examples, and read articles about them. There
is one thing I understood about them, they are operational. That is
something familiar to me coming from the Army. We do operations all the
time, before we do operations we write a plan. Simple. In many of the
articles, seminars and examples they talk about "guessing", research
and being short and concise. That’s all good advice, and all are needed,
but a business plan is not just conjecture and hope, it is an argument.
It is a "pitch" with solid and supportable evidence for your
argument. I read that your business plan should be kept simple and fluid,
but my business wasn't going to be simple. We plan methodically and we
needed to write it down and sound it out. So, while many experts often
suggest keeping the business plan to 10 pages or so ours pushes 60. It’s
detailed in some places and general in others. It makes assumptions, it
analyzes, it predicts, it uses evidence, and it argues. There are charts
and diagrams and a few pictures, but at least we feel like it represents our
ideas and it represents who we are. I honestly believe it wouldn't be as
long as it is if it wasn't needed. We have rewritten in at least four
times, although certain parts have stayed the same from first draft until
now. Was it good? We always thought so. So did many other people we took
it to. Including the bank. Which will take me to my next topic of financing.
Our business plan made us realize a couple of
things. We realized what we were really getting in to and how we were
going to do it. We realized that we wanted to be in business and that we
were in a place and time were the coffee business made good sense. If it
didn't we would have changed what we wanted to do. We are not married to coffee-
we are invested in going into business and making a profit. It’s not all
about the coffee... except in the mornings. Then its coffee time.
