Business Planning and Finance
Compulsory module
10 credits
This is a project-based module in which students, working in small groups, research and develop a business plan for a new venture. With tutorial guidance, students will select an entrepreneurial idea and develop it into a comprehensive and fully detailed, written business plan. All aspects of the business must be thoroughly researched and the written plan must include three years' financial projections. In the final week of the module, they will make a formal presentation of their plan and be interviewed by an enterprise panel with the aim of obtaining funding for the venture. The enterprise panel may include a bank manager, a business angel and/or a venture capitalist.
This is a complex task that brings with it many learning benefits. By means of action learning, participants learn first-hand about the entrepreneurial process of opportunity recognition, start-up and growth and associated activities such as networking, intelligence-gathering and credibility management. Specific skills are developed such as market research and analysis, sales forecasting and the development of financial statements. Perhaps the most fundamental benefit is that, in developing the business plan, students learn to take an integrated view of all aspects of a business and therefore should be able to apply and inter-relate the functional components of the curriculum. The module is carefully structured to provide an integrated sequence of topic seminars, designed to support the development of the plan, and tutorials in which students will discuss problems encountered at the various stages of the development of their business plans.
Select bibliography:
Stutely, R. (1999) The Definitive Business Plan, Pearson Education. ISBN 0273639307.
Provides good common-sense explanation of all aspects of business planning process, with sufficient examples to work with.
Barrow, C. and Barrow, P. (2001) The Business Plan Workbook, (4th. edn.), Kogan Page. ISBN 0749426969.
A step-by-step guide to start-up planning.
