College Project: Business Start Up

Leon11

Hi,

We've to put together a business plan for a business start up. We have decided to go with an idea that targets an area of tourism abroad but has it's operations based in Dublin.

Would anybody know what type of set up would be required for an online based operation in terms of staffing needs etc?

Any comments, suggestions, help or links would be gretaly appreciated.

Thanks,

Leon

Slate

Thats a "how long is a piece of string ?".

You don't give any info to be able to answer it eg
Do you intend being available to answer queries 24 hours a day?
Is it critical that you ar available live or just be able to respond to ? within x amount of time?
What resources are you setting aside to marketing the plan and what is the expected levels of feedback?
How large is the target market, is it a niche business?

I could type a 100 questions similar to above. You need to give more info

Leon11

The business would be live stream in that you can book whenever you want at whatever time be it at 5pm or 5am. Callback time is max 3hrs

We have a target group of 40,000 customers per year based on Irish operations, roughly 300,000 UK customers. Our plan is to target 10% of the Irish market over the next 3 yrs whilst we hope to aim for 2-3% of the UK in the same timespan.

Marketing wise we are looking to put aside €400k per year but this can be flexed in our budgets to accomadate more money through finance.

There is one company in Ireland who claim to offer this service whilst in the UK there is 3 main competitors with a sun group of 10 or so online based companies, we expect to gain UK business by our expertise in local knowledge whilst we expect that we Irish people will go for our service on terms of our customer service.

Customer Service is one of our keys to success.

Looking to sell packages to roughly 8 countries

Ireland
Britain
Germany
Poland
Czech Republic
Slovakia
Belgium
U.S

Slate

From what I can tell, you are looking at putting in an expensive realtime system to manage online bookings and enquiries. Its not clear if you have any experience of this or if you have someone who is going to set it up. My advice if this is critical to the business plan is do not scrounge on this. It needs to be done professionally. Have a look at other travel sites for starters. They often contain links to the companies that host/manage their system and will provide a good starting point to get details/quotes for setting the sytems up. For example gohop.ie contains a link to their web developers http://www.tmsolutions.ie.

Before you go to this level of investment however, ask yourself if this is critical to the startup. You can get a well designed website up and running quickly and spend on the advertising/marketing initially. See what kind/volume of response you get and use this to gauge if you need to adapt the business plan before blowing the budget on the systems. You can have the best system and ideas but no one will know about it!!! Is your target market web savy or would they prefer the one to one talk? You may not need to go full steam realtime initially.

Contact your local enterprise board. They will allocate someone to critically evaluate your business plan in total confidence. They should also be able to point you in the right directions for contacts in the areas you need help and grant aid you in feasibility/employment etc.

Make sure you have costed the business plan properly. My experience with business plans is generally people tend to significantly under estimate the time it will take to get up and running and more importantly the time it will take to actually start getting in cash. As a general guideline, assume it will take twice as long as you think to get the business up and running and that your receipts will be half what you think. What happens to your business plan? Can you cover the costs if this happens? Have you got contingency plans in place?

Slate

Should have read things properly!! Only just realised its a college project. If you need templates etc for business plan, just search any of the major banks sites/accountancy or finance sites. They have templates /advice on doing up a plan

Leon11

Slate,

cheers for that, your questions actually made me think a bit outside the box so to say! appreciate your input. If anyone has anything else to add please do!!