Strategic Plan, Part I: Conceptualizing a Business

Strategic Plan, Part I: Conceptualizing a Business

Define your business, products or services, and customers by developing a mission statement. Ensure that you are differentiating your product or service.

Create a vision for this organization that clearly demonstrates your decision on what you want your business to become in the future.

Define your guiding principles or values for your selected business considering the topics of culture, social responsibility, and ethics.

Analyze how the vision, mission, and values guide the organization's strategic direction.

Evaluate how the organization addresses customer needs and critique how they achieve competitive advantage.

The business and how the organization addresses customer needs and how they achieve competitive advantage.

Writing a proposal for one's book can be a tough job for anyone - particularly for a beginner. Writers face needless and countless rejection merely because their proposal is not convincing enough, persuasive enough, targeted to the correct agent / publisher, or because it veers from desired protocol. Each agent / publisher, too, is attracted by different proposals. In other words, there is a protocol for writing a book and there is a different protocol for writing the manuscript proposal. There have been cases of people producing the most marvelous books and being rejected time and again due to weak or mismatched proposals.

An online business does exist for creating queries and for directing these queries to agents and publishers. The company has accumulated a base of publishers and agents and targets all sectors of writing. It helps clients review and write their queries and dispatches them to the appropriate agent / publisher.

This company has filled a void in that it deals with the first step. The company, AgentsandPublischers.com, were established in 2003 (Publishers and Agents; online) and, according to their realms of testimonials and the need out there, seem to do a flourishing business. They are also the sole company in their field and have no competition.

This company services the query niche. However, the query is only the first step in that the query serves to prod an agent or publisher's interest. The agent / publisher then ask to see the proposal, and intention of following up and actually accepting the book depends on the way that the proposal is written.

The proposal is complex. It consists of an arbitrary six parts and may take as long as three months to write. Some say that it has been harder for them to write the proposal than for them to write the book and that acceptance of the book actually rests on acceptance of the proposal. It needs its own style, requires marketing skills on the part of the writer, requires that the writer show that she has a platform, and requires that the writer be able to catch the interest of publisher and ingratiate herself with agent. It requires in short that the writer know the unique strategies and skills for writing a proposal. And not all do.

The business that I have in mind therefore is to open an online company (called We Do Your Proposal ) that will hire editors and experienced authors to not only help writers produce their proposals but to also send them off to a generated database of carefully-matched publishers and agents. The business will perform the same services as the Publishers and Agents online service but it will direct its entries to writing proposals rather than to queries whilst serving as resource for all agent/publisher-related problems. It will facilitate the writer's path as well as it cans actually helping the writer publish that book

Mission statement

We Do Your Proposal is dedicated to helping writers make connections with the publishing world and the media. We will specially help the beginning writer understand and negotiate the necessary steps that will help him publish his manuscript,

More specifically, we will help book writers find publishers and agents for both adult and children's books and for all typologies of fiction and non-fiction. We will also connect clients with articles or press releases to the news media, which includes social media and more traditional kinds. Finally, we will help client's fine tune and review their proposals, and when desired, we will produce the proposal from start to finish for the client.

Vision

We intend to become the first company that will help writers structure their proposal and help link them to agents and publisher. Our vision is to help each and every one of our clients fine-tune their proposal so that each and every proposal submitted through our services will become accepted. This unfaltering rate of acceptance will result in growth of our client-base and will enhance our reputation.

We intend to gain a universal presence within four years of our establishing the company and to carve a niche that sets us apart.

We also intend to generate a database of hundreds of book publishers and agents that will be regularly updated with new contacts added all the time. Contact will include non-fiction book publishers; non-fiction book agents; fiction book publishers; fiction book agents; children's book publishers; and children's book agents. Publishers will include both well-known companies as well as the up-and-coming publishers.

Guiding Principles and Values

We will accord our clients optimum respect and integrity in that we will slant our service to meet the client's needs rather than our own. We will consider the client's manuscript to be our own and accord it the same care and diligence that we will accord one that we ourselves have produced. We will make sure that we faithfully reproduce the writing objectives of each and every client and that the finished proposal meets the particular client's requirements. Even though payment will be accepted before assignment is processed, we will, nonetheless, ascertain that the review of the proposal, creation of the proposal, and distribution to agents / publishers follows the client's requirements each and every step of the way. To that end, we will be in constant contact with the client ascertaining that we have understood him and we will keep him informed of each of our actions.

We also realize that our clients come from a variety of cultures and that we may be out of touch with some cultural aspects of his writing or some cultural inflections of his requirements. Recognizing this, we will ensure that client directs us rather than that we direct client.

Finally we will ensure that our business adheres to social responsibility. Online enterprises are a relatively new concept and no body of law exists as yet to direct them. For that reason, and given their complexity, a great percentage of online businesses turn out to be fraudulent. We will function in a legitimate way and make the client's good our highest purpose. We will also ascertain that we adhere to general business laws and structure our accountably accordingly so that we show transparency to both clients and to stakeholders. We intend to maintain a clear and precise account of our budget and profits, showing respect to both clients and employees and to be a democratic, sustainable business in all possible ways.