In order to begin your quest to become an Expert, you need to have a Business Plan. Planning your enterprise is essential. Without planning, your project is doomed to failure. Hard graft on its own is never enough. Plan, plan and plan some more. I spent hours and hours planning my expert weight loss guide. Every detail must be accounted for.
I have included a template below for you to use. Do not share this with others. I have hidden a marker in the text that automatically emails me if you breach my copyright.
My lawyers will come down on you like a tonne of cement falling off a tower block.
Your entrepreneurial instincts will have already kicked in and lots of ideas will have flooded into your head. Sleepless nights will become the norm as you travel along Success Road.
Draft a business plan on good quality A4 paper for each expert idea. A free template for download is available here.
When you have at least five ideas, stop work. Fold each business plan into a paper plane. Go into the garden and throw the paper planes. Pick up the one that flew the furthest.
This is your plan. As Aled Jones once sang: ‘Oh for the wings, for the wings of a dove, far away, far away would I rove’. Lyrics that are so true as we drive along Success Road.
Once you have completed your business plan, you need to test the waters. Market research is essential to any successful business idea. After all it is no use becoming an expert if nobody is interested!
Market research is all about research and the market. Not to be confused with your local fish market, market research is about engaging with your would-be customers and finding out what makes them tick.
Who will be your customers when you become an expert and write your book?
Who are you going to make money from? Money doesn’t grow on trees unless you own an apple farm.
Practical Example
Let us say that you decide to become an expert in avoiding car accidents caused by demented old people, who is your market? Can you use your expertise profitably to help old people drive more carefully and slow down? Would there be any profit in setting up a lobby group to pressure MPs to ban anyone over 60 from driving without a chaperone?
You could approach your local Darby & Joan Club or the Women’s Institute. Offer to give them a talk on road safety, poor eyesight and taking personal responsibility for improving their driving standards. At the talk you could offer discounted copies of your guide on how not to drive like a maniac.
What about offering insurance companies a service for testing old people, making sure they can see where they are going and do not drive like lunatics, in order to receive discounted insurance?
Talk to the Guild of Advanced Motorists and see whether they would be interested in developing a course to give to their older members on how to give up driving for the greater good of society.
Keith David is a businessman from a small village in North Wales. He is the author of “The Fat Man’s Guide to Not Being Fat”, “How to Get Rich” and a couple of other self-help books. Best known for his dramatic rise to fame after inventing a dietary plan to lose 7 stone in a week, he is similarly fairly well known for his subsequent fall back into penury. His wife, Anwen David regularly hacks his blog entries and adds factual corrections. You can read Keith’s book on How To Get Rich by visiting Amazon here
Keith regularly mixes up his metaphors. My dad says that Keith is a mixed metaphor. Either that or he calls him “Keith the Twat” and laughs uproariously.
I have deleted the made up business plan. Keith’s real business plan is included in an earlier blog entry. As you can see, it is total pants.
What was I thinking at the time Keith started to out on his quest to become an expert on “Non-Dieting Weight Loss”? I have included my diary extract below.
Extract from Anwen David’s Diary – October 5th
Keith is up to something and I think it might be Plan 11. I can’t believe it. We are only a few months on from the fiasco of Plan 10. He has disappeared into The Creative Pad [editor’s note: this is our garden shed] on numerous occasions over the last few days and for much longer than usual.
Going to keep a close eye on him and our bank balance. Suspect he may try to raid the children’s pocket money accounts again when I am not looking. Must contact the building society and change the number of signatures needed so he can’t withdraw money without my permission.
I have always been very sceptical of Keith’s money making plans, but at the same time as supportive as I can be. After all, who can say whether or not any of his ideas will go on to make us a fortune?
I don’t like to blow my own trumpet, but my additions are much more interesting than Keith’s rambling gibberish.
You may be forgiven for thinking that Keith has plucked the idea of banning old people from driving cars completely at random. But he hasn’t.
In October, Keith was tootling along the road in his pride and joy, an old battered pick up truck, when Gladys the Knight, a villager in her twilight years (85 years young), decided to play ‘Chicken’ with him.
Chicken is a game played on a road heading into Llandaffr DH. There are two roads into the village and anyone who does not want to play can always use the other route. Delivery drivers have occasionally been unwilling participants as a couple of the villagers are a little short sighted.
It is a simple sport, involving driving your car straight at another car. The top speed allowed is 20 mph, thus avoiding unnecessary death. The first person to wimp out and crash into the hedge/ditch is the chicken.
A league table for ‘Chicken’ hangs proudly on the wall of The Lump. Gladys the Knight is top of the league – she has nerves of steel and suicidal tendencies. Keith is bottom. Barry is banned from playing because he is usually drunk and doesn’t have any car insurance.
The key to success in Chicken is to close your eyes and grip the steering wheel firmly in both hands.
Gladys hit the side of Keith’s truck as he careered into the ditch to avoid her.
This was a victory for Gladys, and she got out of her car, ran over to Keith and bellowed “who’s the daddy”, before performing a celebratory dance.
Keith was furious. Not only was he still bottom of the Llandaffr Chicken League, but he also had a big dent in the side of his truck caused by Gladys’s ancient Fiat Punto.
I suspect his idea for becoming an expert in car accidents caused by ‘demented’ old people may have stemmed from this incident.
Keith’s market research for Plan 11 consisted of going to The Lump, drinking three pints of Old Peculier, asking Barry if he fancied being rich, and talking to Bertha (the Big) about Weightwatchers. This was his focus group (see above).
Did he identify his market? No.
Did he find out how marketable his expertise would be? No.
Did he follow any of his own advice? No.
Market research is very important but Keith did absolutely bugger all.
This is not the first plan Keith had to make us rich.
Take Plan 10 for example. The “From Dating to Birth Plan”, is a good example of a distinct lack of market research leading to catastrophic failure.
Plan 10 was the product of yet another sleepless night, drinks in the pub with different people and a few loose ideas centred around vets, birthing techniques and doctors. The first part of the plan was a dating agency for doctors and vets.
Vets4doctors.co.uk was virtually guaranteed not to make us rich. How many vets and doctors are there in the world and who would be prepared to pay us £2,000 to meet someone else in one of the two professions? Who on earth ever heard of people dating on the basis of their profession, particularly vets and doctors?
Vets4doctors.co.uk attracted a lot of interesting characters with user names like “Doctor John” and “Farmer Ted” but made no introductions, mainly because no female doctors or vets registered with the site.
In order to try and boost sales, Keith persuaded Barry to register on the site as a woman, ‘Bareena Leffat’, but posted the wrong photograph. ‘Bareena’ had a bushy beard and was holding a pint of Old Peculier. ‘Farmer Ted’ immediately proposed to him/her.
The second part of the plan was to patent a birthing technique practised on sheep for use by midwives on pregnant women. The birthing technique plan was inspired by our local farmer, Willie the Smell, who stuck his hand up a pregnant ewe’s anus in order to instantly birth a lamb with a large head (it’s all in the fingers apparently).
Keith happened to be watching and wondered whether the ‘anal birth technique’ could be used to reduce the time spent in labour for pregnant women. He believed he had discovered a technique that could save the NHS millions.
Without any scientific investigations (I refused to allow him any experimental time involving my nether regions) he decided to proceed. A few nights later he started to develop “The David Technique Instant Birth Centres” and designed educational guides for doctors and midwives.
He actually went so far as looking into patenting the birth technique, but complained bitterly that every time he telephoned a patent agent to discuss the idea they just giggled a lot.
After realising he would not be able to prove that the technique worked or make a lot of money out of the idea unless he had considerably more than £200 to invest (his total budget for Plan 10 after I refused to let him remortgage the house), Keith gave up.
Will he ever learn? I doubt it. Keith is a ‘get up and go’ kind of person, but rarely with any thought or planning.