Learn how to write the Products and Services section of a business plan as a narrative paragraph, not a chart. The speaker uses a healthy pizza startup to show why some products need market training, like Apple did with the iPad, and what details to include: product description, manufacturing, delivery, and supplier relationships.
All right, let's talk about the products and services section of your business plan. So let's get started. So first of all, I've given you another chart here. I would not write this section as a chart. This chart is really just to kind of help you organize your thoughts. You want to write this as a page narrative, so write it as a paragraph. Don't just fill in this chart. This is to give you a good idea of the kinds of things that should be in here. Okay. So if you're struggling to write this stuff, write, you know, three or so sentences per every one of these lines and then go back and rewrite it all as a paragraph or as multiple paragraphs. This chart will just kind of help you get started. That being said, let's talk about the main things that should go in here. I'm going to augment this a little bit. Start with outline of products and services. So that would be this and this and this kind of the first three things here. So we've already talked about our idea. Our idea is healthy pizza that is available by the slice. This idea is going to be hard going forward. I'm thinking maybe I should just refilm this whole thing and do this. Not such a weird idea. But I am committed to this bit, so I'm going to stick with it for now. We'll see. And the reason I'm saying that it's going to be hard is because I don't know a lot about the food service industry, but that's okay. And it's a weird idea. And the reason it's a weird idea, and let me just point this out, is that it falls into this category. And this doesn't have anything to do with the business plan. But I'm just going to tell you anyway because this is something you should know. It falls into this category of business that we consider to to be training the market is what it is. Which is to say that this is something that doesn't currently exist. And in order for it to be successful, we have to find a market for it and then we have to train that market. Meaning there are people don't know that they want this. We have to convince them that they want it, which is difficult thing to do. There are some companies that do it really well. The most famous is Apple. Apple is famous for training the market. They can make a new thing like an iPad and they can say, look, you didn't know you needed this in your life, but you do. And they're, they're really good at it. And now everybody wants an iPad because it's there. And Apple has convinced them that they need it in their life. And a whole bunch of other companies have come along and said we make iPad like things, tablet computers. So this idea of healthy pizza by the slice is something where I'm going to have to train the market to convince them that pizza can be a health food. Well, that's the big, the big thing that I'm going to have to train them. So it's tricky. It's not insurmountable. If you're in a field where you're going to have to retrain the market, that's okay. It's not. It doesn't mean you should stay away from it. It just means it's not the easiest thing to do. So. But let's press on. So product service idea, we're going to elaborate on that a little bit more. I'm not going to write out a whole thing for this, but basically what we want to do here is go a little bit deeper than we did up here, right? We're drilling deeper and deeper and deeper. So we want to go more specifics. We want to talk about how is our product manufactured? How are we getting it to customers? Is there. Do we have relationships with suppliers already? These are all things that we can fit into these first three. What suppliers are we going to use? Name, drop them. Do we have partners that can help us? That's stuff that can kind of go down here. Products and delivery suppliers. So some of this bounces all over. But those are the main things we want to get out of. This section is. Let me bullet that out one more time. Are we going to make it? How are we going to get it to customers? Do we have relationships with suppliers? Name those suppliers. Do we have relationships with manufacturers? If we need them, name those manufacturers. Do we have any partners that can be of use to us? Name those partners. And that's about it. That should get us kind of everything we need on a surface level. But there's a couple other things we want to talk about in our narrative here that isn't super well defined by this chart. So let's go to a new video. Let's talk about some of these other things that we should include in this paragraph or in this page.
