Business Plan - CHARGED

The business plan module is designed to challenge both our creativity and formal skillsets to showcase and pitch our proposed business. We were tasked with creating a product or service and provide the business objectives & milestones, 2-year financial forecast, unique selling points, target market, time plan and SWOT analysis. The portfolio below shows the development of my business plan ‘CHARGED’, how I came about creating an electric skateboard brand and the process of creating a clear and concise business plan ready to pitch in semester 1, week 12.

Initially, I struggled to brainstorm ideas for a suitable product or service since most products have either been created or have already succeeded and saturated the market. Therefore, I utilised the padlet board (as pictured below) created by our lecturer and viewed the links to various resources to help in the brainstorm stage of the plan. Adam Grant presents a ted talk on original thinking where he states "It's much easier to improve on somebody else's Idea than to create something new from scratch. So the lesson I learned is that to be original you don't have to be first, you just have to be different and better" (TED, 2016). With this in mind, I decided rather than creating a completely new, innovative product, it would be more beneficial from my standpoint to improve upon an already existing product or service. To reinforce this mindset, Simon Sinek reiterates how companies, such as Apple, expand and market their products to show why their products will benefit the market rather than focusing on what products to make.

After reviewing these two clips I brainstormed a few thoughts and realised how I find it difficult in a place like Winchester to get to and from university or the town centre without paying for parking or buses every time I need to go somewhere. I respect towns and cities should pedestrianise a lot of areas within town and charge certain parking zones to encourage people to walk. However, as a student with limited time due to full-time university and part-time job commitments, I find it increasingly difficult to spend 30 minutes, one hour or even 2 hours out of each day/weekend to get myself to a place I need to be. Therefore, I sought to develop upon an Idea which I believe would benefit myself massively but also other students or commuters of a similar status to get themselves to places with ease and effectively at no cost short term.

My business plan proposal is to develop an electric powered skateboard/board that can be easily used by any individual no matter their skill level of balance and ability to ride a skateboard. The electric skateboard is an area which hasn't been fully developed to be easily accessible to the public in the same way scooters have been. My response to this is to develop a board with a clear brand identity, ease of use, affordable and better portability than a scooter to establish an incredibly strong market share in the PLEV (Personal Light Electric Vehicle) market. The reasoning behind the board instead of a scooter is because I believe there is a gap in PLEV market however the electric scooter segment of the market has been severely saturated over the years.

After establishing a strong proposal, I began brainstorming a few brand names and sketching numerous logos to start developing the brand and the product. After noting several brand names, I finalised on ‘CHARGED’ due to its simplicity, relationship to the product, and is similar to the well-known US brand called ‘BOOSTED’ as explained further in my research. The previous brand names I felt didn’t quite deliver why this product would be beneficial for the users; whereas, ‘CHARGED’ signifies electricity which links to sustainable resources and reliability since the past tense implies the board is fully charged and ready to go whatever the scenario.

Now that I have a brand name, identity, and a set of objectives and milestones for the brand, I began looking into logo designs and tutorials to create a strong set of brand guidelines. Below is one of the YouTube videos which I found incredibly helpful to watch as he highlights how to brainstorm initial ideas and style for the logo as well as the colours to select. Gary Simon also showcases how he takes these initial sketches and creates them in illustrator which is a software I am not completely proficient in.

After following this tutorial, I began sketching some initial logo designs onto a sketchbook and developing each style as I progress. To begin with, I tried to experiment using the basic symbols and circuit style of designs to portray a logo but found this to be ineffective at portraying the brand I was going for. Next, I sketched a few lightning/electric symbols in the form of circuits and realised that the lightning symbol was the right form factor to develop. Now that I had established that the lightning symbol was appropriate, I tried to find links between the symbol and the product similarly to how Gary does in his tutorial. I sketched the centre of the symbol to illustrate a road or path where my product will most likely be used.

For the final development, I decided to separate the symbol into 3 components to improve the aesthetics whilst decreasing the complexity of the design. This allowed me to better illustrate the central road illustration but also meant that the left and right triangles looked like arrows pointing forward and backwards which again will link to my product effectively as the skateboard will feature a remote with a forward and backwards button. Now that I had created the final logo and incorporated it into the brand name as seen below, I took the designs into illustrator to develop the brand guidelines. If you would like to download a PDF copy of the brand guideline, click here.

Once we had completed our pitch, the cohort was required to fill in a section of the padlet board to give us feedback on the pitch and general idea/presentation of that idea. My feedback was as follows:

• Cool idea, maybe a sketch of the product would of helped the delivery, but there is structure to the business and once allowed, I could see this being popular in Winchester
• Professional looking presentation - very consistent, and surprisingly engaging slides considering the lack of visuals. Great idea, I would buy this product if I had the balance for it.
• UK sales will flop if new legal provisions aren't made for PLEVs in the next few years. Could peruse overseas sales if that is the case though.
• Good presentation and logo, some sketches would be nice
• Well-developed brand and concept. More visuals especially based around product design would have been a great addition
• The background made it hard to read some of the text. I can see this being a very interesting product especially in citys where parking is harder like you mentioned.
• Good idea which is researched well and presented nicely. would be good to see some visuals of the product

It is clear from the feedback received that in future pitches more visual are needed around the product to deliver a better experience for the audience and potential investors. Also, as mentioned in the business plan report, there are strict laws around the use of PLEV’s on public areas which are due to be renewed in June 2022 but will need further research to be confident that these laws will be lifted. However, in general, the audience feels the presentation was good and the research was well presented thus far.

To conclude the module, we were required as stated in the brief for this topic, to present a business plan outline. A resource I often refer to when creating this business plan was the princes trust pack which detailed how to break your idea and business into headings and subheadings and then explained some key points to establish in your plan to essentially tick of the criteria of a successful business plan. Below is an image showing you a printed copy of the pack, but if you would like to download the pack, click here.

Utilising this pack and further research around constructing and formatting a report helped to create a formal and easily followed business plan which can be downloaded by clicking here. Detailed in this plan is the requirements detailed in the brief and an in-depth discussion of each component. Also, at the end of this report, a 2-year financial forecast is shown to present our expected streams of revenue and expenses which can be downloaded by clicking here.

The main challenge within this module was the difficulty to get started and create an idea that was original. This was quickly resolved through researching into ted talks and original thinkers to get an idea for how to brainstorm and create a product/service. The next challenge faced was creating a 2-year financial forecast that featured supporting evidence to back the expected figures and provide estimations on product manufacturing expenses without a final design to analyse the individual components and create a more precise forecast. Initial research into existing e-skateboards and material costs/RRP’s provides a generic expectation; however, next time I would look to research further into a specific existing product and try to discover the costs for this product or potentially look at contacting manufacturers regarding our product through having some developed sketches to refer to when requesting a quote.