What Professional Business Plan Writers Don’t Want You to Know About Market Research

Professional Business Plan Writers are some of the most helpful people you will ever interact with when it comes to preparing your business for launch and/or seeking funding. Yet they will often keep the best secrets to themselves. It is, after all, what keeps them in business. Some of their best kept secrets are related to market research.

Many primary research methods you can setup yourself – Market research can be broken down in a number of ways. One way is to look at the source of information. Professional business plan writers will explain that there is primary and secondary research.

Primary market research is getting information directly from the source. In most cases, this means your customers or prospective customers. It is typically collected through observation, surveys, in-depth interviews, or mystery shopping.

Professional business plan writers won’t tell you that you can’t do it. They’ll just offer to do it for you! In many instances, you may prefer this if you have the money. It can be difficult to setup correctly and, more importantly, it can be tricky to gather meaningful insights from the information that you collect. However, you absolutely can conduct primary Market Research on your own if you have the time, patience, and know-how.

Industry data (in most cases) is available to everyone – Secondary market research is information that has already been gathered and published by others. Its value is typically in how it is organized and that – in some cases – insights are available with it. What professional business plan writers won’t always share is that you can access most of this information yourself.

There is a catch, however. Many of the top secondary market research sites, such as IBIS World and Statista, come at a price. Often a steep price. Typically, it requires a hefty annual subscription. Though on some sites you can pay for individual reports. Without full access though, its hard to know if other reports may be more appropriate.

There are also free sources, such as governmental organization websites like U.S Bureau of Labor statistics. While the information found on these free sites is helpful, it often isn’t enough to give you a whole picture or answer all your market research questions.

It guides the entire business plan – Whether you conduct the market research or the professional business plan writers you hire do it, the extent to which it is used will be the same. Part of the reason professional Business Plan Writers like to do the market research – or have someone else in their firm do it – is because of how vital it is to the entire plan.

It will impact everything from labor costs and hiring plans to your marketing strategy. In nearly every section the information you learn from market research will guide that part of your plan in some way. This means that if you provide the market research, as long as it is accurate and thorough, you are already giving professional business plan writers a great deal of the information they need to write your entire plan.