Organize Your Work Space: Video Tutorial
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Organize Your Work Space: Tutorial Handout
Business Planner’s RoadMap Organize Your Work Space
As you research your market, you will accumulate information, articles, reports, magazines, newspaper clips, and other assorted documents. If you have a computer, you will also gather a lot of the information in digital format.
Action
Get organized. Create places to store your hard-earned market research information, whether electronic or hard copy.
- Determine where you will work. Determine where to locate your work and storage areas. Physically, this means setting up an efficient work area and figuring out where to store your books and files. Digitally, determine where you will locate your business plan and create a main folder called My Business Planning Project.
- Create your hard file storage area. Set up a place for your business planning project in your file cabinet or file storage box. At a minimum, begin with one folder for your business plan and one for market research documents. Use the categories listed under item three as a starting point for your filing system.
- Create your digital business planning folder. Set up a folder for your business planning project on your computer. At a minimum, begin with one folder for your business plan and one for market research documents. Your list of folders will grow as you begin to develop different Elements of your business plan and Appendices. The table below has some ideas to get you started.
- Set up a binder for market research documents. Whether or not you gather the market research documents digitally, you may find it easier to read them in hard copy. This is one way to organize the documents so they are easy to locate for reviewing purposes. If you prefer, you can simply store these hard copy printouts in a file folder as indicated previously for the digital counterparts. Depending on how many of this type of document you collect, you may wish to insert a set of tabs to make it easier to source the information.
- Organize a bookshelf. If appropriate, you may also wish to make space available for books related to your business studies and planning.
