Environmental Scan

Question 1

The business plan is a tool to help you find and explore opportunities.

Students at any level of education can use the concept of preparing a business plan as a method of exploring all kinds of ideas for starting a business. It is merely a series of questions that lead you to think about the requirements and the possibilities of any kind of business. Until you start to ask these questions, you aren’t able to visualize the details necessary to be successful in a business.

There are many different approaches to writing a business plan, some more complex than others. But the basic components of a business plan can be organized as follows:

* providing a description of the business,

* choosing the best marketing strategy,

* identifying the management plan, and

* analyzing the finances needed to start the business and make it successful.

Question 2

Submit an environmental scan of the company within the chosen market domain using the PEST format. This analysis will be written viewing the company from the outside to the inside. This assessment will consider the knowledge gained from the SWOT analysis generated in Milestone Two and assess the company’s competitive readiness from external dimensions, extending to the global marketplace. The scan will include the external political, economic/financial, sociopolitical, and technological trends for a given market environment and a potential market.