What products and services is your business?

Products and Services
In this section of the business Plan you discuss the products and services that you will be selling. Part of the information that will be included in this section is for the benefit of outside readers who may not be familiar with your business. Part of the information will be useful to you, therefore research and analysis will force you to examine your offerings vis-à-vis your competitors.
Description of products and/or servicesExplain what it is that you are selling. Be specific. The reader should be given more than just a vague idea about your products and /or services. Obviously, some products and services will require much less explanation than others. If you have invented a piece of equipment that will be used for scientific oil exploration, you will need to provide the reader with many details. On the other hand, if you will sell your services as a book keeping firm, you may need to do little more that list the services that you will provide. A pitfall that you should be careful to avoid in this section is making the assumption that the reader can easily understand your products or services without you providing sufficient detail and description.
In addition to listing and describing your products and services, you should note any applications or uses of your products that are not readily apparent to the reader. For instance, if you will limit the sales of your book keeping services to retail businesses, that fact should be included in this section.
Status of the products and/or servicesAre your products and/or services available for sale now? If not, what needs to be done to develop them? If you are selling a product, does it require more design work? More research and development? Have you actually produced one or more completed products? If you are selling a service, do you presently have the skills and technical capability to provide it? If not, what needs to be done? If additional inputs are required before your products or services can be sold, indicate the amount of time that you will need to complete the process.
Proprietary positionDo your products and/or services have any competitive advantages because of patents, copyrights, trademarks, franchise or dealership rights and the like? If so, explain the advantages and state how long this proprietary position is likely to last.
You should state any other factors that give you a competitive advantage, even though the advantage is not protected by law or by contractual agreement. Examples might be special processes or equipment that competitors would be unlikely to duplicate. Perhaps you have special skills or knowledge which would not be easily obtainable by the competition. For instance, employing the best craftsman in the state may give you an unbeatable advantage over competitors who lack such a skilled person. On the other hand, if you have none of these, don’t make up something that sounds proprietary if it really is not.
Comparison to competitive products and/or servicesIdentify those products and /or services which you think will be competing with yours. These may be similar products and /or services or they may be products and /or services which, although quite different, can be substituted for yours. An example of the letter is a business which sells copying machines to firms. Their copying machine competes not only against other copying machines, but also against carbon paper and copying centers.
Once you have identified the competing products (If the number is large, screen out all but the direct competitors), compare yours against the competition. List the advantages and the disadvantages of your vis-à-vis your competition. Later, when you do your market research, you will probably want to address this question again and revise this section accordingly.
After making the comparison, state the conclusions that you draw from it. Are your products and/or services likely to compete effectively? If so, explain why you feel this is so. If not, decide what changes will be made; make the necessary changes and do another comparison. When the results of the comparison are satisfactory, revise this section of the Business Plan to reflect that.
Is your product or service the best of its kind in the market place? This does not necessarily mean the most expensive, but are there ways in which you could improve it, possibly without increasing its price? Do you try, all the time, to make what you sell the best?