Business Plan For Luiz’s Home Bakery
Introduction
Small businesses are critical in all economies across the planet. Such countries as the United State comprise millions of such enterprises, which makes them the backbone of the economy (Better Accounting, 2020). Therefore, there is a growing interest in the subject of running and planning for small-scale firms, as well as the challenges that most of them face (FindLaw, 2018; Smallwood, 2018; Wabara, 2019). This paper presents a business plan for a home bakery, a small-scale family business specializing in baked products. The plan will be presented in the form of a case study where a real business idea is used. According to Duermyer (2020), the business of baked goods is increasingly growing in popularity. Most firms of this nature often operate from home where they can supply products either to consumers or to restaurants and local stores (Shain, 2021). The plan will cover several aspects of a business canvas model.
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Case Study: Luiz’s Home Bakery
Key Activities
A home bakery business comprises a few key activities, which can be summarized simply as producing a variety of baked products. The entrepreneur uses flour to produce such items as biscuits, bread, cakes, and pastry (Hughes, Vaiciurgis, and Grafenauer, 2020, p. 1). Therefore, it can be argued that a home bakery produced flour-based edible items for a large customer base. Baking is the overall term that describes the main activities. However, most family businesses are involved in multiple operations. In this case, the baker has to design, bake, market, and sell the products. Some studies indicate that there is a real possibility for home bakeries to make losses unless an ideal business model is chosen (Priya and Kaur, 2020, p. 7157). Innovation will also be part of the key activities of Luiz’s home bakery, which may include such aspects as customization and innovative product designs.
Customer Segments
Many businesses serve a broad clientele in an attempt to broaden their market base. However, a business must develop a good customer segmentation to help serve each customer base effectively. In literature, it has been established that competition across industries changes the priority for businesses from customer acquisition to customer retention (Christy et al., 2021, p. 1251). For a home bakery, the small-scale operations imply that the owner is more concerned with keeping all the loyal customers as opposed to expanding the business to serve more people. Customer segmentation can be defined as developing characteristics that unify a consumer base (An et al., 2018, p. 2). In other words, a segment comprises customers that have similar consumption behaviours and demographic characteristics. In a modern world comprising new and smart technologies, social networking is increasingly used as a tool and means of segmenting a customer base (Balestar, Grau-Carles, and Saiz, 2018, p. 408). Even small-scale businesses can find useful applications for social media and other technologies
For Luiz’s home bakery, a wide customer base is served despite each of the segments comprising only a few clients. The segmentation can be approached from different angles, including product-based and demographic-oriented segmentation. From a product-based segmentation, the business produces different commodities that can be sold to various consumers. There is a market for cakes, pastry, biscuits, and bread. The use of traditional recipes can also be a critical selling point, especially in a neighborhood with many elderly people or a young population that is enthusiastic about ancient recipes. However, a product-based segmentation simply involves producing a variety of items and marketing them to potential consumers.
Demographic segmentation is more effective since it helps in such efforts as the design and marketing of the products. Luiz’s home bakery targets children and adolescents with such treats as biscuits. These are cheap and delicious and should keep the younger population attracted to them. For the older population, functional products are designed and marketed since this population has different attractions than the younger ones. Therefore, birthday and wedding cakes can be customized to suit the needs of each customer. Fewer orders for this product category are made, which means customization is possible