How to Write a Business Plan for an Educational Institution
Setting up an educational institution – no matter how small or how big it is – is no mean task. You need to have a solid business plan to build its infrastructure, attract more students, bring down attrition of the faculty and staff, choose the programmes you’ll offer, and cut down on operational costs to make it a success. In this article, we will discuss a few tips to write such a business plan for Educational Institution.
Business and management studies include how to make a business plan as a guide to starting and running a business, and expanding it as required. Financial partners and investors also look at the business plan to understand:
- What is your education business idea?
- Who are the target customers or students of the institution and what is the size of the market for the institution or course?
- Which other educational institutions are already in the market and how they are positioned there?
- What are the business resources you’ll need? An educational institute, for example, will need classrooms, books, equipment, and teachers besides several other things.
- How will you do marketing of your institution? Here, you’ll have to brainstorm about the right place where your target customers hang out, promotion tactics, and marketing costs for different strategies you’ll use.
The business plan for an education institute also specifies the premises and types of equipment it will need along with projections of the cash flow, profit and loss accounts, and calculating when you expect your business to break-even.
Business plan assignment help experts may help you write a customized plan for your specific education business if you provide them the right answers to above questions. Here are some business plan samples for you:
Writing a Business Plan for a Private Tuition Class
The market for private tutoring or educational learning centres is growing. The global industry analysts expect it to grow into a $227.2 billion industry by 2022. Before you set about writing a business plan for this small unit of the education industry, you’ll first need to decide whether you want to start your independent business or buy a franchise of an established brand.
You’ll also need to evaluate the competition in the area where you want to open up your centre and make financial forecasts about how your business will grow. You’ll also have to decide whether you want to take a loan where you’ll have to return the money at some point of time or attract investors with whom you’ll have to share your profits.
You’ll also have to define the services of your educational learning centre and the age of the kids you would like enrolled in your institution. This, in turn, will decide whether you need a play area or a computer lab first. If you are catering to smaller children, you’ll perhaps want to open your learning centre close to a residential area and have more open space. For school-going kids, you may want to be situated near a school and have more rooms for students of different classes.
You also need to hire certified teachers or tutors as it helps in establishing the credibility of your learning centre. Besides, you’ll have to actually list out all that you need – from books, chalkboards and educational toys to computers, software, and Educational Institution videos. You will also need desks and chairs. A franchise option generally means that you’ll be given a list of material you need but if you are starting your own business, you need to be the one to decide what you need to buy or hire according to your business requirements.
Smart marketing strategies become a deciding factor in any business. You may offer introductory prices or promotional offers to attract more students. Newspaper, radio and TV ads along with online ads with geographical limitations can also be used.
Writing a Business Plan for bigger institutions
Larger institutions, like universities, polytechnics, and colleges, also need to have a corporate strategy and a business plan in place to succeed.
All institutions need to define their short-term goals (to be achieved in next 1-2 years) and long-term goals (to be achieved in next 5-10 years). The short-term goals may be about increasing the number of students, improve or add new infrastructure, start new academic programmes (for short or long duration), reduce the operational costs of the institution, and enhance the efficiency level of the staff and faculty and stem their attrition rates.
The long-term goals may include carrying out the SWOT analysis of the institution, offer unique and popular courses, attract the best talent, set up world-class infrastructure, promote academic research, and make the institute profitable and deploy funds judiciously.
To achieve these goals, you’ll first have to analyse the existing challenges of your college or university. Do you have good research infrastructure and facilities and what kind of research publications you’ve seen recently? Do you attract good talent and retain it too? Do you have sufficient sources of revenue and enough funds to meet your requirements and future goals?
Once you know your existing situation well, you’ll then need to find solutions to the issues you are facing. You’ll need to figure out the cost of all programmes you offer, how to make them profitable, and how you can tweak them to reduce the expenses. You might even want to discontinue a few programmes that have no takers and introduce in-demand courses instead.
Business planning experts worldwide offer online help to college students looking for assignment as well as new and existing entrepreneurs in the field of education. You may contact them for more help.
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