His Portrait Business Plan

As part of my small brother's grade 11 business studies assignment, he was asked to write about a business idea. He asked me to print this out so that he can submit to his teacher tomorrow. Before printing it out, I had a read through and figured this could be a start of something good. I should keep this online in case he needs to re-visit this in 10 years time.

Business idea

The business idea that I have in mind is drawing people’s portrait. I chose this idea because I am good at it and I really like drawing. Also, because I have some experience in this line of work. It’s more of a service rather than a product. The aim of the business is to provide portrait art service to high end clients.  All I really need is a high quality reference picture from the existing or potential clients and the drawing stationery .These stationery include; graphite pencils, an eraser, a ruler, lighting, work space and sketch pad or canvas. Upon request from the clients, I will use these stationery to create a copy of the reference picture. It usually takes three days to finish a portrait of A4 size. The target market of this business is individuals who are interested in getting a pencil art portrait and, if requested, I can do portraits of public figures.

Business plan

Executive Summary

It really is just a side business I’m going to do to earn extra cash when I’m in school so I imagine it would be small. The objective of the business is to provide quality and realistic pencil portrait art service to those who are interested.

Operating plan

The business would be small so there is no need for a lot of people involved. It’s pretty much a one-man job but I still need someone to do the advertising and marketing for me so I decided to make one of my friends my partner because he is charismatic and good with people. The client will go to my partner to place a request for his/her portrait and they must be able to provide a high quality reference picture. My partner will then convey the request and the reference picture to me and I’ll start working on the portrait. Usually it takes about three days to finish a portrait. After finishing the portrait, I will hand the finished portrait to my partner who will then give it to the client upon receiving the full payment of the work.

Financial plan

The capital of the business will be only around K20.00 which will come from my own savings. Since I already have much of what I need to draw portraits, most of which were donated to the business by my friends, the capital is small. My partner and I decided that we will split the profit equally between us and the rest will go to the items needed for another portrait. The price of one A4 size portrait is K10.00. I can do two portraits during school days and another two during weekend so that’s four portraits in one week. This means that we can make a total of K40.00 in a week. The payment from clients should be done upon receiving their portrait. If we make enough we might look into doing A3 portraits in the future. 

Marketing plan

The business will be advertised verbally and through social media. It’s a good thing I already have existing clients because they can spread the word to their friends. I’m working on creating a page for the business online where clients can place requests and give their reference photos to me which is much easier and faster. We can also create small posters for the business and hand out flyers.

Once the word is out I’m sure people will be interested to try it out. We’re starting small but I hope we’ll continue to grow. I’m glad that I can use my talent to make others happy. As the saying goes we must ‘make the best out of what (we) have’.