- You may be wondering what a business plan is.
I know when I was in music school
that never came up in any of the classes that I was taking.
Working with the string quartet
that I worked with many, many years ago,
we did set up a business plan of sorts.
We decided that we wanted to work together.
We all met here at the Shepherd School.
We set some goals,
and basically what a business plan needs to function
is you'll need to include that history of your organization
that I spoke about earlier.
You need a budget for the projects that you propose to do.
And the overall structure that those things right under
is a mission statement and some objectives
that fall underneath your goals.
For my string quartet, we decided that we wanted
to participate in a touring artist program
in North Carolina.
We made a small business plan for that.
The requirements for it was a three week residency,
which we were happy to go and explore.
We set up a string quartet series of concerts in a region,
so we included that in our plan
that we would have x number of concerts
in a certain period of days,
and that we would go into the schools that in every city
that we were gonna be playing a concert in,
and also do what basically turned out
to be a young audience's program.
So if you're getting the idea here,
we're doing what I did in my business plan
is what you do everyday,
but you're writing it down and listing it up on a document
that you'll be able to produce to someone
if you're having to talk about your organization.
You should know that prior to submitting our grant,
we knew exactly what everything was going to cost.
We'd already made our contacts with the individuals
who would be helping us make our sojourn
through the North Carolina regions we were going to.
We knew exactly where we were going to go,
and we'd negotiated the fees for our contracts.