The Idea
Since you want to create a cash flow as soon as possible, you have already determined your skill set, came up with an idea, and determined that it is financially feasible. The idea section of your business plan should only be one sentence. The best way to approach it is from the customer's point of view. Ask yourself, 'What is the experience I want my customer or client to have?'
Our music instructor wrote that her concept was to 'create an opportunity to children and adults to experience the satisfaction of creating music in a one-on-one learning environment.'
Our tennis pro wrote that his concept was to 'provide a service where adults could come together in a social environment to learn tennis and encourage a healthy lifestyle.'
For this website, my concept was to 'create a platform where people desiring to be in business for themselves could learn the real world information they need to reach their goals and the tools to get there.'
As you can see, your statement doesn't have to be anything quotable for eternity. I simple states who your market is and what they are going to experience doing business with you.
The Market
As we discussed in the section on brainstorming for ideas, your market needs to consist of an unmet need or provide a product/service in a unique way. How the market evolved for this web site is probably a good example of what I am are trying to explain. I've have always enjoyed the education field and teaching, but not in the traditional organizations and schools. Since I'm also a computer junkie, I wanted a way to combine the two, help people and make a living doing it.
An educational web site was the logical way to go and I had the skills to do it: teacher, management, web designer, writer. There were plenty of similar businesses to model mine on and there are some very good ones. What I saw though, it that practically all of them dealt in teaching Internet marketing and as I started building the web site, I saw that it would be very hard to enter the market against the established players that had more resources than I did. Something was still missing.
During some seasonal work that I was doing, I ended up in a situation where I was increasingly helping small businesspeople straighten out the mess they had made in starting up their businesses. The mistakes included improperly setting up the legal structure for their business, having no accounting system in place (everything thrown in a box), and mixing their personal & business funds together. These were not the Internet gurus. These were the plumbers, painters, landscapers, contractors, and small shop owners. They consistently asked me where they could go to learn the type of information that I was telling them.
I had nowhere to send them. They didn't have the time to go to college to learn business. Besides, that was not the type of real world education they needed. Nor could most of them afford the cost or the time for that type of education. I had found my unmet need and unique twist. There are thousands of people out there who need an affordable way to learn basic business concepts in a way that fits their schedules for the non-internet world. This also defined the courses that I needed to write and from what perspective.
In considering your market, they need to address three basic points. You need to look describe the general state of your market, along with its opportunities and threats. You need to look at your competition, what they've done in the past and are doing now. You need to look at the current trends in the market. You may not want to open a CD music store when everyone is moving to digital downloads.