Business Plan for Blue Lotus Bhakti

Executive Summary
Blue Lotus Bhakti is an online web site development and computer consulting business with an emphasis on Bhakti Yoga, which is a devotional yoga and healing practice.  The web site development side of the business is geared toward artists, mystics and healers.  There are no direct competitors in this market, which makes Blue Lotus Bhakti unique.  It will pull from other web site developers based on its relationship in the yoga and holistic health communities.  The marketing plan is to advertise in spiritual, holistic health and online yoga communities as well as use targeted online advertising such as Google AdWords and blogs.  The operations of the business are carried out by the sole proprietor, Becky Westbrook and Blue Lotus Bhakti is expected to make a profit in its first year.

Description of Business
The name of the business is Blue Lotus Bhakti.  The business is a sole proprietorship and its presence exists online only.  It offers web site development, computer consulting and information on Bhakti Yoga.  The owner is Becky Westbrook.  Until 2004, Becky was a Senior Network Engineer in Virginia and has extensive hands on experience with computers, servers, switches, routers, firewalls, and local and wide area networks.  In 2004, she shifted from the corporate sector to the non-profit sector, learned web design on her own and began a consulting business.  In 2006, Becky joined a non-profit computer services organization and provided onsite and remote data network support and consulting.  In 2007, Becky used Bhakti Yoga to heal an eight and a half year chronic health condition and decided to offer that information to others via her business as well as focusing her web site skills on the artist, healer and mystic communities to provide them services they need.  In 2008, Becky resigned from her non-profit agency and went back to school full time, combining web development with religious studies and consciousness studies.

Vision Statement:  Within five years, Blue Lotus Bhakti will be the premier Bhakti Yoga web site on the Internet offering healing eBooks and seminars online, web site development for artists, mystics and healers and will be generating revenues of $250,000 per year.  It will become internationally known with clients all over the globe.

Mission Statement:  Blue Lotus Bhakti will combine the areas of technical consulting with the holistic medicine, art and yoga communities.  It will begin to make a profit immediately with minimum startup costs.  This online focus of the business will allow the proprietor to travel freely around the world making her living wherever there is an Internet connection.  The business already owns the resources it needs to begin.

The holistic health fields and the yoga communities are growing at a high rate and the markets are fragmented and it’s hard for consumers to find consolidated information.  The web offers the small practitioner or artist access to vast amounts of consumers and a very low cost of entry, yet very few of these practitioners are tech savvy and able to capitalize on it.  By being fluent in the language and customs of both the technical side and the holistic communities, Blue Lotus Bhakti intends to make it easy for the practitioners to create a web presence and reach their intended audience.  Blue Lotus Bhakti has a strong sense of graphic design that supports that goal.

In addition, Blue Lotus Bhakti is interested in educating people about the inherent healing power within themselves by using Bhakti Yoga and sound healing and will provide a web presence with links and access to download healing workshops and seminars.

There are risks associated with combining spirituality and business.  Consumers who practice a particular faith may perceive it as divisive or be turned away.  Blue Lotus Bhakti is committed to bringing different communities together and being inclusive, not divisive.  The target audience is aligned with the principle that all paths are honoured.

Analysis of Competitors
Blue Lotus Bhakti does not have any direct competitors offering both Bhakti Yoga resources and computer consulting services or web development.  This differentiates them from the other web development and computer support sites on the web and gives them the advantage in the holistic health and yoga communities.  The two main competitors are Third Eye Studio at http://www.checkoutmysiteonline.com/ and wholistic web site design at http://www.wholisticwebdesign.ca/.  Both of these companies offer web site design services with a holistic or spiritual focus.

Third Eye Studio does not have the strong technical support background that Blue Lotus Bhakti does and its own web site is annoying to use.  wholistic web site design seems to be more focused on the graphical design than the technical aspects of support and marketing.  Both of these competitors focus solely on their portfolios of client sites and do not offer resources of their own in the holistic communities they serve.

A distant competitor is http://openconcept.ca/.  Its portfolio contains social justice and environmental sites and focuses on non-profits, not artists, mystics and healers.  There is overlap in those markets, as the consumers are driven by similar values and yet they are distinct markets.  Blue Lotus Bhakti is also available to travel anywhere in the world to meet with clients and plans to serve a global constituency.

Marketing Plan
Blue Lotus Bhakti has a web site and will have a blog on yogamates.com, the premier yoga community online.  Business cards are posted in local co-ops and New Thought spiritual centers around Seattle.  BLB will also purchase Google Adwords. To raise awareness of their offerings, BLB will post to local and worldwide email newslists and blogs about upcoming events with links to the web site

Operations Plan
Blue Lotus Bhakti has a web site hosted on Host Papa and a domain name registered with godaddy.com.  Rebecca Westbrook is the sole proprietor and only employee.  She will combine the existing Westbecks consulting web site, http://www.westbecks.com with the Blue Lotus Bhakti web site and Everything Bhakti! subdomain, http://www.bluelotusbhakti.com/EverythingBhakti and handle the marketing and technical work

Security Plan
Security is the most important component of an e-commerce web site.  If customers are not confident their private information, identity and data is secure, they will not use the site.  Necessity dictates that you only gather that information from your customers that you absolutely need to in order to complete the transaction.  Privacy is a big issue among e-commerce site users and they will avoid your site if you gather unnecessary personally identifying information from them.

Secrecy is an important part of security.  Secure Socket Layers, or SSL, encrypt the information on a page between the server and the customer so that the sensitive information in the transaction, such as the credit card number, remains secret.  HTTPS, or HTTP over Secure Socket Layers, accomplishes this.  Vendors such as Microsoft, Netscape, MasterCard and Visa have been promoting secure electronic transaction protocol or SET as a way of using public and private keys shared between the customer, merchant, and customer’s bank.  (SearchFinancialSecurity.com, 2008)

Integrity is ensuring that the customers’ data is correct and valid and that each transaction stays linked with the proper customer.  Using third party shopping cart and payment processing entities with a proven track record of security and integrity is advisable for maintaining integrity.

Firewalls are an important part of ecommerce security and can be software or hardware based.  They only allow communication between authorized connections on specific ports.  They maintain session information over the length of the entire transaction, so that a different computer using a different IP address cannot hijack a transaction after the credit card number has been entered and steal that information.  They also prevent unauthorized access to the web site itself so that hackers cannot write malicious code on the web site.

Blue Lotus Bhakti will implement user ids and passwords for authentication and authorization. They will create a secure page that allows the users to create an account by using their email address as their user ID and select their own password.  They will use an .htaccess file that governs who is allowed to access the downloadable files.

Blue Lotus Bhakti will purchase an SSL certificate for encryption.  Godaddy.com offers a standard SSL certificate for $14.99 per year.  This is the lowest cost third party issued SSL certificate available.  They will use HTTPS for any pages that have user ID and password or credit card information on them.

Blue Lotus Bhakti will use a transaction tracking mechanism to account for all the transactions on the site for accounting purposes.  There are many prewritten PHP scripts that interact with databases to handle this, there is no need to bring the authoring of this in-house. 

Blue Lotus Bhakti plans to use PayPal to process all monetary transactions.  PayPal has a proven track record of security and customer recognition.

At the ISP level, Blue Lotus Bhakti will implement a tool called leech protection that prevents users from giving out their password to protected areas of the web site and disables any account with a compromised password.  They will use the ISP's SSL tools for generating private keys and certificate signing requests to send to procure my Godaddy.com SSL certificate.

Blue Lotus Bhakti will include graphics in very prominent places on all web pages indicating the security measures and trust authorities that secure the pages, so that the users will be confident their data is safe.

SearchFinancialSecurity.com (2007). What is Secure Electronic Transaction? - a definition from Whatis.com. Retrieved August 26, 2008 from http://searchfinancialsecurity.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid185_gci214194,00.html

Financing Plan
There is no financing plan currently in place.  Blue Lotus Bhakti has been self-sustaining as a side interest and should continue to do so as a full time venture as it’s marketed.  The projected revenue in the first year is $72,000 with expenses and taxes of $70,500 leaving a profit of 1,500.  The projected first year balance sheet is attached.