6.1: Why It Matters- Reports

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Why learn to write business reports?

You’ve just come home from your day at work as a produce manager at a local grocery store. As you sort through your mail (bills to pay, items to read later, and junk to recycle now), you come across postcards from two different meal kit services, where they send a box of ingredients with recipes to homes. The home cook then follows a recipe for a unique meal with a few special ingredients without having to go to the store for anything.

When you go in to work the next day, you plan to ask the owner about these services. How hard would it be to package something just like that in this store?

The owner of the store thinks your idea has some merit, but isn’t sure how many customers might try it, what they would be willing to pay, or how much it might cost for a simple store in a small town like this. He asks you to put together some information that lays all of this out. He wants to think about it and review it with a couple of business friends that he bounces new store ideas off of.

This is your first time to use a business report in a real life business circumstance, not a school assignment. You start to do what you were trained to do in thinking about this report as an internal proposal. The first step is to set up the exact item or problem statement to research. With that, you can do the research needed to answer the questions and determine how to share your results in an orderly fashion.