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Starting a Small Business and Writing a Business Plan

If you want to have your own business you should follow a few important tips. Don’t start a new business without a business plan. This is one of the most common mistakes. Without a good plan it’s impossible to create a successful business. Remember that your main goal is to make money. Think who would be interested to buy your products or services. Make a plan for advertising your business. This is the first step to achieve your goal. 

You business plan should include the capital you have for advertising and for the other costs. The best thing is o have the investment money from before. If a bank will loan you the money than calculate how much you need every month for it. 

Make a list with all the expenses you will have and try to calculate what you would have to earn to pay them. Try to make realistic goals. If you get to the conclusion that you will have difficulties paying your bills you should reconsider. May be you need to open a smaller business. 

To be able to make a realistic business plan you could ask other people with experience. Try to find someone with the same type of business. Ask him how much profit can he make and if it’s possible to pay his bills in time. 

Show your business plan to your accountant. He might help you make some changes. Keep in mind that in any business there is a risk. The smartest thing is to make that risk as small as possible.

For a good business plan you also need the ability to anticipate change. Do your best to adapt your business to the client’s needs. You initial business plan should be written with a pen. This way you can make changes or add new things.

To understand your prospective business you can try to work for someone else for a few months. Only after that you can make your business plan. By doing this you will gain the experience to start a new business. Try to observe what type of clients you will have. This will help you realize where you need to focus more.

Test your product or service before you start. Try to understand your market first. If your product is well received than it’s safe to start your new business.

At beginning it’s better if you don’t need too many people to work for you. Wait fist to see how much profit you can make. In time you can expand your business and hire more people. Choose carefully the people you will hire. They need to have good ethical values. It’s also important that they have the perfect skills for the job. Try to hire people you know and admire.

To have financial control you need to learn more things about accounting, computer software and cash flow management. All the businesses are focused around these things. Try to learn as much as possible and you will be able to control your finances better. 

How to Write a Business Plan – For Small Inventors

Starting a new business based on your new invention? You need to know how to write a business plan. Creating a comprehensive detailed business plan forces you to make the decisions that need to be made, requires you to do your research and determine all those little details that need to be addressed, from the day to day office expenses to the cost of packaging for your invention, product, or service.

You will know what your price structure will be and how your product will be distributed. This is very important information. Your price structure depends on your distribution. Do you sell retail and wholesale? Do you sell to OEMs? How about mail order? You have to have a price structure that will accommodate a number of different prices for different channels of distribution.

By the time you’ve finished your business plan you should have a pretty good idea of all of the expenses involved in your undertaking, including the cost of manufacturing, marketing, the cost of sales, your hard costs, and fixed costs of your product. You will have knowledge about your competition, about the pricing structure for your product, the lines of distribution, cost of advertising for the various types of media campaigns, and even the cost of your product liability insurance.

Will your product need code approvals from Underwriters Laboratories (UL), IAMPMO, NSF, FDA, or one or more of the multitude of such agencies? How much will that cost and what is involved? Your plan will spell it all out.

You’ll know the retail price and the profit you will make, and you will have a timeline to follow. Make your plan concise and professional, and detailed enough to convey a sense of credibility. Get it all down on paper

If you are going to raise money to finance your invention, product, or service company, you will absolutely need a business plan. Potential investors want to see everything down on paper before they will even consider your idea.

In general your business plan should include; a cover sheet, a statement of purpose of the plan, table of contents, a description of the business, marketing – how you plan to market your product or service, your competition – demonstrate a thorough knowledge of your competition, operating procedures – describe how your business will operate, personnel – introduce your key personnel, loan applications – if any, equipment and supply list – list all of your equipment and supplies, Balance sheet, break even analysis, spread sheet with cash flow for at least three years – monthly for the first year and quarterly after that, and the assumptions upon which you based your projections.

The specifics of your business plan depend heavily on what type of business you are going to be operating. Whatever kind of business it is, you will find tons of information about how to put a business plan together online. The Small Business Administration has a comprehensive guide.

Just begin a search for business plans and review lots of samples and read the advice that you find, and then get started.

When you run into a problem that is difficult to solve, be glad you found it while doing the plan, not after you are already in business. So the more detail you provide the better off you will be, and the better your credibility.

How to Implement Your Business Plan

Article 3 of 3 – Implementing Your Small Business Plan Your Plan Becomes a Reality

This is the 3rd article of our Business Planning series. I am assuming you have completed your plan and we are now ready to actually start using it. The most important thing about planning for any type of business, is having the ability to implement that plan into real goals that are achievable; daily, weekly and monthly. A big fat 60 page plan that is filed and forgotten is ridiculously useless. I never plan ahead further than a year. Business changes constantly as will the direction of where you are aiming to take your business. To allow yourself to be flexible as an entrepreneur, don’t plan too far ahead. Too much planning ahead can also lead to you becoming overwhelmed at the thought of trying to achieve so much. Keep it short and precise and achievable and there will be more chance that you will actually achieve it.

Ok, so now you have that plan we need to look at how to implement it.

There are 3 major areas of your plan that you are going to live by:

1. Budget and Projections

2. Management Process

3. Growth and Marketing If you implement nothing else but your goals for these areas, you will do just fine.

1. Budgeting and Projecting From your business plan you will have a profit and loss projection and budget for the year. Please print off and stick your projections and budget somewhere visible i.e. Right in front of where you work, on the fridge etc. Inside whatever accounting software you are going to use (we recommend Quickbooks), ensure that you have a budget that is easily accessible or possibly set up your system to allow you to view your live figures versus your budget in a live format. To begin with, do your accounts weekly so that each week you are sticking to your budget. The same goes with your projections. If you are not meeting your projected profit targets, take action immediately and create marketing ventures that will help you ensure that you reach your targets. Our ECourse offers you a smorgasbord of marketing and advertising options to choose from that you can implement each month; most of which are free.

2. Management Processes Within your plan you will have identified how you would like the business to run each day and what management processes and systems you are going to use to ensure your business runs smoothly. Just because you have outlined those processes in your plan doesn’t mean that you are automatically going to practice them diligently does it?

How do we make sure we are systemised? We simply take action. If you have staff; delegate these tasks immediately. If not, set a reminder once per month to ensure that your processes are working the best way that they possibly can.

Identify each month what takes the most of your time, what gives you the most grief and what can be done quicker and easier so that you can focus on driving your business. If emailing gives you grief, vow to set certain times per day or week to email or set up autoresponders. If you despise accounting and bookwork, hire someone else to do it. Chances are they will do a better job and in about half the time it takes you.

Whatever systems you use will need to be updated every now and then, the hard part is being diligent about allowing the time (an hour here and then) to actually take action towards refining them. Once you are in the habit of doing this it will become easy. Make the effort to write out a repetitive list of what will require the most work and ensure your staff are pro-active towards streamlining your business. The more you align your processes to allow yourself more time, the more time and freedom you will have.

Spare time and freedom = less stress = happy business manager.

For loads of great tips on how to streamline your systems check our ECourses by visitng the website.

3. Growth and Marketing This was the most important part of your plan and is the most important part of your business. So how are you going to implement all those brilliant marketing ideas? Firstly, start off with completing every single free marketing strategy that you can to drive people to your door. Passing out cards, networking, free directory listings, newsletters and many more of these types of activities will help you build your business as well as your business identity and credibility. Make it a habit to continue with free marketing principles each day.For a full list of Free Marketing Techniques visit our website. Once you are in the habit of allowing a certain time or day per week to work on your free marketing, if your budget allows you can start to add in paid marketing techniques. Add in one at a time so that you can see the results and split test every piece of marketing material that you can.

Every month you are going to construct a new one page marketing plan (there is one available as apart of our ECourse.)You will refer to your business plan for ideas and add in new techniques each month. You will be surprised how many of those brilliant ideas you might have forgotten about! Work with your budget to ensure that you are not overstepping your cash boundaries and slowly add in more and more techniques as the cashflow allows.

Remove what doesn’t work and replace it with something else. I personally have this simple plan stuck on my cork board and I make notes on how many leads and sales I can see each month. I find it easier to visually see where I am heading. A fancy marketing plan inside your laptop that never gets a look in is pointless. Use a whiteboard or a simple one page plan to delegate these activities to yourself or your staff each week.

Each week, allow one day to work solely on marketing. Even if on that day you can only delegate an hour of your time… 4 hours a month is better than nothing. As your business begins to grow and change so will your ideas about where you intend to take your business so again do not plan too far ahead. Work within realistic time frames and within your budget. Stick to your weekly routine and allow brain time for marketing and growth. Make it a habit to grow your business.

With your plan now in action you are going to see some amazing and positive changes take hold. You are now in the habit of budgeting, systemising and planning to grow your business. With all of these things in place there is no way that you can fail. Organisation need not be tedious. Allow yourself specific times each week to accomplish each task and give yourself short time frames. Once it’s done, forget about it and get on with enjoying your life.