No matter what the size and scope of your company, writing a solid business plan and brand positioning statement will help you. Not only will the process of writing a business plan and brand positioning statement help you carve your own path toward business success, the first will help you attract investors, while the second will help guide your sales strategy, bringing in new customers.
With that in mind, let’s cover some tips for writing a solid business plan and brand positioning statement.
Writing a Business Plan: Top Tips
1. Moderate your optimism.
Business success doesn’t come easy. Most new companies don’t actually bring in revenue during the first year. More than half lose money.
So, exercise moderation when choosing dates for milestones, defining management responsibilities, and setting your budget. It will probably take a little more time, help, and money than you expect to get your business off the ground.
2. Emphasize cash flow rather than profits.
Cash flow problems are a leading killer of small businesses, so planning ahead for them should be a top priority.
In fact, the company Palo Alto, a designer of business plan software, says if you include just a single table in your business plan, it should be the cash flow table. You bet investors will be looking for it.
3. Explicitly differentiate yourself from competitors.
If your product or service has enough demand to be profitable, you already have competition. So, if you want to achieve business success, you have to make it clear how what you’re offering is different from what the other guys are selling.
What this really comes down to is finding a niche. Your competitors aren’t fully meeting the needs of all of their customers-that’s impossible. What this means is that you have an opportunity to identify segments of their customer base you can cater to better and convert them.
A great exercise for differentiating yourself from your competition is writing a brand positioning statement.
4. Stick to 15 pages or fewer.
Rambling in your business plan is a sign that you don’t have a firm grasp on your core business concept.
A business plan for a new company shouldn’t be longer than 15 pages, and that’s with tables and images. If you ask around, you’ll notice that this is the maximum length set by many business plan writing competitions, and there’s a reason for that-it’s harder to write a concise business plan than a rambling one.
Writing a Brand Positioning Statement: The Basics
A brand positioning statement defines how you can serve your target market in a way your competitors don’t. If written well, it can help fine-tune your sales strategy.
The quintessential brand positioning statement used in marketing textbooks around the world comes from Swedish automobile builder AB Volvo:
For upscale American families, Volvo is the family automobile that offers maximum safety.
As an entrepreneur, you can use a brand positioning statement as part of your overall sales strategy to promote your business or yourself. A brand positioning statement should identify, preferably in one sentence, all of the following:
- Your product or service
- Your company (or you)
- The category the product or service is in (or the field you are in)
- Your target customer
- The one key benefit you provide, possibly with a brief explanation
You may have noticed that the brand positioning statement doesn’t explicitly mention your competitors. It is implied that your key benefit is something you can provide better than the competition within your niche. You have hopefully already identified this when writing your business plan.
Now, although there are similarities between a brand positioning statement and a tagline, your tagline is made for customers, while your brand positioning statement is more suitable for keeping you focused on your core strengths. If you don’t have a tagline for your business yet, we recommend starting by writing a brand positioning statement, as it should help you pinpoint the direction you want to move in.
Good luck!