Business Success: Writing a Business Plan and a Brand Positioning Statement

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!

Writing a Business Plan for Your Home Business

Are you writing a business plan for you home business? Do you really need one?

Why writing a business plan for a home business? A home business like any other needs a road map to a new destination. If you do not use one, you will end up lost before you get to your destination.

Every business no matter how small it is, must a have a business plan. You may not need a “formal” business plan document but you definitely need a “business plan” for you home business.

A formal business plan is a very long detail document with about 80-100 pages. A home business may not need this kind of elaborate plan, but writing a business plan is not an option. It is critical for your business.

Writing a business plan for your home business plan is just your “strategic planning.” You want to cover at least four major elements: 1) Your home business description and elements, 2) Your marketing plan, 3) Your financial plan, 4)) Your operations plan

1) Your Home Business Description and Elements: This element covers what kind of business you are doing. Regardless of your home business of choice, at the very minimum, you need to have the following:

  • Why: What is your main purpose of having home business? If it is just money, you may want to reconsider. Any business has to be driven by some sort of desire besides the financial rewards. This desire will give you the self-motivation that you need to do it; otherwise, you are setting yourself up to fail.
  • What: What is your home business? What is your product or service? What is your focus?
  • When: When do you plan to do it? Do you plan to work every day for 2-3 hours or 10 hours a day? Did you notice I said every day?
  • Where: The location is probably your home, but where in your home. Do you have a designated space for it? Can you have everything you need available in this space?
  • How: how you are going to execute? Is your business a one-person show? Do you need an assistant or a particular tool? Who is involved in your business?

2) Your Home Business-Marketing Plan: When writing a business plan, marketing is crucial. At the beginning, you can do many things. In addition, there are many that you do not know and you are not familiar with, however, at the very least, plan what you know.

  • Do you need a website or a blog?
  • How do you plan to get clients? Do you need word of mouth referrals? Do you need friend’s referrals or other local business referrals?
  • What is your market? Who is your target audience? Age, gender, and location, are important elements.
  • What are you customer needs? What problem are you trying to solve for them?
  • Who is your competition? How can you be better than they can?

3) Your Financial Plan: Although there are many home businesses that do not need a lot of money to start, you do need some capital to start and some to maintain. Do you know how much that is? Can you afford to start a business? Are you banking in your business to produce and maintain itself right away? If the latter is the case, you may want to reconsider. It will be a shame to put many hours of work and count in income you are not sure is going to come.

4) Your Operations Plan: This is your initial description on you plan of action

  • List your priorities
  • List your short-term items and have a dateline
  • List your long-term items and have a dateline
  • List your daily actions
  • Schedule your daily actions and your priorities

Although many home businesses have started with nothing in place, most have fail for not having something in place from the start. Writing a business plan does not guarantee success but it does guarantee you clarity in what you want to do and how to accomplish it.

This plan is necessary to utilize during your road trip. You adjust as you go. You correct and continue. It may be in just 5 pieces of paper, but if you did your homework, may be that is all you need to start and become successful.

Business Plan Guide – 7 Mistakes to Avoid When Writing a Business Plan

A business plan guide is a great place to start when you are getting ready to start a new business venture. Perhaps you have found a book about writing business plans, or are following a template, but chances are, these materials will only focus on the steps necessary to create your written report and will fail to point out the critical mistakes that most new business owners make. So let’s ignore the step-by-step tutorial for a moment and focus on the real world mistakes you need to avoid.

1. Don’t Put it Off.

Yes, writing a business plan can be a monumental chore. It’s easy to procrastinate while you focus on the more exciting processes of your business. Many new business owners will wait until the day before their scheduled meeting with the bank — and then frantically try to write a plan overnight. You can imagine the results.

Don’t wait until you have more time. There will never be more time. You need to clear your calendar for a week and make your planning a top priority. Or if that isn’t feasible, schedule a certain period of time each day to work specifically on planning. No doubt you have heard the old saying: “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”.

2. Don’t Confuse Profit With Cash Flow.

Unless you have an accounting background, you are very likely to define the success of your business in terms of profits. A simple definition of Profit would be Sales minus Expenses equals Profit. But in the business world, profits do not equate to cash. Your profit formula does not take into account the amount of cash you have tied up in production costs for products that have not yet sold, or the customers who still owe you money for sales that have already been made. Your business can look quite “profitable” while your bank account is over-drawn.

In your written plan, make sure you include a table that addresses cash flow. Ideally, you should detail the monthly cash flow for the first two years of the business and annually thereafter.

3. Don’t Fall in Love With Your Idea. Too many business plans blabber on for pages about the “newness” and “uniqueness” of the idea. But the truth is, investors want to invest in people, not ideas. It is only the people who can execute the systems necessary to bring the idea to life.

Instead of waxing poetically about your business idea, focus your energy, and your reader’s eyes, on the ways you plan to implement this great business idea.

4. Don’t Succumb to Fear and Dread.

If you have never written a business plan, the process may loom like Mount Everest. But, like most new challenges, writing your plan isn’t as hard as you have imagined it to be. You aren’t writing a doctoral thesis or the next great novel. If you have invested in a business plan guide, use it. You can easily find helpful resources such as books, software programs and templates. Remember, you eat an elephant one bite at a time, so start chewing.

5. Don’t Over Sell.

Skip the vague and meaningless business phrases such as “best ever”, “highest quality” and “unsurpassed customer service”. You will lose your reader’s interest and respect if you engage in hyperbole that isn’t supported by measurable facts. Remember that the objective of a plan is its results, which require tracking and follow up. Focus your goals on specific dates, management responsibilities, budgets, and measurable milestones. Think fewer words and more numbers.

6. Don’t Engage in One-Size-Fits-All

Business plans can have many different purposes and they should be written to reflect the specific purpose at hand. You may be using your plan to start a business, or just run a business better. Your purpose may be simply to sell an idea for a new business to one particular business partner. Your plan may be intended to secure a small business loan, or it may be needed to secure millions of dollars of venture capital. Each of these purposes would require different information, presented in different ways to meet the needs of different readers. Keep a picture of your intended reader firmly in your mind and your business plan will stay focused as well.

7. Take Off the Rose Colored Glasses

Optimism is a wonderful resource. Without it, a business owner would find it difficult to summon the energy necessary to launch a new venture. However, this is not the time to engage in unbridled projections. If your company’s growth chart is based on an “industry average” of fifteen-percent annual growth, you should certainly be prepared to prove that assumption. Provide supporting data and, when in doubt, be less optimistic.

By using a good business plan guide, and avoiding these common mistakes, you can prepare a plan that almost guarantees your business success. Best of luck!