10 Steps To Success in 2012 – Step 10: Plan

10 Steps To Success in 2012 - Step 10: Plan

Ultimately whatever the aspirations for your business, write them down in a business plan in line with what you want to achieve over the next 12 months. By documenting your S.M.A.R.T. objectives, you are able to share them with peers, staff, bank managers and/or advisors to the business and it enables you to track progress and make decisions more easily that are congruent with where you are heading. 

Include specific actions with who is doing what, by when and the associated measure such that you can monitor how you are getting on with the plan. Time is one of the most valuable assets you have and it is limited to so many hours in a day, days a week, weeks in a year and, as you know, time flies (where does it go?).

With a dynamic business plan (i.e. one that doesn’t sit on the shelf gathering dust), how you prioritise this commodity is made clearer and you can make the best use of the time made available to you and be more effective with the actions you take. 

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How to write a business plan

Without a plan for your business I believe you are potentially planning to fail by failing to plan.

May be the problem is “How To Write A Business Plan” – well I think I can help?

What does a business plan do?

• Gets the ideas from your head onto paper
• Gives you clarity and focus for your business
• Allows you to budget and manage your cash flow
• Helps you identify your products, services and the market

What’s in a business plan?

• Vision – your future aspirations
• Mission – what you do for your clients
• Objectives – defined targets for your business
• Strategies – how are you going to get there
• Plans & Actions – what you are going to do to successfully achieve it

What should the content consist of?

• What is the business?
• What is the product/service?
• What is the market place?
• What is the future potential of the business?
• What are the forecast profit and turnover figures?
• What is the investment required?
• What are the prospects for the any inward investor?
• What is the exit strategy?

To make the job easier there is an award winning software package that takes you step by step through how to write a business plan as well as including over 500 templates – click on the image to find out more.

You may also want to download a free template that has all the essential elements that should be included to help you write a business plan.

Already have a business plan? Great – click here for a free review of your business plan.

If you need any further help with how to write your business plan, then email me.

Why Every Business Should Have A Plan

If you don’t know where you are heading, firstly, how will you get there and secondly, how will you know when you’ve arrived?

This applies to any business, whether a ‘one man band’ or a much larger organisation. Most businesses start of with a vision in mind and have an associated plan of how to achieve this vision – whilst it may not be written down, it probably exists in the mind of the business owner and is typically where it stays.

This doesn’t help if you are looking to disseminate this plan to staff and have them work in line with what the company aspires to – mind reading is unlikely to be on the CV of your employees!

Business plan basics.

There are many important steps to consider when developing a business plan for your company, but the first step is to fully understand the main uses of a business plan. The four main uses of a business plan are as follows:

• a written document that you can use in your search for financing.
• a tactical planning and management tool for your business.
• a document showing the capacity of your team to control and manage all the aspects of the company.
• brings you new ideas to refine your project by checking and estimating the induced hypothesis.

The necessity of business plans.

The drafting or update of your business plan is essential to the good management of your company. It can be used when searching for a business partner, for obtaining external financing, and for defining some stages of the development of your company, such as:

• The creation of your company.
• The launching of a new product.
• The establishment in a new market.
• The transfer, buy-out, or the structural development of your company.

Tips for developing a quality business plan.

1. To be credible, a business plan must be coherent and each parameter in the business plan must be based on facts.

2. There are many methods to build business plans, but very few can help you correctly carry out reliable financial projections based on a preliminary commercial engineering and market study.

One frequent mistake when building business plans is to first define the target in terms of market share, and then try to “find” the number of customers necessary to fill these objectives! This process should be reversed.

3. In addition, one essential point in a business plan is to define concrete policies and measures. This definition aims to gain a reasonable number of customers, based on a sufficient knowledge of the market.

The calculation of the costs of the planned actions in your business plan are essential and make overall financial projections possible. In short, financial forecasts – including those related to the financing of the project – must be elaborated from the basic elements of the project.

4. In a business plan, the marketing plans as well as the financial forecasts require a basic understanding of how these important elements are calculated.

5. The last point and certainly not the least significant: A business plan is never ended “once and for all”. A regular follow-up and comparison between the theoretical business plan and the reality of its execution are essential. You can then modify your business plan and adapt it to improve performance and achieve your goals.

Planning for success.

Once your business plan is documented, publish it and communicate it with all the stakeholders and employees in the business. Have the measures and targets visible across the business within the relevant departments so the progress can be easily seen.

Using the plan as a working and dynamic document and adapting it as the business develops is essential to future success of your business. Get your business plan out of your head, on to paper and in to action!

Strategy – What’s Your Next Move?

There are over 4.5 million businesses in the UK and every year 400,000 are formed, with nearly as many failing. Most businesses stay small or plateau at a certain turnover without being able to grow – probably because business owners are working ‘in’ the business rather than ‘on’ it; making tactical day to day decisions rather than strategic ones.

So what distinguishes a successful business?

How about the following?:

• Knowing your strengths and weaknesses
• Having targets in place
• A business plan covering all aspects of the business
• Effective targets and measurements in place
• Ensuring that product and service offerings meet the needs of the market
• Ability to create a competitive edge
• Efficient, clear and consistent business processes
• Inspired and driven leadership

Getting back to your core competencies and strengths in order to focus and build upon them is where having a strategy is important.

So where to start?

Initially you need to establish what your vision and mission are.

A vision – the overall intention of your business e.g. Toys ‘R’ Us: “To put joy in kids’ hearts and a smile on parents’ faces”.

Your mission explains what you do and how you do it in line with your vision e.g. Ebay: “To provide a global trading platform where practically anyone can trade practically anything”.

The next step is to clearly define your marketplace – what’s the product or service you are offering? Is it what the customers want? Who is an ideal client? How are you going to distinguish yourself from the competition?

In order to reach your desired market, you need to review where your business is currently positioned across all ‘pillars’ of the business: finance, sales, marketing, operations and resources (e.g. staff, IT infrastructure) and where you need to be in each of these areas to achieve what you want for your business.

The gap generated from this exercise is the challenge and defines the next step which is ‘How are you going to get to where you want to be?’ With these business issues identified you can now establish a list of actions that are required to resolve them and move your business forward.

These actions then need to be prioritised into what are the ‘now’ actions that need to be implemented straight away and what are the ‘next’ actions that will follow on to keep this action plan dynamic – most importantly who is going to do what by when and what are the targets and measures that can be put in place to ensure that the business is moving in the direction you want it to?

Documenting this will provide you with a simple and effective strategic plan; to be reviewed and updated regularly, defining the next move(s) to either start your business, enable you to grow your business or to better manage your time effectively; thus moving you from a tactical to a strategic business owner!

Free New Guide: “50 Essential Business Advice Tips To Prevent Your Business From Failing”

Are you worried about the future of your business?

No one wants to fail in business; however statistics show that 1 in 3 businesses fail in the first year of business and a further 50% of the remainder don’t progress after the third year.

Whatever stage your business is at, this guide aims to give you the essential elements that you should have in place to prevent your business from failing.

Split into sections, this guide covers all ‘pillars’ of business: Strategy, Finance, Sales, Marketing, Operations, Resources & Personal.

To download your free copy, click here: http://www.paulgreen.biz/success_tips.htm

Protect Your Ideas*

Click on the image above to find out more about software to help with your business planning

Build it, then sell it

People often ask if they can sell an idea for a new product or service to a company that will implement it. But ideas that can’t be protected are worth relatively little. I don’t mean necessarily legally protected, but at the very least, protected with marketing momentum, image, and awareness.

Relatively few of the well-known successful start-ups depended on the ideas. What matters is doing it, starting it up, getting it done. For example, when Apple Computer started in 1976, thousands of people had the same idea. Altair and MIPS were already producing. Every hobbyist club in the country talked about it in their meetings. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, however, did it. They found the resources, contracted people, took the risks, and started it up.

There are plenty of good examples. Was Federal Express patentable? No, but they did it. Look at Amazon.com—it was a good idea, but very copiable. In that case they knew they had to move fast and gain visibility very quickly to pre-empt competition. McDonald’s?

There are companies whose main advantage is the idea. Kodak, Polaroid, and Xerox are examples, but these are exceptions, not the rule.

By the time you’ve had a good idea, so have hundreds or thousands of others.

So how do you approach a large company with a good idea? I say, simply, don’t; not until you have momentum. Sure, some ideas need larger companies to move them forward, but if your idea is that good and not legally protectable, why shouldn’t the big company move on it? Managers are charged with enhancing the value of the company they work for, and you’re saying there’s no patent, so why not? They aren’t bad people, it’s just that you don’t own the idea.

Besides, larger companies move very slowly, and unless you’ve proven the idea and developed the concept, it’s even harder to think they’ll do it better.

My advice is to build some advantage first, develop this idea, bear down, and make it work. After that, then you will have something to sell. Even without patents, you could have trademarks, service marks, and legal protection against people trying to trade on your company’s name and trademarks.

Think of it from the buyer’s point of view, for a while. Which would you rather buy, an idea, or a business? Turn your idea into a business that works, with sales and employees and a market position, and then you have something to sell.

Remember that there are almost always people proposing ideas to large companies, and you’ll have to make sure the contact in the company understands that you might have something that’s very worthwhile. It’s hard for me to think you can do that without building it first, then selling it.

Think about what it is you own that they would need your participation for—perhaps it’s your expertise or name in an industry.

*Disclaimer. NB these articles are for informational purposes only. They are not designed to be used as a substitute for legal advice.

Reviewing Your Business Plan

It is essential for your business that you have a route map which shows exactly how you will achieve your business goals.

Without a plan you are planning to fail.

The plan that you develop needs to be a living document that is constantly checked and updated. If not done on a regular basis then there is really no point in generating it in the first place.

It is critically important that you know that you are actually achieving the plan. If not, then you will need to adjust the plan to accommodate any revisions that occur.

The very basics in a good business plan are to detail the tasks and systems that you will use to progress the plan. You will need to review your plan on a monthly basis initially to ensure progress is being made as planned.

You may choose to change the frequency of the review at a later stage when the initial kinks have been ironed out and the planned progress is being achieved.

The initial goals in the plan are usually small in terms of financial profits, but it is just as important that they be achieved on schedule as the larger goals that occur at a later date.

Proving that the plan is working effectively in the early stages is essential in demonstrating that the overall plan is achievable. So, check that every detail of your plan is being achieved.

Not everything works out as planned, so you must find out the answers to the following questions:

1. – Did you achieve the financial goals for the period within the timeframe allocated? Maybe you achieved some, but not all of them.

2. – Did the systems that you used to complete the tasks work well? Maybe some worked very well, but others were not so successful.

Analyse the answers that you obtain. For those systems that worked successfully, continue working with them for the future tasks.

For those items that did not meet the targets set it will be necessary to evaluate why they did not work effectively.

What went wrong? Was the system used flawed? What did you need to do to actually complete the task? You will need to adjust future tasks of the same type to accommodate the revised procedure adopted.

Continuous improvement is essential in a good business plan. Adjusting and tweaking the elements within the future plan based on your experience can only improve the effectiveness of the plan and generate confidence that it can be achieved.

Plan your work and work your plan and you will be well on the way to achieving your goals.

via UK Business Advisors Ltd | UKBA – Articles: Business Planning – Reviewing Your Business Plan.

Key Steps to Developing a Quality Business Plan

There are many important steps to consider when developing a business plan for your company, but the first step is to fully understand the main uses of a business-plan.

The four main uses of a business-plan are as follows:

• A Business Plan is a written document that you can use in your search for external financing.

• A Business Plan is a tactical planning and  management tool for your business.

• A Business Plan is a document showing the capacity of your team to control and manage all the aspects of the company.

• A Business Plan brings you new ideas to refine your project by checking and estimating the induced hypothesis.

The necessity of Business Plans

The drafting or update of your business-plan is essential to the good  management of your company. It can be used when searching for a business partner, for obtaining external financing, and for defining some stages of the development of your company, such

as:

• The creation of your company.

• The launching of a new product.

• The establishment in a new market.

• The transfer, buy-out, or the structural development of your company.

Should you call in a consultant or write the Business Plan by yourself?

You should be the main (if not single) author of your business-plan, because the Business Plan is, so to speak, your own “baby”, it is a reflection of your personality; it is by this means that your investors will discover the person with whom they collaborate.

But your project may be too important and you may want to call in a consultant for help and consultation. Even so, you should stay in control of its development!

Tips for developing a quality Business Plan.

1. To be credible, a business-plan must be coherent and each parameter in the Business Plan must be based on facts.

2. There are many methods to build Business Plans, but very few can help you correctly carry out reliable financial projections based on a preliminary commercial engineering and market study.

Indeed, one frequent mistake when building Business Plan’s is to first define the target in terms of market share, and then try to “find” the number of customers  necessary to fill these objectives! This process should be reversed.

3. In addition, one essential point in a Business Plan is to define concrete policies and measures. This definition aims to gain a reasonable number of customers, based on a sufficient knowledge of the market. The quantitative estimate of this gain must be calculated on realistic monthly and annual increase rates. A well-founded pricing policy then makes it possible to estimate the sales turnover in the years ahead.

The calculation of the costs of the planned actions in your Business Plan are essential and make overall financial projections possible. In short, financial forecasts – including those related to the financing of the project – must be elaborated from the basic elements of the project.

They should be proceeded by a  commercial engineering study which projects a realistic estimate of sales.

4. In a Business Plan, the marketing plans as well as the financial forecasts require a basic understanding of how these important elements are calculated. You can use good software – some of which is free – to faciliate the development of your Business Plan.

5. The last point and certainly not the least significant: A Business Plan is never ended “once and for all”. A regular follow-up and comparison between the theoretical Business Plan and the reality of its execution are essential. You can then modify your Business Plan and adapt it to improve performance and achieve your goals.

via UK Business Advisors Ltd | UKBA – Articles: Business Planning – Key Steps to Developing a Quality Business Plan.

How Important Is Strategy In Your Business?

On a scale of one to ten, having a good business strategy rates about a fifteen!

No matter what kind of business you have — whether you sell products or a service, as the saying goes, “if you fail to plan, then you’re really planning to fail.”

Creating a strategy can mean the difference between you working 60 to 80 hours a week all year long — and then breaking even, or worse, losing money.

On the other hand, many successful entrepreneurs who have a strategy work fewer hours and make piles of money — and they usually attribute their success to having a strategic plan and following it.

So what is strategic business  management? Very simply, it’s the process of defining the goals and objectives for your business, creating an action plan so you can reach them and then following the plan.

How do you create a strategic plan for you business?

1. First, know what your vision for your company is. If there were no barriers, nothing stopping you from taking your company as far as you could — what would that look like?

2. Next, what are your company’s core operating values? What are its guiding principles? In other words, why are you in business and how do you do business?

3. Now create a 3 to 5 year plan. Your long-term plan is based on the broad objectives that will help you get from where you are now, to where you want to be.

4. Develop a plan for this year. These are the specific objectives you plan to accomplish this year that will lead you

closer to your long-term goals.

Remember to be “SMART” when setting your annual goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-oriented). Include a list of the barriers that are stopping you from getting where you want to go.

Figure out what resources you’ve already got, and what resources you need to get you past those barriers.

And then create an action plan that clearly lays out how you will achieve your goals. Involve key employees with this part of the planning process.

5. Create a set of milestones or benchmarks. This is very important, so that you can measure your progress.

6. Share the plan with your employees, and anyone else who will be involved in the process. Your annual strategy is the roadmap that will make sure everyone ends up at the same destination – but to be effective, everyone needs the same map!

7. Put the plan into action. Now that you have the roadmap, it’s time to begin the journey.

8. Check your progress. Just like any trip, you need to check the map every now and then; to be sure you’re still on the right road. If something isn’t working, the sooner you figure it out and make the necessary adjustments, the sooner you’ll be back on track.

9. Follow the same cycle next year. (Dream, Plan, Act, Check).

Creating a business strategy and following it will ensure that you enjoy the journey as much as getting to your final destination.

via UK Business Advisors Ltd | UKBA – Articles: Strategy – How Important Is Strategy In Your Business?.

You Do NOT Need a Business Plan to Start a Business

Doug Richard is not a fan of iron-clad business plans that owners and management teams follow to the bitter end.

Why? Because business plans are most often written before a company is successful, and often before it is in business.  They are written in hopeful ignorance and are based on best guesses.  Business plans serve a useful purpose once a business is making money and raising revenue, but they have a very limited usefulness, if any at all, before a business is up to speed.

If you are just starting your business, or have a business that seems to be less than wildly successful, start your business planning as follows:

• Identify your customers and their needs.
• Identify the products and/or services you will provide to meet these needs.
• Identify how people will learn about your products and services.
• Identify how and where they will pay you for your products and services.
• Identify who will help you to achieve these objectives.

Read full article: http://www.businesszone.co.uk/blogs/doug-richard/doug-richard-blogs/you-do-not-need-business-plan-start-business