Planning For Your Business Plan

Roadmap To Your Business Success

Having a business plan helps you focus, be accountable and enables you to ask pertinent questions about yourself, your business and your business environment. It helps you to identify all the potential risks your business can face and what your strategy will be to mitigate these risks. By identifying a business strategy ahead of time, the easier it will be to understand your direction, your budgets, schedules, and how to market to your target audience.

But before you jump in to create your plan, there are four important steps that must initially take place before you begin:




Step 1 - Know who you are

The first step to creating your business plan is to understand who you are. Here are some very specific questions to ask yourself:
" What kind of business do you have? What do you do?
" Who is your customer?
" What do you sell?
" How does your product/service benefit your customer and how do you do it better than anyone else?
" What does your product lack in comparison to your competitors?
" How will you alleviate external threats to your business such as in an economic downturn?

Answers to these questions will help you in creating your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis and will help you identify positive or negative internal and external factors to achieving your business objectives.

The second part to step one is that you'll want to ask yourself some personal questions:
" What do you enjoy doing personally and professionally?
" What are you proud of personally and professionally?

Starting a business is very time intensive and it's easy to let personal goals and aspirations get pushed aside. What could start out as a passion with drive and total commitment to serve can easily become a chore when burn out sets in. You'll want to avoid this by including a balance in your life.

By answering the personal questions above, you'll have set the stage in creating your brand story for the branding section of your business plan.



Step 2 - Know where your business is today

Next, you'll need to know where you are today. This may take some time to answer unless you are in your first year. Otherwise research will be required to get through this step. To start, you'll need to gather answers to questions such as:

" Where did your business come from last year? Here, you are looking for answers as to not only what type of clients did you get but also from what sales and marketing activity.
" How many new clients did you acquire? How many repeat clients did you have?
" What is your average dollar spent and average dollar made per client?
" What is your closing ratio?

Answers to these questions will help you plan things such as determining how many customers must walk through the door or must you get in front of should you want to increase your earnings. Step two is an essential step in not only creating the marketing plan, but in creating your sales plan and understanding what it will take for your business to be successful.



Step 3 - Assessing what has worked and what hasn't

After you have determined where your business is today, you'll now want to evaluate what you've been doing. Is the road you are on leading you to where you want to go? Take a hard look at what you've been doing and what has brought in business. When you find that certain activities are not as successful as others in bringing in business, don't keep repeating them. Eliminate them from the plan. If you're not tracking where your business is coming from (advertising, print, radio, TV, direct mail or word of mouth) then start - TODAY! It doesn't make sense to continue spending money on anything that doesn't increase the bottom line.



Step 4 - Where you want to be

In this step, you'll want to allow yourself to dream. Ask yourself where do you want to go? Write down all that you want to do, to be, to achieve, to learn, and to earn. This should be both professionally and personally. Here you'll begin setting goals for yourself. These goals can be changed, adjusted or altered along the way when necessary. It's important that you at least create them so that you have something to measure your success against. A well balanced plan should include all aspects of your life - professional, family, spiritual, recreation and growth.



Having completed these four steps will enable you to create the backbone of your business (and life) plan. It will be a plan that is a living document to be updated as you or your business changes, a document that will keep you on a path driven for success.