Posts Tagged ‘ Business Plan ’

The biggest little problem I have heard lately is employees texting on the job.

One text message is no big deal.  You lose a minute or so of productivity per text message.  But what happens when someone receives and sends 30 text messages an hour as they carry on at least three conversations?

You need a business plan.

It needs to drive daily decisions.

There are tons of free resources out there to help you get started.

One website has over 400 free sample business plans.  This can be a great place to start.  But all it is is a start.

Money motivates.

But once you pay enough to get money off the table, money doesn’t matter that much.

Once you do that, what really motivates is being autonomous, the satisfaction of skill and mastery, and making a contribution to the world around them.

Check out Daniel Pink’s book: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Have a watch. This is well worth 11 minutes of your life:

Who are you?

What is your business?

If you can’t answer those questions, you’re in trouble.

The answers to those questions dictate how you interact with your customers and employees.

Your business mission statement is the most important part of your business plan because it tells you what else is important.

A business plan that is clearly made from a template won’t get you any money.

The only way to get banks or investors to give you money is to prove that you don’t need theirs.

When I consider investing in a startup business and I see a plan that will make money, I do everything I can to get more money for that startup.  I’m not worried about them losing money, I become worried about missing the opportunity for them to make me money.

If you use a business plan template just for outline purposes and develop the strategy well, then you will turn some heads with your business plan and attract money when you get in front of loan officers or investors.  (Really, loan officers are investors; they just have lower risk tolerances.)

What factors make a great business plan?

Another reader question asked about how to do market research.

There are several main purposes for market research.  Market research can help you, (in no particular order):

• see the size of your potential market,
• anticipate the needs of your market,
• develop an advertising strategy,
• know what price your product can bring in the market, and
• know where to reach your market (online sales, stick and brick, affiliate marketing, etc.).

A complete market analysis will address five main questions.  First, and perhaps most important, how do your customers hurt?  Their pain will drive your marketing strategy.

Adam Stephenson is a patent attorney at Adam R. Stephenson, LTD.  Check out his business here.

Adam started out with a business plan created from a template, so we took it and made it better.  The template told him format, but we spent the time to create a plan that will give him specific milestones to measure his success as the business grows.  I helped him with the financial projections, cash flow planning, and other business management strategies.

I wanted to include his recommendation from my LinkedIn profile here:

“Tony reviewed my business plan in detail, examined my financial projections, and sat down with me face to face to analyze my market’s opportunities and challenges aspect by aspect. His advice about how to successfully navigate the startup period and manage cash flow by using ways to encourage early payments has been extremely valuable.

A reader asked how to do a break-even analysis.

Here it goes.

Whether it is salaries for new employees, equipment, or both, starting a business or expanding production costs money.  Doing a break-even analysis will tell you how productive the expansion needs to be to pay for itself.

You need to know a few things to get your break even analysis to tell you the truth.