Building a successful business is all in the planning. Starting your business plan is the first and most important part of starting any business. In most cases newbies to business, start a new business.
By looking at how much money they are going to make! This is planning but this is the end of a business plan! This post will be talking about how and why a business plan should be constructed correctly. And executed with precision to achieve pinpoint accuracy.
Starting your business plan.
All businesses have to start somewhere and by somewhere I mean starting your business plan. But what is a business plan? What should it contain? Can I undertake it on my own or do I need specialized help? QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS! A business plan is a blueprint of how you plan to achieve your business goals. Especially considering that a new business is not expected to make a profit in the first two years of start-up!
It’s not surprising that 20% of new businesses fail n the first year. That’s why starting your business plan in this day and age is more important than ever!
At the end of the day your business plan must show all your objectives, which will help you identify any potential problems and help you measure your progress. Your business plan should help you with your:
- Start-up costs.
- Business projection.
- Sales.
- Marketing.
All the above points play an important role in the construction, development and running of any kind of business.
Start-up costs.
Every business will have some kind of start-up cost. Depending on your type of business this could mean investing hundreds or thousands of pounds or dollars into your chosen business. Will you be looking to rent or buy your place of work?
Either way you will be faced will all the bills associated with running a building i.e lighting, heating, security, marketing, business rates, rent or mortgage and Insurance. These costs will play an important part in your start-up and running costs, unless your business is online?
If you’re thinking of starting an online business you will still experience start-up costs, which will be your hosting package, Insurance, website security, marketing and e commerce training. The costs can and will vary from provider to provider, so shopping around is advised! One thing above all is to make you business costs clear and totally transparent.
Business projection.
What is your expected turn-over after 1 year? Or after 2 years? How about 3 years? I hope you’ve got the picture! A lot of thinking needs to be applied to starting your business plan and then you need to take action. Your business projection should take into account your start-up costs, running costs and give you an idea of when your business will start to turn-over a profit.
Your projection should work on a monthly, quarterly, 6 months and then yearly. But that’s not the end of your projections, I’d like to be clear on the fact that your projections play a vital role in your business growth or demise. So your projections will need to focus on a 5 year and 10 year projection too!
Financial forecast.
How much will it cost you to get your business up and running and when will you start making a profit? In fact, where do you plan to get financial backing and how much will you need? Every business is unique, so this is a problem Google can’t solve for you. To make sure the numbers add up and makes good business sense.
Starting your business plan and making sales.
Take the time to study your prospective market and make comparisons with other businesses in your field. This can often be found by approaching your local government, where relevant business data can be found and studied. Making your sales forecast easier, by delivering better accuracy for your future sales.
Competition.
Starting your business plan will bring home to you all the different strategies required to plan a successful business. Competition in business can come in quite a few forms, which is direct or indirect. Direct competition will come from people who are in the same type of business, which means that their business goals and marketing strategies will be similar to yours. The other form of competition will be indirect, which means that they’re not in your line of business but they might market the same products as your business. Either way you need to be aware of any threats to your business profit margin
What is a good business plan.
There’s no doubt that planning is important to any business and with 20% of businesses failing in the first year, 30% in the second year! The odds of success are seriously stacked against a new business.
The statistics makes that quite clear, your only way to make sure your business isn’t apart of the next batch of statistics is to make sure your business plan is through and all your figures add up! It should also give you an in depth insight into how you expect your business to perform and point out as much, if not all of your expenditure and potential pitfalls!
Planning for business success.
Take the time to understand your business and what sacrifices you will need to make to get it off the ground. The hardest part of a new business is the startup process, not many entrepreneurs fully understand what a new business involves until it’s failing!
I’ve personally started a few different types of businesses and I can tell you from experience, that it takes a lot of hard work. On paper all the projections made good sense but in the real world, working to achieve the targets set, took a lot of dedication.
The conclusion to starting your business plan.
There’s many types of businesses and depending on your chosen niche, you’ll be looking at starting your business plan for an online or bricks and mortar business. The business strategy will reflect the business model and your business blueprint should give you all the guidance you’re going to need to give yourself the best chances of success!
In this review you’ll find a lot of direction and guidance, to assist you in starting and executing your business plan, with pinpoint accuracy.
I hope you enjoy the journey you’re about to undertake and don’t forget I’m here for all you comments and questions. If you would like a prompt reply, please leave all your feed back below. I will answer them as soon as possible.
