Succss Tip: Business Plannning 101Written by Bob Decker
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REDUCE BUSINESS RISK A business plan that is truly a working document can substantially reduce business risk for your company. Day to day decisions should be run through filter of your business plan to determine what fits and what doesn’t. Your plan can validate issues that fit within it, and should be altered when necessary to allow for new opportunities that may stretch parameters of plan but support your overall goals. The result is that you will make “strategic” decisions rather than pursuing costly whims or suffering under an “idea of day” mentality. In addition to pro forma financial elements, business plan foundation is cemented with solid sales and marketing elements to guide you toward more revenues and higher profit. It should identify routes to market for your optimum sweet spot, and show you when to hire key personnel, and who to hire, saving you from costly hiring mistakes. GETTING STARTED: ANALYZE YOUR BUSINESS PLAN TO BECOME MORE COMPETITIVE The first step in becoming more competitive is to perform a complete, objective analysis of your business plan. It will be extremely difficult for you to view your business dispassionately and perform an objective assessment. For this reason, you will probably want to look at contracting with outside professionals to perform your assessment. These industry experts have decades of corporate experience in building successful sales and marketing strategies to help them understand your challenges and how to address them. An outside consultant can provide you with a comprehensive analysis that culminates in a gap analysis and steps to address holes in your overall business plan. Once you have this assessment and know where gaps are, you can begin to build a plan that will enable your company to effectively win against any and all competitors, big or small. You can either perform steps to execute plan internally, or hire outside expertise to perform those functions that you don’t have knowledge and experience to perform. This straightforward and easy to implement process will get your company on fast track to more sales. KEY BUSINESS PLAN ELEMENTS Key elements of your working business plan include following: · Executive Summary: vision, mission, company objectives, keys to success · Company Overview: focus, current product/service description, future products/services, positioning of products/services, business concept, current situation, key success factors · Organization: stakeholders, board members, employees, strategic advisors · Operations: key personnel, organizational structure, human resources plan, product/service delivery, customer service/support, facilities · Market analysis: overall market, anticipated changes in market, market segments, target market and customers, customer characteristics, needs, and buying decisions · Competitive analysis: key competitive capabilities, key competitive weaknesses, competitive evaluation of products/services, industry overview, nature of competition, changes in industry, primary competitors, competitive products/services, opportunities, threats and risks · Sales and Marketing Plan: go to market strategy, competitive overview, sales tactics, marketing plan, channel plan, advertising plan, promotions/incentives, publicity, trade shows, partnerships and alliances · Financial Overview: short and long term views of company’s situation/needs, assumptions and comments, starting balance sheet, profit-and-loss projection, cash flow projection, balance sheet projection, ratios and analyses YOUR BUSINESS PLAN IS A WORK IN PROGRESS If you created a business plan when you started your business but have not taken time to update it over months and years, you are not much better off than if you’d never created one. Business plans are meant to be working documents, and will become stale and useless if they aren’t updated. As stated before, a business plan is a selling document. It sells your business and its executives to potential backers of your business, from bankers to investors to partners to employees. Early stage companies need effective business plans to attract investors. All companies need an effective plan to guide business. Companies that lack effective and updated business plans often suffer from unrealized revenues, lost opportunities, significant competitive losses, reactive hiring decisions, and poor profit and loss financial performance. Rather than being a working document that guides your business, an unrealized business plan can become a nagging item on your strategic “to do” list. Ideally, you should maintain a workable business plan to determine where company needs to go, warn of possible roadblocks, develop contingencies, and keep business on track to reach planned goals. LET YOUR BUSINESS PLAN WORK FOR YOU Sales and Marketing Pros can guide you through process of revising or developing your overall business plan. SMP’s Opportunity Maximizer Workshop performs a full-scale assessment of your business plan, including your sales and marketing infrastructure. The workshop provides you with a gap analysis and steps to close identified gaps. SMP also offers part or full time Advisory Services from executive level business professionals, sales and marketing experts, business writers, and a full array of document, graphic, and website support; allowing you to just pick up phone and request help as you need it. SMP is ready to work with you and your team to package your business so that it embraces future. With creative planning and packaging, you will win in marketplace, at both investor and customer levels. Contact Bob Decker at 952-955-1200 or visit www.salesandmarketingpros.com for more information.
Mr. Decker is the Principal of Sales and Marketing Pros (SMP), LLC, founded in 2003 to foster venture incubation, market entry, and growth services to technology and services companies. Prior to founding Sales and Marketing Pros, Mr. Decker was a Senior Sales and Marketing Executive with IBM Corporation. He holds a Bachelor in Business Administration Degree with a marketing major from the University of Notre Dame.
| | What is an Investor Ready Business Plan?Written by Howard Schwartz
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A complete description of product or services offered by you should be outlined in detail. A description of overall market for your product or service, along with details of your customer base is essential. The investors need to know reach and kind of customers your product / service is catering to. Marketing Plan
One of most important sections of your business plan is your marketing plan. This section will outline your sustainable competitive advantage to your investors. In a way assure them why you will succeed where others have failed. This section is where you include a definitive description of your customers, market size, demographics, characteristics, growth prospects, trends and sales potential per product / service category. Here is where pricing strategies are outlined and how they can directly influence growth potential of each product /service. It is also important to include future growth, market share and trend influences.
Barriers to Entry Along with giving details of what your product / service is and who your customers are, you also have to inform your investors how you will you prevent your competitors from taking away your customers. The barriers to entry section outlines your business strategy to keep your competitors at bay and grow in market. Investors need to feel comfortable about soundness of your strategy before they invest in your venture. Click here to contact us to learn more about writing an investor ready business plan: http://www.investorbusinessplan.com/writing-business-plan.html For more in-depth information on Business Plans, you can visit our site at: http://www.investorbusinessplan.com
Howard Schwartz is a Business Plan Consultant and a partner in investorbusinessplan.com. He is based at Stamford, Connecticut, and has helped many young entrepreneurs start out on their business careers by preparing a comprehensive business plan for them. He can be contacted on info@investorbusinessplan.com and at 203-494-3344.
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