What Should Be In My Business Plan?
Many sole traders, SMEs and even large organisations fail to get their Business Planning working in the way that it should: delivering a successful platform for something more than just bumping along on the bottom of success, having a reliable internal structure and designing effective systems to deal with the business environment.
The successful Business Plan does not happen by mistake, by osmosis or some spooky magic: it takes a lot of consideration and deep thinking, revisions and updates. That said, the following questions and prompts will push you forward and give you the best possible chance of success.
- Define your market: what is its size and where is it located? What are its Sector Trends: growth, values. Legislation?
- What does your current business offer in terms of the exact products/services you deliver? What quantities, values and distribution patterns are we looking at? Are any of these insufficient for where you want the business to be?
- What do you really know and understand about your customers? What types of customer are you servicing and how do they perceive what you do for them? How many different customers do you have and if your business is focused upon a very small number of customers, how much of a Risk is this?
- What makes your product/service different from your competitors?
- Assess your routes to market: who are the Gatekeepers, the Influencers and how important are your Strategic Partners (if you have them)?
- What other individuals or organisations can you work with to develop your market?
- Build a relevant and meaningful Competitor Analysis: take time to fully understand their product/service and how it compares to yours. The more time you spend on this the greater your chance of success.
- Build your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) and spend time making this ad detailed as you can. Write a SWOT on your competitors making use of your research in the above sections: what does this then tell you?
- Set out your Business Plan including sections on Sales and Marketing Strategies (minimum of one-year timeframe). Show your Sales and Margins by product/service stream, market segments, etc. Make this as detailed as you can.
- List your Strategic Actions: detail your Marketing campaigns, Sales activities and regular, systematic customer analysis, Advertising and any other activity that will deliver your Plan with details of costs and returns.
- What human capital do you need for success?
- What financial capital do you need for success?
In short, the more effort and time you put into the above areas the more you will understand about your business, what your competitors are doing and the more likely you are to succeed.
Revisit and modify your Plan frequently to keep things on track.
Good Luck!
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