Most successful businesses have created a business plan at some point, usually before their start-up.

Why?

A business plan is needed to address all of the central components to starting a business. It is essential to make sure that you, as a new entrepreneur have carefully thought through many if not all, of the important components of your business. Ideally, you need to do this BEFORE starting your business.

What is a business plan?

They are generally prepared for two reasons:

1. To obtain financing for the business

2. To help determine if essential components of starting a business have been considered.

Often times with new entrepreneur’s (and sometimes even with the more experienced!) they overlook certain aspects of starting a business. So the business plan helps to ensure that most, if not all reasonable questions have been answered and strategies thought about.

Although business plans are often considered optional – they serve a vital importance to entrepreneurs.

Many aspiring entrepreneurs and even experienced entrepreneurs fail to recognize their importance. It is often considered an “optional” component of their business and should only be prepared when absolutely necessary.

Not so!

It is needed to address all of the central components to starting your business. It is essential to make sure that you, as an entrepreneur of quality, have carefully considered what you are offering, how you are offering it and whom you are offering it to.

Although it may be tempting to say “I have everything in my head about my business” – could lead to a lack of clarity.

Why?

The idea of keeping everything in your mind makes it possible for you to:

• forget certain things
• remember things incorrectly or too modified to later be useful
• misconstrue thought combinations that you had at one point but later revised
• revisit ideas that you already have thought of and since dismissed…

Preparing a business plan will allow you to document what you know and have the permanent impact of writing it down.

But this is complicated – Right?

In the context of the larger corporate world a business plan is not only essential but required. Many formats of business plans are modelled after the layouts and inclusions used for larger public companies. The time frame and level of detail is much greater for large corporate entities as they are required for various interested parties (stakeholders). However, it is not necessary for smaller businesses, especially start-ups to prepare overly lengthy and complex documents.

Your business plan need not be a time consuming, uncontrollable and over-the-top difficult process!

How Can I, As an Entrepreneur Achieve This?

Through the simple process of preparing a Preliminary Business Plan you will:

1. Engage in a key strategy that will help you to organize your thoughts
2. Help you to focus on your business intentions.
3. Apply a straightforward, step-by-step process to prepare one.
4. Obtain clarity about your business.

Why is it called a Preliminary Business Plan?

Traditional business plans, like those used for large public corporations can be very complex and have the level of detail that is not required for most smaller, private businesses.

A Preliminary Business Plan is shorter, designed more for the start-up of the business and it is easier to understand and prepare.

Here are just some of the questions that it should answer:

• Describe in detail exactly what your business is to be.
• Describe whom your products and/or services are for.
• How do you plan to deliver your products/services to your customers/clients.
• What pricing do you plan to use.
• If you have a product, list the major suppliers
• Indicate whom your major customers/clients are likely to be.
• What are the risk factors that you see for your business.
• What current businesses pose as competition to your business?
• How many employees do you plan to have in the company and at what point will they become active?
• Have you completed one?

It will address all of the central components to starting your business. It is essential to make sure that you, as a new entrepreneur have thought carefully through and considered all that you need to BEFORE starting your business.

A Preliminary Business Plan is a step-by-step method that allows you to organize your thoughts and WRITE DOWN your intentions through documenting them in a meaningful way. It also provides you with a document to provide to interested parties (for example, banks, investors, etc.) if the need arises.

You need to prepare one, if you are:

• An aspiring entrepreneur who is serious about properly planning a business and would like to discover if you need one for their new business.
• An experienced entrepreneur who never has prepared one, but would like to learn how.
• An aspiring entrepreneur who is skeptical, but would like to explore the process and know more.
• Any entrepreneur who has heard about them, but are confused and would like some clear DIRECTION of what to do.

You can find a sample business plan for a small business in all kinds of formats. There is a sample business plan for a small business where you basically fill in the blanks or you can have access to a sample business plan for a small business where you can pattern yours from it or you can develop a business plan that is centered on what you want for your dreams and your life.

I don’t know of better way than to let your business give you what you want for your lifestyle. Whether it’s a sample business plan for a small business or one where your business gives you a plan, it should tell you what is needed to take you where you want to go and when and how you can get there and it should be in clear simple terms, supported with all the specifics.

So using a sample business plan for a small business is just one of many ways to make a business plan but frankly I think designing one that will have your business give you exactly what you want is by far the best way.

So, why not start out with what you would like to have in life for you and your family? Then develop a business plan that could show you exactly what your business would need to do to give you that life style. If you think about it, there is no other way where you have more control over what you want in life than letting your own business do it for you. If you work for someone else, you’re sure not going to have as much control over your future.

So how would you go about making a plan like this? Well if you know a fair amount about business, you can. It will take some special calculations and some work but if you know how to put together a Profit & Loss Statement, you can probably do it.

You would first do a P&L for the present year for your existing business and the first year and as many years after as you would like to have your plan cover. Your existing business financials will be the foundation for building yourself a business plan for as many years out as you want. This data will tell you a number of things but first if you want to build your plan around what you want in life, you would need to decide some things about your life:

1. You would need to decide how much income you would like to have for yourself for each of the years you plan for.
2. You would need to determine what kind of profit margin you would want from your business for each of the years.
3. And by combining these 2 things into a P&L format you can develop a financial business plan that can extend as for into the future as you would like.
4. The first thing it will show you is how much sales you would need each year to give you the income and profit you would like. Once you see the sales needed, if you know your business well enough, you should be able to estimate those additional expenses needed to overcome capacity constraints that will occur as your business grows.

With this information you can actually predict not only what your sales will be, but you can see how much your fixed and variable expenses will be, what your labor cost will be, your material cost, and your profit.

1. So let’s first look at what exactly are fixed expenses? They are exactly what they say they are; they are fixed. This simply means these are expenses that are ongoing whether you have a lot of sales or “0” sales. They are expenses like utilities, taxes, rent, salaries other than the wages used in the making of the actual product or doing a service, business fees, telephone, etc. See how these expenses would continue on even if you have 0 sales? Any expenses that fall into this category are fixed expenses. Far too many small business owners never divide their expenses into fixed and variable. As a matter of fact, if you could have a business that had “0” fixed expenses; this would be the best of all worlds, why? If you had “0” sales, you would have “0” expenses. So the closer you could get to this the better you would be.

2. Variable expenses are those expenses that track directly with sales. If sales stop they stop. These are expenses like supplies used to support in the making of your product or doing your service. Such things as shipping cost for raw materials for your product or service. If you have no sales then you’re not going to be purchasing materials so your shipping cost for those materials will stop as well. As an example, if you have a lawn mowing business and there are no lawns to mow, then you wouldn’t be buying gasoline to travel to your lawn mowing site. These kinds of things are variable expenses. If you’re producing a product, it would include supplies used to produce that product like sand paper, glue, finishing materials, cutting tools, etc.

3. Labor and material costs are also directly proportionate to sales. These are things that go directly into the making of the product or into doing the service.

a. Labor cost is the actual direct labor used in the making of product or doing the service. The cost would also include all the fringe benefits like social security, payroll taxes, vacation pay, holidays, sick pay days, etc.
b. Material costs are all the materials used in the making of product or in doing the service. In the lawn mower service as an example it would be the gasoline used in the mower and any other materials used directly in that service. For producing a product it would be all the materials used in the product that is sent to the customer including all the packaging materials.

Average Selling Price

Now when you calculate your average selling price which is your cost of sales (material + labor) divided by (1-gross profit), you can determine how many customers you would need and then come up with what you think your conversion rate would be for converting leads to customers, you can determine how many leads you would need. Then from this and with the aid of the U.S. Census Bureau and some basic research on your own you can actually have a pretty decent idea of what size your market is and is going to be in the future so you can see if it will support your business plan or not.

So if you can put this all together, you can have a complete business operating plan that would show you exactly what your business would need to do to give you the income and profit you would like to have and a rough idea whether your market would support it or not. All you would have left to do would be to figure out how to make it all happen.

It’s like planning backwards.

1. Determine what you want in life
2. Figure out what your business would need to do to give you that life.
3. Figure out how long it would take you to reach it.
4. Figure out how big of a market it would take each of the years you’re planning for.
5. Then see if that market is big enough.

Isn’t this a much better way to go about planning your business? Shouldn’t your business be designed to give you want you want instead of you working yourself to death just hoping for the best?

So how would you go about calculating all this?

There is quite a bit of calculations and you should know a little about business principles but it isn’t that complicated. So first let’s look at figuring out your future needed sales with this formula:

Projected sales = fixed expenses divided by (1-(var exp % of existing sales + mat cost % of existing sales + lab cost % of existing sales + desired net prof %))

So, let’s say you existing sales is $850,000 annually, your fixed expenses are $275,000, variable expenses is $55,000 or 6.5% of the $850,000, material cost is $236,000 or 27.8%, labor cost is $109,000 or 12.8%, and your existing profit margin is $175,000 or 20.6%.

Now let’s say next year you want to have a profit margin of 25% so what would your sales need to be to give you that profit margin? Now you might think you would simply tack on 4.4% more to sales (25% – 20.6%) and you would have it. Well not quiet. it doesn’t work that way because you are going to have the additional variable expenses, material cost, and labor cost too. Remember, the more sales the more each of these expenses and cost will be.

So here is how you would do it:

Projected sales = fixed exp ($275,000) divided by 1-(6.5% + 27.8% + 12.8% + 25% (your new profit margin) = $896,057 (new sales)

You can do this for as many years out as you want. Obviously this is based on your first year’s fixed expenses remaining constant and no consideration of depreciation, inflation, or taxes.

But most likely you would need to increase your fixed expenses because you’re going to probably have more rent, utilities, or such as your business grows. So, you would simple put in your new fixed expense number in place of the existing one for each of the years you would be planning for.

So, you see if you decided you wanted a 35% profit margin at year 5 then you could see how much sales it would take to give you that.

Now it’s also important to know how many more customers you would need as well so you should always look at that unless you have another way of growing your sales other than with new customers.

Let’s say your average selling price for your service is $925.50 and you have one transaction per year per customer.

Using that first years sales example we used above, you would calculate it this way.

$896,057 divided by $925.50 = 968 customers needed for the year. Now if your average transactions per customer are more than 1, then you would need fewer customers. As an example, let’s say your average transaction per customers per year is 2.5 then 968 divided by 2.5 = 387 customers per year.

Now let’s say you estimate your conversation rate to be 3% of turning leads into paying customers with the advertising method you’re going to use, how many leads would need to contact to get 387 customers? Simply divide 387 by 3% and you get 12,909 leads you’re going to need to contact.

Then the question is; is your market going to be big enough to provide you with 12,909 leads for the next year and how many will you need each of the following years?

It may be easier than you think to figure this out. You would do some research and with the aid of the U.S. Census Bureau you can roughly determine whether your plan can be supported by your market or not.

So what do you think? Is it better to build a business plan around what you want in life then see how your business can maybe give you that or is it better to use a sample business plan for a small business where you are probably guessing?

I’d love to help you some more. Please go to http://www.StrategicBusinessSolutionsLLC.com and see what might be available.

A business plan may be defined as the formal statement of a collective set of business goals or planning. It can also contain the background information about the organization. Business plan is mandatory to run a company because it is an essential part of initial strategic planning of any company. The capability of writing this plan effectively is a fundamental quality that a businessman should have, especially while starting a new business company or organization. The plan acts like a road map which may guide the company towards success.

There are some objectives or reasons to write a plan for business. These are mentioned below:

– It’s a tool or equipment for obtaining financing
– This helps to unite joint venture partners in a common goal or destination
– It makes the whole business goals feasible to study and analyze
– It will serve as the blueprint for the debut business companies.

A business plan works to convince individual or institutions for investing money in his business or loaning money. Sometime the plan writing is more important than the plan itself. While attempting to write a plan, the businessman’s strategic foundation should be identified first. This strategic foundation explains about the type of business he wants to start or which type of firm he wants to establish. It also indicates the basic elements that are needed to start the business firm. One can predict about the future condition of the company by the plan on his business. In the plan, the main products and the information on the clients should be written down in detail. To get more idea about it the business man can contact with business marketing consultants who can help him.

The planner can be able to declare the financial conditions and financial goals of the company by the help of written form of the business plan. A businessman must think about the present and the future conditions, which mean that he must analyze recent conditions as well as the upcoming needs. He should categorize the ideal and awful clients so that he can take steps to attract the best clients, at the same time to refuse the others. A business plan should be written in brief way so that he won’t forget any topic or information.

Writing a business plan proves the deadly seriousness of a businessman. It is very important in acting as a guide in different stages of the business. While writing a business plan one should follow some criteria which make the plan more effective and work worthy. To set up a unique business goal that is verifiable. The main purpose of writing the plan is to notify the specific goals or plan that a company is going to perform. It will guide the businessman to take decision himself as well as it will explain his plans on business and aims to anyone reading his plan. It also states the long term objectives of the business.

The plan must be realistic in every aspect. It includes the time line, market analysis, specifies projected expenses and revenues, and creates an accurate forecasting. One must keep his plan simple, easy and clear to be understood easily. If the language is difficult and inflate for impressing the customers, it may affect in reverse way. It may be confusing for the businessman himself. It should be very easy and naturally described without any excess verbiage. It should be in proper tone so that the reader can response and react positively to that tone. One must consult with some of the institute concerned with the business sector. These firms and organizations help you to take proper decision at the right time. Consulting institutes such as business consulting firms, business technology consulting, business plan consultants, organizational consultants etc. They help and give you the proper guideline in every aspect and decision. These types of firms summarize the plan and efforts that is effective for the company.

One must write a plan staying along the lines of traditional business plan format. Creative thinking is always appreciable, but to make yourself look more professional you must go with the guide of a tested business plan template. This may organize the plan into a well structured data and document.

One must clearly state and define the main purpose of the business plan. Similar to the identification of the goals of business, the writer must identify and specify the goals of the written business plan. It will help to secure the financial backing from the investors.

Once the plan is ready for the inauguration of the business, the businessman should decide his priority. These priorities will make the success in business easier. The main contents of writing a business plan are given below:

Cover sheet
Statement of purpose
Table of content
The business
-Description of business
-Marketing
-Competition
-Operating procedure
-Business insurance
Financial data

Summary:
Overall a business plan should be written in such a manner that it is easily understandable and that have the ability to attract newer clients. After these mentioned process been finished, one would be ready to face challenges that a new business would bring.