Free Business Plan Advice and Business Plan Template

By Linda C Smith

Every year businesses and organizations everywhere set aside time for strategic planning sessions. It is the perfect occasion to put a shine on the business' vision and adjust its direction. In some cases it is little more than an afternoon in the conference room with coffee and cookies. In other cases it's an off-site weekend away affair complete with break-out sessions and social activities.

Regardless of the event structure, strategic planning is an important function for all the stakeholders of a company. Stakeholders are everyone who benefits from, or is concerned with, an enterprise. Even a home-based business owner needs to set aside time to come to accounts with past and current functions and weigh those against future needs and aspirations.

Strategic planning sessions or retreats should involve both big picture overview as well as detailed action planning. These exercises are necessary in order to set goals and milestones that are real and achievable. These sessions are as valid for a non-profit philanthropic organization as for a for-profit company.

• goal: objective or target - has specific language and target date
• milestone: sub-objectives that indicate where you are on the road to the goal

In all cases there are basic questions that should be addressed in 4 key categories:

1. the business itself
2. the business' offerings
3. the business' customers
4. the business' future

1. Questions to ask and consider about The Business:

• Who is your company? Who are the principle players? The stakeholders?
• What is the declared purpose of your business? Are you a for-profit enterprise? Are you a non-profit organization with a philanthropic base? Is the purpose at the core of your vision larger than its details?
• What do you hope to achieve?
• What differentiates your business from another that is similar? What is your uniqueness?
• Is your business small? Independently owned? Relatively low volume of sales?
• Is your business large? Multiple layers of organization? Board of directors? Stock holders?
• Do you know how big (or small) you want or desire your business to be? Do you want a business large in annual profit margin? Large in philanthropic outreach? Big in the numbers of people it touches?
• Is your business a manufacturer? Distributor? Supplier? Service provider?
• Are you meeting the needs of your employees? How do you know? What do you have in place that tells you?
• Who benefits from your business' daily operations and in what ways?

2. Questions to ask and consider about the Business' Offerings:

• Can you describe your products and services? Do you know when to add improvements? Do you know when to retire a product or service?
• Who benefits from your products or services? Do you know what your products/services' intrinsic values are? Their perceived value from your customers' points of view?
• Who are your competitors?

3. Questions to ask and consider about the Business' Customers and Clients:

• Does your business have non-profitable users? - these are people/entities that use the services of your business but do not pay for the service. There is no profit realized from users. Do you know why this would be an advantage for your business?
• Who are your paying customers? Do you know where they are? Do you know all the ways in which you can communicate with them?
• How do you know you are meeting your customers' needs?
• Can your customers find you easily? Communicate with you easily? Is it time for an internet presence? Is it time to offer both in-person point-of-sale and online website purchasing?
• Are your customers aware of all your purchasing policies (everything from delivery and shipping issues to refunds and returns)?
• Why should your customers/clients care about your products/services? Your company as an entity?

4. Questions to ask and consider about the Business' Future:

• Where do you want to go? Do you have an ideal picture of what your business or organization can be?
• Is growth part of your plan? Does your business have the ability to grow from small to large? How would this be measured? Is the risk worth the expanse plans?
• How will you take the next step of growth?
• Is it time to downsize? To diversify?
• Do you have a road map of strategies to get you where you want to go? Simplistically, do you know where you want to be in one year's time? - in terms of staff? In terms of profitability? In terms of marketplace position?
• What does your company give back? To its employees? Its other stakeholders? The community-at-large?
• How do you measure/celebrate milestones?
• How do you know you are on track with your business plan?

Knowing which questions to ask in a strategic planning session can help facilitate the expectations and goals of the session and make the entire process more valuable to all participants. It's also good to be reminded that every part of a business needs to be assessed and dusted off periodically...life doesn't stand still and neither should your business.

Linda C Smith, author and owner of a home-based business. I write a business blog at
http://intlnat.com where you can also find links to my business. My joy in business is sharing my passion for my products as well as showing others how they can enjoy the benefits of a home business.

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How to Start a Business and Write a Business Plan

By Richard McMunn

If, at any time, you've considered starting your own business, then this article could be of interest to you. This article is applicable to people of all walks of life who are about to embark on an internet business; one of the most frequently searched business on the internet.

Starting an internet business

Before you go ahead with any plan to start a business it is important to ask yourself; are you a self-motivated person and have you been realistic about the pitfalls? The key difference between an employee and an entrepreneur is the motivation of the individual.

You may well be able to succeed in your own business if you are able to create an idea and then proceed with it without someone else's encouragement.'Risk' is a word that you need to familiarize yourself with. Your new business will have an element of risk. The difference between risk and irresponsibility is that risk is not usually 'business'-threatening.

Irresponsibility, however, generally shows that difficulties have been blatantly overlooked. You need risks to succeed; if one risk fails then you will need to move on to the next. You lose everything when the irresponsibility takes over.

Business Plan

As with any business you need a business plan and an internet business is no exception. The business plan exists for a reason; they are invaluable but beware they can take a few weeks time and a lot of energy, however, it will be worth it as it will encourage you to come to terms with your business idea and also serve as your evidence when applying for a small business loan from a bank.

Your business plan must cover how you will generate income, what your expenses will be, who your competitors are, and most important, what your business does.

Funding

You can start a business with your own savings or borrow from a bank. The best and most popular advice is to start the business with your own money since it makes the business much more personal to you and will force you to be strict with your expenditure. It is advisable to avoid borrowing money from family or friends. 99% of the time, you will not be able to pay them back, and if you are able to it won't be for months or even years.

Product Pricing

Proper pricing is the one thing that keeps the business alive. You need to find the happy medium between undercharging and overcharging; research your market and find out what the prices are like.

You could even start with a 'tester or introductory price'; this will give you an idea of how much you should charge for the rest of your products and/or services.

Research

Do not act hastily; it is easy to get excited over the prospect of your new business; however research cannot be skipped, overlooked or rushed. Whether you are researching markets, competitors, finances or marketing methods, it is vital that the research is carried out thoroughly.

On the other hand, it is possible to research too much. Do not remain motionless under the burden and concern caused by research overload. It is easy for you, the prospective business owner to remain just that - prospective. Find a happy medium; plan your research before heading into it. You can then follow your plan and have a set time for when your research is complete

Learn how to start a business and how to write a business plan with this article. How to be a an entrepreneur.

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Go Where the Puck is Going - Great Advice When Planning to Start a Business

By K. MacKillop

Wayne Gretzky offers one critical piece of advice to young hockey players; don't follow the puck, but go where the puck is going. This same advice applies to developing a viable startup. Don't try to compete where the market is right now, but look ahead for where the market is headed and prepare your startup to meet them there.

All startups begin with a great business idea. Even those entrepreneurs who don't really care what the operations are have to come up with a product or service that can be the focus of their business skills. The best ideas fill a need or provide a benefit to the target customer, and the ideas with the most growth potential must have room to grow. Tastes and interests change rapidly these days, and effective business owners must always be looking ahead to steer the venture in the right direction.

Changes in the business landscape are developing rapidly. Now, every business needs a web presence and are likely to be most successful if they offer some ecommerce component. Mom-n-Pop general stores are harder than ever to keep afloat because you just can't compete with the big box stores on price. However, niche and specialty shops are a good option, as long as the service and knowledge of the staff are top shelf. Information services are booming -- you can buy information on everything from starting a business to baking a cake, but the quality of the products available ranges from worth every penny to not worth a dime. The same goes for consulting. There are now "consultants" for everything from organizing your house to life coaching to training corporate executives. Competing in these crowded industries is tough, and successful enterprises must constantly upgrade their offerings to remain competitive.

When looking for a good business idea, look at the obvious. Very frequently, the most successful businesses are founded on a need the entrepreneur identifies that is right in front of them. Avoid commodity businesses where the consumer buys only based on price. Do look for consumer monopoly opportunities that give you pricing power. That is, sales are not driven by the lowest prices. Service based businesses are good options, though the downside is that your sales are limited by the number of billable hours available.

If you have a particular industry or target market in mind, do some research to see where those markets are going. Look for niche opportunities and specialize...you can always expand into more general offerings once your venture is off the ground. The best place to start is with your industry associations and trade journals. Keep up with the current news and join the networking opportunities. If you have a specific target market you would like to focus on, figure out where they go and what they do. Talk, and listen, to everyone around you to discover their needs. Don't overthink the options. Once you land on a potentially viable idea, follow up with a basic marketing analysis and keep moving forward.

Greater success in business (and in hockey) can be attained by looking where the target is going to be rather than aiming for where it is now. Even once your venture is up and running, long-term success relies on your ability to prepare for the inevitable changes to come. Always be looking for opportunities and threats on the horizon, and keep your venture flexible enough to respond as needed.

About the Author - K. MacKillop, a serial entrepreneur with a J.D. from Duke University, is founder of LaunchX and authors a blog focused on starting a business. The LaunchX System will help you plan your business startup to be flexible and to be able to skate where the puck is going. Visit LaunchX.com today and find out how we will help you start a business.

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How to Protect Your Business in Case of a Divorce

By PJ Kennedy

If you have a great marriage with beautiful kids, and you own a thriving business is hard to think about divorce. Your wife has been there for you since the beginning and you have a great relationship with her. More reasons to talk to her about a postnup. Divorce poses great threats for the health of a business, and if when you married you didn't prepared a prenup, maybe is time to speak with your wife about a postnup. Is a touchy subject and you want to approach your partner in a light conversation, but you want to stress the importance in protecting the family assets.

A great case in point is the owner of the New York Yankees, George Steinbrenner. The boss granted great powers and a financial stake to his soon to be ex-son in law in the family business, the New York Yankees. Then back in March/2007 his daughter filed for divorce from her husband and soon Steinbrenner was seating in the negotiation table with the enemy. And this is a primary example of how things quickly can turn sour in your business, today you might be dealing with family and tomorrow with a stranger.

Situations like this can create a very negative atmosphere in your business and with your partners. If you encounter yourself in this situation, you want to make sure that an agreement is in place, so the right of first bid to buy back shares at a prearranged price goes to you and your company in case of a divorce or separation.

You also want to instruct all your children, who eventually will have ownership stakes in your company to have prenuptials in place with their future wives to avoid this sort of situation. Of course everything has its time, so you want to instruct your children when will be the best time to have the prenup completed. They don't want to take a 100 page document on their first date, but planning is crucial for the well being of a business.

PJ Kennedy has worked in the granite industry for the past 15 years. Please visit his site http://www.massachusetts-granite.com for information on Massachusetts granite. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=PJ_Kennedy

He Didn't Plan to Fail - He Failed to Plan

By Tony W Murtagh

Before you go too far down the road of developing your web-based business (or any business for that matter) you really need to formulate a plan of action.

Your plan should have long term goals and short-term action points - and be realistic and achievable. Many people start on a course of action, not really sure of where they are going or how to get there. Imagine that you said to your wife "come on, get in the car we are going on holiday."

She would probably reply with a series of pertinent questions - where are we going? How will we get there? Have you packed? Do you have the money to pay for it? How long are we going for?

If you replied "we are driving down to Florida for two weeks, the hotel is booked and paid for, I've done the packing and I have ample spending money, there is every chance that you would get there and have an enjoyable vacation.

If however you mumbled "..er.. I don't know, I haven't planned anything", she would probably be very unimpressed to say the least!

The same can be said of your business. If you do not know where you are going (your long term goal) or how you are going to get there (your short term action points) the chances are, that you will get nowhere.

Once you have drawn up your plan - (as detailed as possible) you then need to review it regularly so that you can judge your progress and amend the plan as necessary. Let's go back to the holiday analogy. You may have planed your journey to Florida to take a certain route, but you find a road blocked - or better still hear on the traffic news that the road is blocked (forward planning) - so you sit and study your road map and find an alternative route.

Likewise with your business; if it becomes apparent that a certain plan of action is not working, don't be afraid to change it. Just remember that as you travel further down the road of building your business, you will certainly come up against some obstacles. But you should be learning and increasing your skill base all the time, and if you can look upon obstacles not as problems to stop you, but as challenges to be overcome, you wont go far wrong.

Finally, never be afraid to change your plan altogether. If you were going to Florida and discovered that the area you were planning to visit was about to be hit by a severe hurricane, you would re-plan your destination.

Similarly, if something is about to happen which will wreck your business plans, take stock of the situation, see what you can learn from your experiences up to that date, and then set yourself a new goal.

Now ensure that you write your plan down. Set your self short-term goals - what you will be doing in the next few weeks - medium term - say for the next six months - and long term - for the next year or two. You should then review your plan every month or quarter, making whatever amendments are necessary, and rewarding yourself for goals achieved.

Tony Murtagh has spent all his career involved in sales, sales management, marketing and PR. He was a UK National Sales Manger (Major Accounts) for a mobile communications company, had his own publishing company producing a monthly Business to Business magazine and has acted as a PR consultant for a number of small businesses. At present his main focus of attention is on his web businesses, especially his Gambling portal - The Betting Directory (http://www.betting-directory.org.uk/) and he also runs several gambling related blogs, including Online Gambling News (http://bettingandgamingnews.blogspot.com/).

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How to Choose the Ideal Restaurant Location

By Amy Nutt

When it comes to restaurants, location is everything. You have to be where people can see you or you'll find that there are simply no customers, but there is much more to choosing the right spot for your eatery than merely walk in traffic. In fact, it's necessary to consider a number of factors before deciding on a locale.

People: The availability of clients is the biggest concern, of course. You'll need to make sure that there are enough potential customers in the area to make it worthwhile to set up a restaurant. It's a good idea to do a survey of the population in the area you wish to build your business. This will enable you to find out whether or not people will be interested in what you have to offer and whether or not they eat out often, among other factors. This can also help you decide which type of restaurant to start... a burger joint might not do well in a more affluent area, but it would be ideal for an area where people are looking for fast, cheap food.

Competition: Who is the competition? What are you offering that beats them? Whether you are offering lower prices, different cuisine or tastier food, you need to be better than the competition. There's no point in starting a coffee shop if there are already five in the same neighborhood. Also important is to find out how the pricing works in the neighborhood. If all the restaurants are very low priced, you might be hard-pressed to compete with a fancier gourmet food place that needs to have higher prices. This is also where it pays to know your clients. If they don't have money, don't expect to make it with $100 plates of food.

Parking: Don't underestimate the value of parking space. A new client isn't going to spend a lot of time searching for a spot to park just to try your food. While it's best to have your own parking lot, you should be good as long as there's ample space near the restaurant location.

Visibility: Many restaurants find that a large amount of their traffic comes from those just passing by. These people decide at the last minute to eat at a particular place and this is why you want to make sure to have an easy to see locale. Another important factor is how easy it is to get to the place. Places that are just off the main road, but still visible, are ideal. You want people to be able to see your restaurant and pull in without battling traffic or having to find a map just to get there.

The location of your restaurant is very important. You need to take the time to check the area out, take a close look at the people who live and work in the area and know your competition before making a decision to place the restaurant. The research will pay off in the long run, since you can be sure to select the perfect spot.

As restaurants Quebec offer some of the finest cuisine, Winnipeg restaurant also have outstanding desserts. If you're thinking about eating a one-of-a-kind meal, don't forget about visiting restaurant Calgary!

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An Introduction to Farm Strategic Planning

By Wayne Messick

Farm strategic planning is easier today than ever before, which is a good thing because strategic planning is an important part of planning for succession. Software tools and easy to use templates, containing detailed framework and sample texts, will help even the novice farmer along with their advisors create professional looking plans with tables and charts. For those people that don't know where to start, the tools are a big help removing one of the farmers traditional excuses for inaction.

Strategic planning for farmers involves creating a framework for making future decisions. This is critical today because if you need a bank loan for farm expansion, you will need to be able to fully explain your plan in a professional manner - something your banker can take to the board or to their masters in a distant city. How will your farm use the money? Will you be using the money to immediately increase revenues or is it for an investment that will take time before income results? What kind of monetary investment will be needed to get the ball rolling? How long will it be until you can expect to see a profit?

You can look at farm strategic planning as a sort of question and answer guide. You may need to take a step back and look at your ideas from the view of an outsider, something important when considering succession and planning. You might understand everything that there is to know about the farm, but others most certainly will not - especially the non-farm family members who are not part of the day to day activities.

One of the elements of farm strategic planning is to be able to explain and inform others. When planning for succession takes place, maybe one of the options under consideration is to interest investors in some part of the operation. A well thought out farm strategic plan may result in them wanting to become involved. If you have good ideas or something unique to offer, people will often jump at the opportunity to invest.

But, even if you don't need or want outside investors, farm strategic planning is essential. It allows you to put your goals on paper (or on your computer) where you can refer to them easily and stay focused on your objectives. Sometimes farmers realize too late that they have forgotten about a special market opportunity or failed to stay competitive where they were a market leader. They may have lost sight of their goals and their farm is suffering as a result.

Farm strategic planning tools are available online as well as in your local extension office. In many cases, the basic guides and other resources are free.

There is software available to help you assess your ideas and evaluate marketing strategies that you intend to use. Unless you are running a non-profit organization, farm strategic planning business should include ideas for growing the business to make passing down the farm financially painless for you.

How do you plan to reach your customers? How much will it cost? How effective has that type of advertising been for other owners?

Lots of questions are involved in farm strategic planning, but you already have all of the answers. You just might not know it yet.

When Don Jonovic PhD and I wrote "Passing Down the Farm the OTHER Farm Crisis", in 1986 - based on my experiences helping farm families plan for the future of their business during and beyond their lifetimes and Don's insights into family business dynamics. We submitted a draft of each chapter to a panel of farmers, ranchers, and agribusiness owners - who checked it for accuracy and clarity.

The result. It was packed with universal truths about relationships and the need to take charge of the activities that surround planning for the future of the farm. It remains a favorite of farmers and their advisors to this day.

When I decided it was time to create a version for the new millennium, we first had to ask and answer three important questions. "In two decades, what's changed, what's stayed the same, and what should we do?"

If you are serious about farm succession, or if you are a professional involved in farm succession planning - or an farm association executive, click the link below to learn solve the riddle of the emotional triangle that causes most farm succession plans to fail. http://www.passingdownthefarm.com/farm-succession-planning.html

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