Business Planning for New Business Owners
Business planning can be one of the most difficult tasks for a small business owner. You may have a vision of success and a good foundation for your business, but the steps that occur between are a little foggy. Having a business plan will give you a roadmap to navigate this scary path and help you to make good focused decisions for your business over the long term. Here are a few ways to begin the planning stages of this very important document.
- Visualize success. You likely already do this in your daydreams, but it is time to get really specific. How will your business operate on a daily basis as a successful entity? What will your routines, your store, and your customers look like at this point? How long will it have taken you to reach that dream level of success? Knowing these key facts will help you to decide what needs to change in your current business operations. Decide what steps need to happen and when you will take them. Now you’re already halfway there. Wasn’t that easy?
- Compare your previous plans to the actualities. This will show you trends in your style of planning. Do you overestimate sales? Underestimate the amount of marketing your need? Do you tend to spend a lot of time in DIY ventures only to have to outsource them later? Noting key trends such as this will help you to see what areas of your current plan are likely to be unrealistic.
- Get feedback. By all means, make sure this feedback is from people who are experienced in business and who are not so close to you that they can’t be honest. Ten is an ideal number because it will allow you to get this feedback from a variety of people. Make a list of people who are relevant to your business, either because they have run one like it before or because they are similar to your target customer group. Avoid people that you already talk to on a regular basis; you already know what they will say.
- Picture your ideal customer. You already know who they are approximately but flesh out their character a little. What is their gender and age? What does their living situation look like? Where does she shop for clothing, furniture, and food? Once you know this person, picture how they would feel encountering your business. What would they like and dislike? Why did they decide to visit you in the first place? Why are they going to come back—or never come back at all? Run through a normal transaction in your head from this customer’s point of view and try to identify areas of weakness.
Business planning can be difficult, but this list ought to give you a very good idea of where you want your business to go and what your key roadblocks will be in getting there. Just remember: no plan is written in stone. Business success tends to migrate to people who are flexible enough to make a plan and change it as soon as it ceases to work for them. However, making that plan in the first place lays the foundation that will be the basis for the rest of your business.
