Most Important Questions for Business – Business Scale?
Published January 21, 2011 | 
Does the Business Scale?
Entrepreneurs quickly learn to understand that the differentiation between modest wealth and obscene riches is “scale.” For those that don’t know, scalable businesses are those that can produce the next product or widget at a tiny proportion of the cost.
For a simple illustration think about the cost of developing software, and understand that once Microsoft invested a huge amount to develop the code for its Windows operating system, the incremental cost of printing each additional copy became almost nothing. The question then becomes what models are difficult to scale? The answer is to think service businesses, where the need for people grows with revenue.
An extremely important factor when building a business for profit and success is structuring the business for growth. We’ve had years of experience and worked with numerous clients that never structured their business to be scaled up. 
Fortunately, the good news is that any business model can be restructured for scalability at any time, but sooner is better than later. We are absolutely positive that the most strategic, lucrative, and best thing you will ever do is structure your business for growth.
Entrepreneurs have a propensity to get extremely excited about innovative business ideas they have, and they frequently act too quickly and set those ideas into action without pausing and taking the necessary time to plot out and plan their entrepreneurial journey first.
Believe it or not, this is a frequent event in the business lives of the majority of Entrepreneurs, and not planning out a good path to your goals is risky. 
Understand completely that by not performing the first few steps crucial to structure your business you unquestionably set your self up for defeat.
Structuring a business is mentally demanding and exhaustive in the beginning and frequently requires assistance from others in order to get additional viewpoints and perspectives. More often than not the best action to take is block out time in your schedule to begin researching what authorities in your industry are doing, specifically how they have structured their businesses. This serves to immediately do away with a number of unnecessary tasks for you. If you believe someone in your industry is an authority and you would like structure your business similarly, you should then keep their contact information handy.
When you have completed what you feel is a functional business structure and processes, let operations run for a while there isn’t any significant growth so that you can determine any issues and problems to adjust for before you have huge contracts and expenses to deal with.
Finally, structuring your business for scalability is one of the most important things you can do, even if you rather it not grow much. In the long run, operations will be show to be much easier if you have strong systems that have been proven functional, and automate your work flow.
Operations Plan – Management Team
Published January 12, 2011 | 
This is often marked as the most important component of any business, since it is a widely stated fact that even the best new idea or existing plan will fall short if executed unsuccessfully. The Management Team portion of the business plan must demonstrate to the investor or lender why the vital company personnel are highly qualified to implement and execute on the business model.
Description of Key/Vital Team Members
The Management Team portion should consist of biographies of vital team members and feature their primary responsibilities. Biographies should take account of the previous positions that the individuals have held and specific detailed successes in each.
These accomplishments could consist of the launch and growth of new innovative businesses or managing branches or departments of recognized businesses. Biographies must also contain educational experience and additional relevant information.
Team member biographies ought to be adapted to the company’s growth stage. For example, a start-up business must call attention to its management’s achievement launching and growing businesses. A more established business must highlight how team members have effectively operated in the structure of larger enterprises.
Management Team Openings
Reflecting the phase or stage of the business, strategic operative parts may be absent from the team. This is okay given that the plan directly defines the responsibilities that these parties will assume the part of, and recognizes the important characteristics of the persons that will be engaged. Conversely, it is generally not to your advantage if personnel are absent for highly crucial responsibilities. For instance, a plan that is essentially a marketing plan should not search for financing lacking a tremendous marketing team.
Board Member Descriptions
The Management Team portion must additionally contain biographies of the business’ Advisory Board and/or Board of Directors. At the same time as having well-known advisors/board members adds standing and credibility, it is extremely effective to make clear how these advisors will absolutely have an effect on the business through strategic guidance and/or providing channels to major clients, partners, suppliers, and so on.
Operations Plan – Business Milestones
Published January 11, 2011 | Long-Term Processes
The second section of the Operations Plan is demonstrating that the team capability to execute the long- term business vision. The best way to present this is using a chart. On the left side, list the key milestones that the Company must reach and on the right, the target date for achieving them. Like the chart in the Company Analysis (detailing past accomplishments) these new milestones should include expected dates when (1) New products and services will be introduced to the marketplace, (2) Revenue milestones will be attained (e.g., date when sales will surpass million dollar mark), (3) Key partnerships will be executed, (4) Key customer contracts will be secured, (5) Key financial events will occur (future funding rounds, IPO etc.), (6) and Key employees will be hired.
Always use additional text where necessary in order to support the projections presented in the chart.
The milestone forecasts or projections presented in the Operations Plan must be in agreement with the projections in the Financial Plan. In both areas, it is important to be aggressive but believable. 
Presenting a plan in which the company grows too rapidly will show the naiveté or inexperience of the management team, while portraying too conservative a growth plan will frequently fail to enthuse the potential investor (who will require a high rate of return over a relatively short time period).
Once again, proving believable milestones is crucial. Confident knowledgeable investors and lenders know how rapidly businesses grow and if you are unrealistically aggressive, you will waste valuable credibility.
Marketing Plan – Customer Retention, and Partnerships
Published January 7, 2011 | Customer Retention
You should understand that the four P’s mostly discuss how to attract customers, and marketing departments must also develop and build long-term, lasting revenue-generating relationships with customers. The developed processes and strategies through which the marketing department plans to keep and maintain customer relationships should also be detailed in the Marketing Plan. Such processes could include the implementation of effective customer relationship management (CRM) tools, building extensive network relationships allowing more people using products or services making it more difficult for a competitor to penetrate the market, and ongoing value-added services.
Partnerships
The popular practice of forging partnerships to improve market penetration has become quite commonplace, and the basic fact is that, in spite of whom the partnership is with,
partnerships taken by themselves are meaningless.
Exactly what are significant are the terms of the partnership. Case in point, while it seems great to say you have a partnership with one of the major search engines, the fine points of the partnership are exactly what investors find important. Another case in point, investors will look disappointingly upon a partnership in which the search engine earns a commission rate of 40% on customers it refers to you. Conversely, investors would look much more favorably upon a more equitable partnership.
By itself if partnerships are an important part of the marketing plan, be sure to provide detail of the specific information of the partnerships, and this includes how the partnership will work, ownership interest of each partner, responsibilities of each, and the type of customer leads expected from each partner, and so on.
Marketing Plan – Price and Place
Published January 6, 2011 | Price
This important section of the business plan should detail the price point(s) at which the business’s products and/or services will be sold. If the products or services are sold as packaged bundles, these should be detailed thoroughly in this section of the plan. Underlying reasoning for the pricing ought to be specified when appropriate for example, why the business has selected an introduction fee plus monthly membership fees as opposed to a one-time lifetime membership fee.
Place
The final “P” refers to “Place” or “Distribution Channel” and should make clear how a business’s products and/or services will be distributed to its customers. This section is critical because if customers experience difficulty accessing products and services, they won’t be able to easily purchase them.
This section is especially critical for high-growth, capital-challenged businesses. The attainment of profit-effective distribution channels is often the most difficult challenge for these type businesses.
Examples of distribution methods include (1) Retail location, (2) Website, (3) Another website host like products/services sold through/hosted by another website — application service provider/private label model, (4) Another retail location like products/services sold through a third-party’s retail location, (5) Another website location like products/services sold through another website, (6) Direct mail catalogs.