The Elements of a Business Plan – Last Five
Published December 28, 2011 | 
The result of successful planning should always be effective, efficient, cost-effective, and highly-capable of guiding the production of the desired results, and involving the most efficient investment of resources.
What are the Elements or Sections that should be included in a Business Plan?
Remember, the first five elements of a business plan create an impression of the business opportunity and specific market information or research to confirm it. The remaining five elements of the plan are concentrated mainly on tactic, for the most part the marketing, operational, financial and management strategies that business plans use.
Marketing Plan – The marketing plan provides facts, and details your strategy for penetration of the target market niche. Major components include the following:
- A thorough description of the company’s preferred strategic position
- Details of the company’s product, along with potential product extensions and service offerings
- The company’s desired branding and image strategies
- The company’s promotional strategies
- Descriptive overview of the company’s pricing strategies
- Current and potential strategic marketing partnerships and alliances
Operations/Design and Development Plans – These components detail the in-house strategies for transitioning the business from concept to reality, and needs to answer questions including, but not limited to:
- Functionality required for operating the business?
- Milestones to reach that allow the business launch?
- Processes for quality control?
Management Team – The Management Team shows that the business has the required human resources to successfully execute the plan, and this component answers important questions including:
- Identification of the key management personnel and what are their backgrounds? What additional management team members are required to make the business a success?
- Other investors and/or shareholders, if any?
- Identification of the Board of Directors and/or Board of Advisors?
- Identification of professional advisors (e.g., lawyer, accounting firm), if any?
Financial Plan – The Financial Plan entails the promotion of the company’s revenue and profitability model. It should include comprehensive descriptions of the strategic assumptions the model is based upon, analysis of significant revenue and cost variables, along with comparable analysis of actual revenue results for existing companies with similar business models in similar sized markets.
In addition, the financial feasibility measures the total amount of capital requirements for the business, the proposed use of the capital, and the projected future earnings. The feasibility also includes Projected Income Statements, Balance Sheets and Cash Flow Statements, broken out either monthly or quarterly for the first three years (with applied seasonal trends), and annually for three to six years as required.
Importantly, all of the assumptions and projections in the financial feasibility must be based on and be supported by the assumption descriptions and explanations offered. The Financial Feasibility or Plan is what the entrepreneur uses to communicate exactly how the management team will “monetize” the overall vision for the new business enterprise.
Appendix – The Appendix is used to simply support the rest of the business plan. Every business plan should have a complete set of financial projections, with the summary of these financials in the Executive Summary. Other miscellaneous documentation that could appear in the Appendix includes any technical drawings or images, resumes, personal financial statements, customer lists and letters, and anything else that help one reach a clear and complete understanding of the business.
Skillfully and comprehensively presenting these components in their business plan helps entrepreneurs to better understand their business opportunity and thereby contributes to the critical task of persuading investors that the opportunity may be right for them as well.
Strategic Social Media Plan for Small Business
Published April 3, 2010 | I can assure you of the daily impact of social media that happens without you ever knowing it, and of course, everyone’s heard the expert’s advice that you need a social networking profile on sites including Twitter and Facebook, and the longer you wait, the further you get left behind by your social media savvy competition.
So feeling the pressure to do something, you create a profile and start telling everyone about your products and services, but that is not the way to use the social media tools and applications that you have at your disposal, by repeating the established traditional marketing practiced for generations.
If you follow the traditional approach to your social media strategy, I can promise you, that you will do nothing but waste your valuable time, a precious asset you can afford to waste very little of, time you need to spend identifying and developing new business opportunities, dealing with your clients in person, face to face, and growing you business.
Younger Entrepreneurs and business owners must be extremely careful not to think for one moment that social media technology and the Web are going to replace face to face contact, which as great a tools as they are, the technologies can never do. It is important to understand completely that the exact same principles used face to face, apply directly to social media, with the method of contact and delivery, being the only real difference.
There are companies both large and small that have launched their social media strategies with profiles scattered across the social networking spectrum, yet something seems to be missing, and only with closer examination it becomes evident what the problem is. The networks and sites are filled with company staff members commenting and connecting with each other, but there isn’t a consumer in sight, no one to engage with, not the most critically important people, the customers.
Engagements with the customer is THE reason you carefully create and plan your social media strategies, to create and enhance your reputation, and strengthen the public’s perception of you as the local expert, the trusted advisor and 
go-to person, and finally engage your community and provide valued information and advice.
Try and understand the reasons why people are drawn to, and freely interact within the social networks, and it doesn’t take long to realize they are there to connect with each other, with family and friends, to engage and interact at different levels with others that are of like-mind and draw strength from each other, to share information and experiences, to share activities, all of which creates a great sense of community.
Entrepreneurs and business owners need to have a clear understanding of this human motivation and work closely with it to bring maximum efficiencies and return on investment by creating a clear and focused social media strategy for their business.
So the real question to begin with is what is the best approach to develop and strategically plan social media?
To begin with, you need to determine the reasons why you should have a social networking presence, and if the reason is only because everyone else is doing it and you don’t want to get left out, or your competition in the market is doing it and you have to compete, then stop right there. You want to develop and strategically plan how you will use social media because it gives you another powerful ad medium to contact and capture the valuable attention of consumers that are prospective customers, because it presents a great opportunity to take your important message to a 
potentially much larger market, for the big exposure it can deliver to you and your brand, and finally because you are an expert in your field and consumers are looking for an expert to advise, coach and provide motivation.
Start at the beginning by preparing a general strategy for social media, and then check out and decide on ways in which you can start building an audience. Determine answers to questions including will you begin by creating a website, blog, or go right to Facebook and MySpace, do you start using Twitter right away, and on what networking sites (i.e. LinkedIn etc.) do you plan to create profiles?
What is your brand and how do you plan to announce it? Always remember to focus on you and your team helping others, and how you actually provide assistance, and your business is the one to contact when your service or products are needed, which in turn raises your brand value and associated consumer awareness, and increases your profile relevancy on the web.
Now the first step should be to set up accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, check to see where you fit in the community, and be sure and upload all your contacts into Facebook and start the routine process of adding friends to your page on a regular schedule.
Establish yourself the goal of getting your initial personal contacts engaged and then begin to connect and engage with other local businesses and customers. While you are doing this, be sure and build a schedule to allocate time each week to this continuing task or you can be quickly overwhelmed when attempting to keep up with the multitude of conversations happening.
Then as your familiarity with the sites and networks grows (and it will), you might learn that some of them are not for 
you and your business, which is okay and part of the process, because at least you learned for yourself, and you are more informed about social media than when you started the process.
Now you are learning, and at this point you can start to build your blog, and remember that your blog web site is where all roads and associated customer traffic leads, and everything else you do should be designed with the goal of getting people to your blog and when there, interacting with you on your terms and “on your ground.”
It can be great just to have a Facebook fanpage that can drive traffic to your blog and web sites, but the effectiveness of both working together for you can create a synergistic affect for a highly successful social media strategic plan.
Lastly, remember that along with the creation of your blog site comes the continuing responsibility of adding content on a weekly basis, and you should allocate and schedule at least two plus hours for each week.
In addition, you need to use the same strategy for all the social network sites you use by allocating time during each week in your plan’s schedule to update your sites, and always remember it’s about continuing or perpetual engagement with your community as though you were actually face to face, not just about only promoting your latest product, and your social media strategic plan will lead you down the road to great success.
Power in the Results of Your Plan!
Published August 31, 2009 | 
I need to make one statement right away and get it out in the open, and that is the fact that no business or strategic plan is ever 100% dead on accurate, but of course having no plan is absolutely never the right thing to do either, so let’s look at the actual results of the business compared to those projected in the business plan.
Another seemingly contradictory statement is that most plans are wrong and yet extremely vital, it’s an unexpected and surprising thing to hear from someone who forecasts and prepares business and strategic plans for a living, especially for those that have never developed and put a plan together, so after making a statement like that where else do we have to go, except to the very core of what business and strategic planning is.
Let me start out by saying that those who are deeply involved in plans prepare projections that many times are incorrect, and of everyone I know, only a few even came close in predicting the steep plunge in the global economy last year in the summer and fall of 2008, 
so it goes without saying that those who are deeply involved in business planning processes around the world have been going through a lot of changes, adjustments and corrections, and multiple reviews and revisions, a classic true learning experience for everyone.
So you see why my opening statements about needless ineffective business and strategic plans, and yet their importance should start to make sense, and as we look ahead to the rest of the 2009 and further ahead to 2010, many upbeat forecasts that are being questioned, are in the review and revision process and starting to reflect the realities of the global economic situation, which always brings up the question why do business and strategic planning in the first place, is everyone just wasting their time developing plans and forecasts?
The answer should quickly become obvious that although the results are inaccurate at times, how we can determine where we are, if a map hasn’t been produced to show us how we got there in the first place and of course, where we are going.
If and when you look at your plan prepared last year, and of course the results should be greatly different from what actually took place, you would compare the two in detail and look not only where the differences are, but where the greatest differences exist, for example, where expenses were tied 
to sales, where sales performed as expected, and look for how all the numbers were supposed to tie together, not just why they didn’t, and many times contributing factors that exacerbated the economic impacts can be identified, and those factors can be planned for and possibly eliminated as adjustments are made for the future.
And If you are like the many thousands of global entrepreneurs and organizational leaders that did not have a business or strategic plan, then this might be a really good time to get the process started in order for you to develop and have a much clearer view of your future business, and you can start by making some simple projections for sales and revenues, costs and expenses, and at this time don’t worry about whether they’re wrong or not, just try and make sure that you check each month to determine where and how, and in which direction the numbers were incorrect so that you can make necessary adjustments as a result of the information, and this whole process should bring you much closer to the action of what is taking place in the local, national, and global markets, and increase your awareness of the actions you need to take to increase your success.
By implementing the review process on a monthly basis, if you are wrong you are only wrong one month at a time, and as you use the plan’s comparison to actual results and associated analysis to see more closely what is happening exactly, your adjustments will improve, become more accurate, and the future results will be much more in tune with market activity, and you should begin to see monthly improvements.
These planning and analysis steps will increase your analysis skills, and put you in a better position to forecast more accurately when the markets should finally start to improve, and they will at some point, and you will be able to use what you learned in the process to see the signs, anticipate what will take place, and plan your actions accordingly.
So although the results of planning may be wrong and inaccurate, it is still a critical key component to an Entrepreneur’s or organizational Leader’s strategies for success, and an essential tool for successful global Entrepreneurs, as they learn in addition to preparing an initial business or strategic plan, an important part of the process is making necessary changes and adjustments, ultimately determining how to recover in the most effective and efficient manner, and how would you know how to recover if you didn’t prepare the business and strategic plan in the first place.
The Power of Purpose Unleashed!
Published August 29, 2009 | 
Vision Statements and Mission Statements are often inspiring words chosen by highly successful Entrepreneurs and business leaders to convey the direction of the business organization in a clear and concise manner, and through carefully crafting a clear mission statement and vision statement, you can powerfully communicate your intentions and motivate yourself and your team to realize a well defined and inspiring common vision of the future.
But what about these two terms often used interchangeably, and although there is a vast difference between a mission and vision, and the two concepts play-off of one another, they work in very different ways.
Mission is the purpose or reason for the existence of your business and it is a general heading or direction. A mission is what you stand for, should be timeless and it should rarely, if ever, change and it should always stand the test of time in that there is no end to the mission.
A vision is a specific future destination or a dream with a deadline, and having said that the vision should change over time. The vision must say “yes” to some ideas and “no” to others, since it’s about what the future might be, could be, and shouldn’t be, example: “To put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960’s.”
Mission is about preserving the core of which provides continuity and stability, like a fixed stake in the ground or the horizon limiting possibilities, and acting conservatively, 
while the vision is about stimulating progress, urging continual change, compelling constant movement, expanding possibilities, and revolutionary change.
To build your mission remember, a mission statement should be somewhat timeless and it should apply not only today but possibly even twenty to fifty years from now, and it should put forth a general direction or heading stating what it is that you stand for. In essence, a mission can never really be achieved as it should be on going, and if it can be achieved if completed, then it is a vision not your mission, and you should think of your mission as your true north heading on your compass. Microsoft’s mission is simple as “Help entrepreneurs realize their full potential”.
To create your mission statement, first identify your business’s “purpose or reason for existence,” and be sure to focus on the idea or approach that make’s your business stand out and apart from its competitors, and is the main reason that customers will choose to do business with you and not your competition.
Next identify the key measures of your success and make sure you choose the most important measures (and not too many of them!), combine your winning idea and success measures into a tangible and measurable goal, then refine the words until you have a concise and precise statement of your mission, which expresses your ideas, measures and desired result.
Once you’ve created your mission statement, move on to create your vision statement and first identify your organization’s mission, then define the human value in that mission, next, identify what you, your customers and stakeholders will value most about how your business will achieve this mission and further define these into the values that your business has or should have. 
Combine your mission and values, and refine the words until you are satisfied you have a vision statement inspiring enough to energize and motivate people inside and outside your business.
Finally, ask yourself what big goal do you want to try to achieve in the next three to five years, what does success really look like in five years, how should your business be different in five years then it is now, and using your own metrics of success and approach to accomplish, for you to consider yourself successful? Microsoft’s vision is as simple as “a computer in every home that’s running Microsoft software”.
How to Structure a Business Plan and Narrative
Published August 27, 2009 | The first thing I need to point out and emphasize, is that there are no required formats for a business plan and with good reason, but there is however, a fairly common structure that most business plans use as a skeletal framework. 
In order to provide a context and to the scope of your business plan, you should identify the time period for which the plan will focus, be it a one year, two years, three or more, this time constraint is necessary in order to provide a window of context for your thinking and decision-making.
First of all, think of a business plan as a story, a story that explains how a business works, and when a business plan doesn’t work, it’s typically because it fails either the narrative test or the numbers test, two questions which simply ask “Does the story makes sense?”, and “Does the story add up?” A business plan is therefore usually broken down into these two test sections, first, a written section typically called the plan narrative, and second, the numbers section, typically referred to as the financial projections or feasibility, and even though separate, 
the two sections must be completely entwined, which is where the business plan problems surface by the two sections failing to relate and tie information together.
The narrative of a business plan is usually broken down into three major sections including first the business description section, second the market strategy section, and third the management and operations section. The business description section simply describes attributes about the business itself and should include company mission/the purpose, company vision/dream with the deadline, and the section should also include current business status and description of future plans. Along with the business description, information about the industry should be included indicating the chief characteristics and trends, and finally the product and service description section along with proprietary features and future development plans.
The market strategy section documents all of the activities surrounding the most important function of your business, the marketing, which addresses the questions of what you sell and how you sell it, and should include a market analysis with target market and market trends along with the growth potential, competitive analysis with competitor profiles, market niche and market share, and a comparison of strengths and weaknesses. Market strategy also includes cost, differentiation, focus, pricing strategy, distribution strategy, service and warranty policies, and promotional strategies including social media strategy, advertising, public relations, personal selling, and sales promotions.
The management and operations section of your plan is critical, and many times closely focused upon by potential investors and lenders, because it describes who will manage the business and how they will do so, including the description of how you produce the products you sell, or the services that you deliver, and of cour
se, basic details of how the day-to-day operations of the business are conducted. The management and operations section of your plan should also include the management team listing including education, background and responsibilities, and the ownership structure of the business, whether sole proprietor, partnership, S corporation, LLC, etc., and a strategic partner and supplier discussion along with human capital and personnel needs discussion, and finally insurance and risk management discussion and facilities overview.