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Roadmap To Your Business Success-
Planning For Your Business Plan
Planning For Your Business Plan
Having a business plan helps you focus, be accountable and
enables you to ask pertinent questions about yourself, your
business and your business environment. It helps you to
identify all the potential risks your business can face and
what your strategy will be to mitigate these risks. By
identifying a business strategy ahead of time, the easier it
will be to understand your direction, your budgets, schedules,
and how to market to your target audience.
But before you jump in to create your plan, there are four
important steps that must initially take place before you
begin:
Step 1 – Know who you are
The first step to creating your business plan is to understand
who you are. Here are some very specific questions to ask
yourself:
• What kind of business do you have? What do you do?
• Who is your customer?
• What do you sell?
• How does your product/service benefit your customer
and how do you do it better than anyone else?
• What does your product lack in comparison to your
competitors?
• How will you alleviate external threats to your business
such as in an economic downturn?
Answers to these questions will help you in creating your
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT)
analysis and will help you identify positive or negative
internal and external factors to achieving your business
objectives.
The second part to step one is that you’ll want to ask
yourself some personal questions:
• What do you enjoy doing personally and professionally?
• What are you proud of personally and professionally?
Starting a business is very time intensive and it’s easy to let
personal goals and aspirations get pushed aside. What
could start out as a passion with drive and total commitment
to serve can easily become a chore when burn out sets in.
You’ll want to avoid this by including a balance in your life.
By answering the personal questions above, you’ll have set
the stage in creating your brand story for the branding
section of your business plan.
Step 2 – Know where your business is today
Next, you’ll need to know where you are today. This may
take some time to answer unless you are in your first year.
Otherwise research will be required to get through this step.
To start, you’ll need to gather answers to questions such as:
• Where did your business come from last year? Here,
you are looking for answers as to not only what type of
clients did you get but also from what sales and marketing
activity.
• How many new clients did you acquire? How many
repeat clients did you have?
• What is your average dollar spent and average dollar
made per client?
• What is your closing ratio?
Answers to these questions will help you plan things such as
determining how many customers must walk through the
door or must you get in front of should you want to increase
your earnings. Step two is an essential step in not only
creating the marketing plan, but in creating your sales plan
and understanding what it will take for your business to be
successful.
Step 3 – Assessing what has worked and what hasn’t
After you have determined where your business is today, you’
ll now want to evaluate what you’ve been doing. Is the road
you are on leading you to where you want to go? Take a
hard look at what you’ve been doing and what has brought
in business. When you find that certain activities are not as
successful as others in bringing in business, don’t keep
repeating them. Eliminate them from the plan. If you’re not
tracking where your business is coming from (advertising,
print, radio, TV, direct mail or word of mouth) then start –
TODAY! It doesn’t make sense to continue spending money
on anything that doesn’t increase the bottom line.
Step 4 – Where you want to be
In this step, you’ll want to allow yourself to dream. Ask
yourself where do you want to go? Write down all that you
want to do, to be, to achieve, to learn, and to earn. This
should be both professionally and personally. Here you’ll
begin setting goals for yourself. These goals can be
changed, adjusted or altered along the way when
necessary. It’s important that you at least create them so
that you have something to measure your success against. A
well balanced plan should include all aspects of your life –
professional, family, spiritual, recreation and growth.
Having completed these four steps will enable you to create
the backbone of your business (and life) plan. It will be a
plan that is a living document to be updated as you or your
business changes, a document that will keep you on a path
driven for success.
And now, I’d like to invite you to download a free webinar on
how to create A Successful Business Plan In 7 Steps. Click
here to download your copy!
About Tonya Fallows:
After 8 years of practicing Real Estate, Tonya Fallows, a
Realtor and an owner at Prestige Real Estate Group, LLC in
Denver, CO, has always worked with a business plan since
beginning her practice. During the process of writing and
“living with” a business plan, Ms. Fallows discovered that
incorporating one’s professional and personal life into a plan
made it easier to accomplish all that one may want in life.
Soon Ms. Fallows began receiving requests from colleagues
to help build their business plans. Ms. Fallows has been
working with business owners and business professionals
creating business plans since. To contact Tonya Fallows,
email her at TFallows@prestigerealtygroup.com.
enables you to ask pertinent questions about yourself, your
business and your business environment. It helps you to
identify all the potential risks your business can face and
what your strategy will be to mitigate these risks. By
identifying a business strategy ahead of time, the easier it
will be to understand your direction, your budgets, schedules,
and how to market to your target audience.
But before you jump in to create your plan, there are four
important steps that must initially take place before you
begin:
Step 1 – Know who you are
The first step to creating your business plan is to understand
who you are. Here are some very specific questions to ask
yourself:
• What kind of business do you have? What do you do?
• Who is your customer?
• What do you sell?
• How does your product/service benefit your customer
and how do you do it better than anyone else?
• What does your product lack in comparison to your
competitors?
• How will you alleviate external threats to your business
such as in an economic downturn?
Answers to these questions will help you in creating your
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT)
analysis and will help you identify positive or negative
internal and external factors to achieving your business
objectives.
The second part to step one is that you’ll want to ask
yourself some personal questions:
• What do you enjoy doing personally and professionally?
• What are you proud of personally and professionally?
Starting a business is very time intensive and it’s easy to let
personal goals and aspirations get pushed aside. What
could start out as a passion with drive and total commitment
to serve can easily become a chore when burn out sets in.
You’ll want to avoid this by including a balance in your life.
By answering the personal questions above, you’ll have set
the stage in creating your brand story for the branding
section of your business plan.
Step 2 – Know where your business is today
Next, you’ll need to know where you are today. This may
take some time to answer unless you are in your first year.
Otherwise research will be required to get through this step.
To start, you’ll need to gather answers to questions such as:
• Where did your business come from last year? Here,
you are looking for answers as to not only what type of
clients did you get but also from what sales and marketing
activity.
• How many new clients did you acquire? How many
repeat clients did you have?
• What is your average dollar spent and average dollar
made per client?
• What is your closing ratio?
Answers to these questions will help you plan things such as
determining how many customers must walk through the
door or must you get in front of should you want to increase
your earnings. Step two is an essential step in not only
creating the marketing plan, but in creating your sales plan
and understanding what it will take for your business to be
successful.
Step 3 – Assessing what has worked and what hasn’t
After you have determined where your business is today, you’
ll now want to evaluate what you’ve been doing. Is the road
you are on leading you to where you want to go? Take a
hard look at what you’ve been doing and what has brought
in business. When you find that certain activities are not as
successful as others in bringing in business, don’t keep
repeating them. Eliminate them from the plan. If you’re not
tracking where your business is coming from (advertising,
print, radio, TV, direct mail or word of mouth) then start –
TODAY! It doesn’t make sense to continue spending money
on anything that doesn’t increase the bottom line.
Step 4 – Where you want to be
In this step, you’ll want to allow yourself to dream. Ask
yourself where do you want to go? Write down all that you
want to do, to be, to achieve, to learn, and to earn. This
should be both professionally and personally. Here you’ll
begin setting goals for yourself. These goals can be
changed, adjusted or altered along the way when
necessary. It’s important that you at least create them so
that you have something to measure your success against. A
well balanced plan should include all aspects of your life –
professional, family, spiritual, recreation and growth.
Having completed these four steps will enable you to create
the backbone of your business (and life) plan. It will be a
plan that is a living document to be updated as you or your
business changes, a document that will keep you on a path
driven for success.
And now, I’d like to invite you to download a free webinar on
how to create A Successful Business Plan In 7 Steps. Click
here to download your copy!
About Tonya Fallows:
After 8 years of practicing Real Estate, Tonya Fallows, a
Realtor and an owner at Prestige Real Estate Group, LLC in
Denver, CO, has always worked with a business plan since
beginning her practice. During the process of writing and
“living with” a business plan, Ms. Fallows discovered that
incorporating one’s professional and personal life into a plan
made it easier to accomplish all that one may want in life.
Soon Ms. Fallows began receiving requests from colleagues
to help build their business plans. Ms. Fallows has been
working with business owners and business professionals
creating business plans since. To contact Tonya Fallows,
email her at TFallows@prestigerealtygroup.com.
By: Tonya Fallows
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