Field Guide To Business Plans For A Small Business

A lot of people have been following up on my last few blog posts and after reading my free eBook have been asking about how to write their own business plan.

I’m really pleased about that because one of my missions in my professional life is to make sure that as many small business owners as possible awake to the necessity and indeed, benefits of having their own implementable business plan.

You see, my SMART Business Planning method was designed especially for small businesses.

If you own a small business on your own, or with your spouse or with another good friend as a partner, you can use this specially designed 5 step process to write a meaningful and actionable business plan for your small business.

The majority of small businesses fail within their first 5 years, and of the rest, most identify themselves as “struggling”.

However, on the positive side, most successful small businesses credit their success with having a business plan directing “traffic” as they grow their business. Successful small businesses know where they want to go and what to do to get there. They are organised. Like the old television series “The A-Team”, they have a plan!

Watch this video, especially if you’ve thought about preparing a business plan for your business, but never really started. You may have stalled because it was too expensive to hire a consultant, or perhaps you didn’t think you had the expertise to write a business plan. You may even have bought a book of templates, but found filling in the blanks didn’t work for you.

Well, none of these should stop you.

You do not need an expensive consultant.

You do not need special business-writing expertise, you do not need templates. What you need is to bring your own knowledge about your business and apply it to a formula.

It is critical that you start by clearly defining what your business will look like when you’ve “got there.”

This should be so clear that it is your driving force.

The clarity of your vision should include the reason why you started your business in the first place and what dream you wanted to achieve. It should include a very clear description of what your business will look like as your ultimate successful vision, where you can describe in detail who your customers are, and what you do for them; where you can describe what your people are like, how they work in the business and how they behave; where you can be specific about what your finances will look like, and which key business processes you will excel at in order to achieve this dream business.

Starting with this clear description of where you want to go means that your small business plan has a specific long-term target to work toward, and, that it describes all the indicators of “success” that you can plan to attain.

All the other SMART Business Planning phases of looking at where you are now and Bridging The Gap follow, by logically seeing how you can get from where you are to that vision.

Having a single, clear cohesive strategic direction means that all your day-to-day actions and decisions can be tuned in to achieving that ultimate vision.

This avoids flip-flopping from one business direction to another and ending up working so hard every dau=y to get you nowhere.

Now, download my free eBook called How To Plan The Best Future For Your Business and learn about:-

• Why as a small business you absolutely need a business plan now;
• Why the old way of getting your business plan doesn’t work for small businesses and why the SMART Business Planning formula does;
• The different types of business plans and which is right for you;
• What should be in a business plan and what should it look like; and
• How to write your own business plan by following 5 steps, including the critical first step of getting ready to write your business plan.

You can get the free eBook here.

Let’s get this done!

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