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Posts Tagged ‘planning’

A business planning template can be an invaluable tool for a first-time entrepreneur or any entrepreneur working in an unfamiliar business sector. Using a template that is specific to your business sector can shortcut the work and formatting you have to do significantly. Here are three steps to make the best use of a template.

Read Through the Entire Template

First, read through the entire business plan template to understand the guidance it gives which you may make use of. Read both the sample text and financials and all comments and instructions given by the creators to help you along. By reading the template through, you get a sense of what the finished product might feel like and what type of work you must do to get your plan to this level.

Adjust the Financials

Before you do any writing, work on the financials to make them consistent with your plans. Enter your startup costs (after you have researched them) cost of goods sold, operating expenses, and revenue projections. The financial model with the template should help by automatically updating the financial statements of the plan based on the changes in these basic drivers. Check that the financial results (profit, return to investors, and cash reserves on hand) are appropriate for your business before moving on to the next step.

Customize the Plan

Next, customize the text of the plan starting with the company overview, working through to the end of the plan, and ending with the executive summary. As the executive summary pulls from every other section of the plan it is always best written last. Be sure that the language you use is entirely your own. Use sample text from the business plan template only as guidance to the tone and type of content you should use. Refer to guidance within the template to be sure you are fulfilling the purpose of each section as you write.

Plans are very crucial in every business. Without it, you will not have a clear way in managing your business systematically. It will serve as your guide in meeting the goals of your business and achieving success. For this reason, it is very important to plan your business carefully in order to have a clear set of strategies in meeting your goals. In terms of online businesses, whenever you are starting it or already managing one, planning is very significant in succeeding it. Even though the world of internet is very stable, on the other hand, there are lots of businesses appearing in it everyday. This fact makes any newly started business unstable upon beginning, so online business planning is foremost needed in surviving the online market.

Upon planning your online business, it is helpful to read first some informational articles about starting up an online business. There are lots of articles around and it is even now available in various forms of eBooks. In reading it, make sure to understand its every aspect that can be beneficial in formulating a plan for your business. You can also read some business plans offered for free in several websites. In searching for helpful articles upon planning your business, you must first finalize the kind and type of your business since business plans are categorized according to the kind of business. Examples of categories are food business, clothing and accessories, electronic gadgets and a lot more. After you have determined the kind of online business that you want, then, you must gather all the related articles that you think are useful in planning your online business. Sort it according to importance and combine it all in order to come up with a set of tactics useful in managing an online business. Online business planning is truly a worthwhile step to accomplish before starting an online business, so take it seriously as this can be your key in achieving success.

In starting the plan of your online business, set first the time frame of your plans. You must give yourself a deadline schedule so you can be directed in formulating your plans. Upon searching for sources, you can freely utilize the internet for relevant information. You can also ask advice from experts or from those who have already started up an online business. Remember that testimonials and advices are the most important part of your business plan since no other knowledge can match the learning gained from actual experiences. Then, after you have finished your online business planning, make sure to compile and follow it strictly. A business plan is worthless if you don’t have plans in following it so be strict in yourself in terms of making it as guide in your online business. On the other hand, you can still modify it whenever you have found certain points inappropriate for the flow of your online business. Just keep in mind that planning your online business is a significant step in achieving success to your chosen line of business, so take it as serious as possible.

Plans are very crucial in every business. Without it, you will not have a clear way in managing your business systematically. It will serve as your guide in meeting the goals of your business and achieving success. For this reason, it is very important to plan your business carefully in order to have a clear set of strategies in meeting your goals. In terms of online businesses, whenever you are starting it or already managing one, planning is very significant in succeeding it. Even though the world of internet is very stable, on the other hand, there are lots of businesses appearing in it everyday. This fact makes any newly started business unstable upon beginning, so online business planning is foremost needed in surviving the online market.

Upon planning your online business, it is helpful to read first some informational articles about starting up an online business. There are lots of articles around and it is even now available in various forms of eBooks. In reading it, make sure to understand its every aspect that can be beneficial in formulating a plan for your business. You can also read some business plans offered for free in several websites. In searching for helpful articles upon planning your business, you must first finalize the kind and type of your business since business plans are categorized according to the kind of business. Examples of categories are food business, clothing and accessories, electronic gadgets and a lot more. After you have determined the kind of online business that you want, then, you must gather all the related articles that you think are useful in planning your online business. Sort it according to importance and combine it all in order to come up with a set of tactics useful in managing an online business. Online business planning is truly a worthwhile step to accomplish before starting an online business, so take it seriously as this can be your key in achieving success.

In starting the plan of your online business, set first the time frame of your plans. You must give yourself a deadline schedule so you can be directed in formulating your plans. Upon searching for sources, you can freely utilize the internet for relevant information. You can also ask advice from experts or from those who have already started up an online business. Remember that testimonials and advices are the most important part of your business plan since no other knowledge can match the learning gained from actual experiences. Then, after you have finished your online business planning, make sure to compile and follow it strictly. A business plan is worthless if you dont have plans in following it so be strict in yourself in terms of making it as guide in your online business. On the other hand, you can still modify it whenever you have found certain points inappropriate for the flow of your online business. Just keep in mind that planning your online business is a significant step in achieving success to your chosen line of business, so take it as serious as possible.

This is the fourth in a short series of articles from Learn to Write Proposals examining how to write a proposal.

If you compare sales people and project managers yu may conclude that you wouldn’t want your project managers going out selling and writing bids and you wouldn’t want your sales people running your biggest projects. That’s a huge generalisation and probably not fair to the many exceptions to the rule, however, writing sales documents is a different type of writing that many internally focused staff aren’t familiar with.
   
But the point is that quite often, sales people aren’t the best at planning and managing detail, especially when it relates to project plans and the like.There’s a good reason for this – they are often out on the road, visiting clients, managing relationships and don’t have time to micro-manage a complex development project…even if that project is a written proposal. Plus, dealing with the detail isn’t what drives sales people.

With the advent of proposal centres and bid team support in many organisations the onus has been taken off a lot of sales people when it comes to planning the detail of a bid, managing those who need to contribute to it and actually writing the business proposal. Where bid teams exist they often take over the project and the account manager becomes a contributor to the combined effort.

But what about in smaller organisations where there is no bid team? How do they manage the production of sales documents? Ideally you need someone to manage the project (of writing the proposal) and that person should have commercial awareness to do it. Look at the job advertisements for bid team managers and you’ll see some of the skills required.

So if you don’t have a bid team behind you, or you are managing a bid for the first time, what do you need to do?

Firstly, check all the requirements of the RFP or tender documentation – know exactly what you have to submit and when. Just like any project planning think about the goals and work backwards, considering all the project dependencies.If it’s a large bid with a lot of people working on it, then get some help off a project manager in putting a project plan together.

Learn to Write Proposals has a whole bid management toolkit to support the bid preparation. Our bid planner includes key things that you need to include in your bid planning including the Proposal Development Schedule. This requires some basic planning, such as:

Key Event
Start date / Finish date
Who is responsible?
Deliverable Status

The Bid Management Plan should pull in the relevant strategic overview from the capture planning document for this opportunity and look closer at each section of the proposal and allow you to allocate ow- nership of the different proposal sections. It should look at other areas too – it is there as a practical tool to help you be successful, so develop it, keep it updated and circulate it with updates to everyone involved. Other things that you should consider are:

Detail of each specific requirement: summarise or copy the requirement from the RFP
Your response to the requirement: How do you meet the requirement and add value in your solution. (Use strategy and win themes from the bid capture plan)
Documents: are there any other documents to read or to refer to?
Graphics: would your response benefit from graphics (the answer is yes, so make a list of the graphics you need and schedule time for them to be prepared)
Who?: Which individuals are responsible for drafting the relevant sections for the proposal?
When? What date is the response required?: update this if a draft has been completed and the individual is now working on the next version – it can be checked off when verified as finished

A common mistake is not allowing enough time at the end of the proposal for proper review. Anyone who has been involved in writing proposals has had the experience of the late night trying to get a proposal finished because it has to be handed in the next day. That might not be such a problem if your are making last minute changes to perfect the fourth draft, but if you are just trying to finish the first draft, the chances are you’re in trouble.

As England’s law of proposal writing states: “The chances of winning a proposal are directly in proportion to the number of hours between finishing it and the time it has to be submitted.”

There are some very good reasons why you should give yourself time for the proposal to be reviewed properly – and we will look them in a later article on quality reviewing a proposal. For now, just ensure that you give yourself plenty of time for this in your proposal schedule – I recommend at least four days and schedule the people you will need to review it for that time.

Lastly, when thinking about proposal planning, bear in mind those times when you have multiple proposals to prepare. It makes life harder and it means getting more people involved. Sometimes it may even require a decision that you can’t bid for some of the smaller, lower-probability opportunities. That’s when opportunity qualification and making bid/no-bid decisions really comes to the fore of your business development strategy.

Next…what information do I need to include when I write a business proposal.

For more proposal resources visit http://www.learntowriteproposals.com

For a small business entrepreneur on a tight budget, working with a business plan consultant may not be in the cards. In these situations, look for a business plan template which can guide you in the process of creating your plan and set you on the right track by focusing you on what funders are interested in seeing. If it is a high quality template, it will indeed serve as a “consultant in a box”, providing you with basic guidance on how to proceed.

Structure and Format

A business plan template will be a great source of information as to the proper structure for your plan and format to use. This is because the template won’t simply tell you what to do, but will show you as it provides an example of the full layout of the plan. This means you can move past worrying about the presentation look of the plan and focus on its content (your research and strategy).

Financials

The revenues and costs of your intended business may be relatively easy to estimate, but converting these numbers into full pro forma financial statements may be beyond your ability, at least within a reasonable time frame. A business plan template should include Excel worksheets for financials which only need you to customize certain numbers in order to generate full, consistent financial statements just as funders want to see them. As long as the financial assumptions you enter are reasonable, the entire financial section should be correct. You can then spend more time looking at these statements as an investor or lender would and project what kind of questions they will ask.

Example Text

A business plan template includes not only the general structure and format of a business plan, but may include example text for all of its sections. Having this example text can serve as a great guide to what type of information to include, what questions you must answer, and how to relate the many pieces of the plan to each other.

Small Business Plan Templates:  Start With Your Business Sector

For potential small business owners hoping to start one business in their lifetime, there isn’t a need to become a business plan writing expert. Even serial entrepreneurs who form business after business will often make use of business plan consultants to speed the process of creating a business plan and make the results more professional. Small businesses should seek the help of a business plan consultant as well, or, at the very least, use a business plan template to make the business plan development process simpler and faster.

What is a Business Plan Template?

A business plan template is an outline of a business plan, sometimes with a fully written sample, which uses the format and structure that is recommended by its creators for funders to see. Some basic templates are provided for free, but the most useful templates, including sample text, directions, and a customizable Excel financial model and pro forma financial statements, are sold online for a fee.

Start With Your Sector

If you are starting one of the top 50 or so types of small businesses, why use a generic business plan template when you can find one already customized for your business sector (such as a retail store, restaurant, salon, insurance brokerage, non profit, or financial planning business, to name some of the most popular)? By using a template customized to your sector, a lot of the legwork of making the plan more specific will be prepared for you. For example, a great deal of time savings will be from using a financial model more closely aligned with the nature of the costs and revenue drivers for your company.

How to Choose

Business plan companies and organizations supporting specific sectors are good sources for sector-specific business plan templates. Evaluate whether to purchase a template by looking at the track record of success of its creator, the type of support offered to customers, and guarantees. Don’t waste your time on purchasing multiple templates if they don’t rate well in these three categories.

Are you thinking about putting up your computer repair business for sale?

Or are you on the other side of the table and looking to buy an existing computer repair business for sale?

Either way, don’t let this major transaction be an afterthought.  Planning ahead is key for buyers and sellers alike.

Future planning and especially having an exit strategy is something many computer repair business owners don’t necessarily think about as they build their companies.  However, you have to think about how you can make your business not only profitable, but also appealing to future buyers once you decide it’s time to move on, for whatever reason.

The following 3 tips can help you develop an exit strategy so you are ready once you decide to move on and put your computer repair business for sale.  And if you’re looking to buy an existing business, consider this a quick checklist of what determines tangible value.

Set Your Prices Right from Day 1. Many new and inexperienced owners make the mistake of charging too little, often WAY too little, for their computer repair services.  One of the biggest causes of this is a copycat billing rate structure.  New computer computer repair business owners often will find out what a competitor is charging down the street and will simply charge the same, without looking at the company’s business structure or whether that rate really works for their specific type of business.  Also, how do you know this competitor knows what he/she is doing when it comes to setting prices?  And do you know anything about this competitor’s technical competence?  You need to determine your own pricing structure based on sound financial projections and your value proposition.  And make sure that your pricing structure makes your business profitable and thus appealing to future buyers once you decide it’s time to put up your computer repair business for sale. Focus on Getting Clients … Not Customers. New and inexperienced computer repair business owners often spend a lot of time chasing down one-shot deal customers, keeping their fingers crossed that these people will call them in a few months or a few years.  Your business is not going to be successful or appealing to future buyers if you base your services on the needs of one-shot deal customers.  Spending all that time and money acquiring customers for tiny, unpredictable projects is not going to be financially lucrative.   A computer repair business that offers on-going service agreements will grow a stable client list and have recurring revenue and predictability, as well as the ability to hire more staff.  And all of these benefits will make the business very appealing to those that might want to buy it when you need to or want to get out. Create Curb Appeal for Your Computer Repair Business for Sale. If you’ve ever watched one of those real estate TV shows that detail how they fix up a home about to be sold to make it more appealing, you’ve probably heard the term “curb appeal.”  However it’s also easily applicable to a computer repair business for sale.  If you ever want to be able to sell your computer repair company – if you move, get bored, get burnt out, get injured or pass away – the list of your clients on annual service agreements will become one of your few tangible assets.  For the overall valuation of your computer repair business, you of course need to consult your trusted accounting advisor.  But, as an example of how valuable on-going service contracts are, if your company has been averaging $200,000 per year in pure consulting revenue for the past 3 years and ¾ of that ($150,000) is locked in on annual service agreements, you have a pretty nice asset for someone thinking about acquiring your business at a multiple of your overall gross revenue.  On other hand, how much do you think a competitor would pay to purchase a list of one-shot deal cheapskate customers that just call once in a while?  Without on-going service agreements, you are starting from scratch every single month.  You need to cultivate your list of service agreement clients to prepare a very desirable computer repair business for sale… one with curb appeal.

In this article we talked about 3 ways to make your business more appealing for sale and plan for an exit strategy.  Learn more about how to succeed on either side of the table with a computer repair business for sale that attracts great, steady, high-paying clients now at http://www.ComputerRepairBusiness-ForSale.com

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