Important Considerations To Make When Writing A Business Plan

Business plans outline the goals of your business, how you expect to achieve them and the timeframe you are aiming for. Within your business plan, you should explain how your business idea would work and be profitable. The following considerations are advisable:

Product Or Service

You should clearly state what product or service your business is providing, how you plan to obtain these items or the material/ingredients/equipment needed to provide your finished product or service to your customers. You should also have an accurate idea of how much your product or service would cost your business to provide; taking into account the cost of employee wages, materials/equipment and the cost of any premises that you operate to run the business. 

Once you have a good idea of how much it would cost to provide products or services to your customers, you can then come up with pricing strategies to ensure that your business is profitable. It is important to analyse your direct competition, checking how much they are charging for their products or services. This allows you to understand if the price you want to charge for your products/services is sustainable compared to your competition. If your business charges a higher price than the competition but doesn’t offer a better product or service your business is unlikely to be popular with customers.

Create Financial Plans

It is important to ensure that you are continuously aware of the costs associated with running your business, there are two types of costs associated with running a business including:

Fixed Costs: Fixed costs are costs that remain consistent regardless of how much custom your business receives; this includes costs such as property rent, weekly payroll and equipment depreciation. It is important to understand that these costs do change over time but at a much slower rate than variable costs.

Variable Costs: Variable costs change based on how many customers your business receives; this includes costs such as manufacturing costs, delivery/shipping charges and credit card fees.  

Ensuring that you are aware of the costs associated with running your business can help you know when it is time to put your prices up if needed to remain profitable as a business. If your business supplies other businesses with products/services you should consider credit insurance to provide you with financial coverage if the businesses you supply don’t pay on time. Credit insurance brokers will pay you what the business owes and absolve the debt themselves; this means that your business won’t be out of pocket because of other businesses' shortcomings. 

Defining Business Goals

Defining several main larger goals for your business can help you stay consistent with the running of your business, you can split larger goals into smaller more manageable goals that you can aim to achieve over a set time. There are a number of meaningful goals your business could ascribe towards such as: 

• Increased customers

• Reducing how much it costs you to provide your costs or services

• Increased profits

• Improved marketing effectiveness and business awareness amongst your target market

• Increase of business size or the number of locations your business trades from  

It is your choice if you want to aim for specific number-based goals or to see a gradual increase in positive metrics. A good way of setting more manageable targets for yourself is by speaking to other business owners at business owner gatherings and conferences. This way you will be able to learn from experienced business owners, learning from any mistakes they have made and taking forward advice you have been given for the betterment of your business. Additionally, once you have had experience operating your business you will be able to make more accurate targets for yourself based on the circumstances of your business. 

Create A Marketing Plan

You are about to launch your very own business and you want the world to know, creating a marketing plan is a great first step to achieving this. You can start by creating a SWOT analysis, this is a document where you write the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to your business. This way you have a better idea of what you are already good at and how you can improve your business in the future. You should also add how your business will stack up against direct competitors; if your business is a brick-and-mortar local business your competitors will be other businesses that offer the same products or services in the local area. If your business is online your competition will be much larger and may span your regional area or even your country.

Conclusion

Ensuring that you create a business plan for your business can help you be more consistent with your decision-making, allowing you to more effectively achieve the goals you have set for your business.