Suggested Organizational Structures for Your Business Plan
How your business is organized is a crucial element of your business plan. You should use whichever structure is best suited for your type of business and the people running it. Following are four examples [more…]
How to Know When Your Business Focus Needs to Change
Sometimes, businesses need to change plans for how or what they do in order to survive and succeed. Watch for these signs to indicate that a major redirection or even a total reinvention of your product [more…]
Three Ways to Change Your Business Plan Focus
Don’t wait until your business is upended by change before you refocus your business vision. Stay proactive by annually assessing how well your product, location, distribution, staffing, and operations [more…]
Focus Your Business Plan on Strengths
While flexibility and creativity are important, staying focused on the heart of your business plan is critical to your success. No company can be all things to all people. In fact, companies that try to [more…]
Business Planning: Marketing Basics
You’re not alone if you’re wondering, “What is marketing, anyway?” In a sentence, marketing is the process through which you get and keep customers. The image shows a bird’s-eye view of the marketing cycle [more…]
Business Marketing Plan Overview
Your business plan sells your company — to investors, lenders, partners, key employees, and associates — whereas your marketing plan tells how you plan to sell your products. Because selling your products [more…]
Business Plan Master Budget
Your master budget is a key part of your business-planning efforts, but you may or may not want to include it in your written business plan. For most of your audience, your pro forma income statement, [more…]
How to Introduce Your Business Plan
As you describe your business — or your business plan or concept if you’re just getting started — you want to cover the high points, and you also want to build enthusiasm by conveying that it’s a really [more…]
How to Define Distribution and Delivery in Your Business Plan
The distribution and delivery section in your business plan is all about how you get your products and services into your customers’ hands. Not all businesses are equally concerned with distribution and [more…]
How to Describe the Management Team in Your Business Plan
Long-term business planning success depends, above all, on the quality of the management team providing the leadership, direction, and vision. In fact, in some cases, investors have funded start-up companies [more…]
Essential Elements of a Business Marketing Plan
Marketing is one of the top issues on the minds of most CEOs, entrepreneurs and small-business owners. In fact, most business advisors and investors consider marketing the one area that can make or break [more…]
How to Assess Your Business Competition
Assessing your business competitors is critical for any business owner. Why? A good business plan includes strategies for capturing market share. To grow your business, you need to gain market share [more…]
How to Calculate Market Share for Your Business Marketing Plan
Market share is the portion your business captures of all the sales of products like yours in your market area. These definitions and calculation approaches will help you determine your current share or [more…]
Build a Marketing Plan Appropriate to the Current Business Climate
Business marketing planning involves analyzing the business climate and how outside forces may affect your company’s success. For example, poor economic conditions can affect your customers’ abilities [more…]
Set Business Marketing Plan Goals and Objectives
Strategies for growing your business are essential to a successful business plan. Include your marketing goals and objectives in the marketing strategy section of your written business plan. [more…]
How to Develop Targeted Branding and Positioning in Your Business Plan
As you develop your branding and positioning statements, keep in mind that unless your business is very, very large and extremely well-funded, it can’t try to be all things to all people. That’s why many [more…]
Business Marketing Product Strategy and Value Proposition
As part of your marketing plan, you need a product strategy. You may be planning changes to the products you sell. The most obvious change is to introduce new products, but you may also plan to communicate [more…]
Business Marketing Plan: Your Internet Presence
In this day and age, no business marketing plan can overlook the importance of online communication. Even if yours is among the few businesses whose customers don’t use the Internet, most certainly your [more…]
Business Marketing Plan: Financial Terminology
When developing a business plan, people sometimes hyperventilate when they hear the term financial statements, as if someone just told them that the rest of the conversation would take place in an arcane [more…]
How to Put Together an Income Statement
Your income statement is an essential part of your written business plan. The income statement calculates your net profit, or bottom line, using this basic formula: [more…]
Sample Business Plan Income Statement
An income statement summarizes your revenue and costs and shows your net profit in your business plan. Take a look at how a gift shop called Broad Street Emporium uses income statements to manage business [more…]
How to Create a Business Plan Balance Sheet
Your balance sheet gives you a snapshot of what your business is worth at a particular moment in time. To make the calculation, tally up the monetary value of everything your company owns and then subtract [more…]
Business Plan Balance Sheet: Fixed Assets
On your business plan’s balance sheet, fixed assets are usually big, expensive, and meant to last a long time, so they’re not very liquid. Fixed assets include [more…]
Business Plan Balance Sheet: Intangibles
Intangibles are assets that, by definition, are hard to get your arms around. But these intangibles can turn out to be extremely important to your business. Intangible assets include things like an exclusive [more…]
Business Plan Balance Sheet: Current Liabilities
Liabilities are amounts of money your business owes to creditors in the form of bills that are due, bank loans you’ve taken out, and bonds or warrants that you may have issued to raise money. [more…]
