Business Plans For Dummies

Paul Tiffany, Steven D. Peterson, Colin Barrow

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781119943884
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

Your one-stop guide to creating a winning business plan from scratch

Whether you're starting a new business or growing an established one, you'll need a solid business plan to get you where you want to go. Revised for today's rocky economic climate, this edition of the UK's bestselling business plan guide gives you what you need to map out your business strategy and stay on course – including a complete sample plan that you can easily adapt for your business!

• Chart your course – assess the current state of your business and where you'd like to take it, and establish clear, achievable objectives
  
  

• Get to know your customers – learn the latest techniques for getting a better idea of who your customers are and what they want
  
  

• Scope out the competition – find out who your competitors are and what it'll take to get your share of the market pie (and theirs)
  
  

• Sort out your finances – construct a value chain, examine your cash flow and calculate a sensible budget
  
  

• Enter the Dragons' Den – convince bankers, investors, venture capitalists and other funding sources your business is a good investment
  
  

• Read the tea leaves – learn to decipher changing cultural, political and technological trends and to alter your strategies as needed
  
  

Open the book and find:

• Tips on developing a sure-fire business strategy
  
  

• How to set realistic objectives
  
  

• Forecasting and budgeting strategies
  
  

• Keys to writing a motivational mission statement
  
  

• How to decipher the latest consumer trends
  
  

• Advice on building your brand and brand loyalty
  
  

• Tips for seeing and seizing opportunities before the competition
  
  

• Ways to adapt your plan to economic change
  
  

Learn to:

• Prepare a watertight business strategy
  
  

• Assess the marketplace
  
  

• Devise a sensible forecast and budget
  
  

Part I

Determining Where You Want to Go

In this part . . .

No matter what you’d like to finish, from wallpapering the bedroom to hooking up the new router, it’s awfully easy to pass over all the preliminary stuff and jump right into the thick of the project. Let’s face it, the preliminaries are a bit boring. But for the really important things in life – and in business – preparation is everything. So preparing to do your business plan ranks right up there in importance with each of the other major steps as you create a plan.

In this part, we help you prepare to plan by looking at what a business plan is all about. First, we look at how to establish a mission for your company and develop business goals and objectives with all your stakeholders in mind. We also point out why values are so important to your company, and show you how you can use your company’s values. Finally, we look at how a vision for your company gives you something to aim for and a direction to take.

Chapter 1

Starting Your Business Plan

In This Chapter

Getting the most out of your plan

Using your plan as a record of the past and a guide to the future

Making your plan function as your company description

Figuring out how to address your different readership

Checking out what the written plan looks like

Most of us go through life thinking ahead. We plan to paint the house, plan to go back to university, plan to take a holiday and plan for retirement – we always have a plan or two in the works. Why do we plan so much? We certainly can’t predict what’s going to happen, so why bother? Certainly, none of us knows the future. But each of us knows that tomorrow will be different from today, and today isn’t the same as yesterday. Planning for those differences is one way to move forward and face things that are unfamiliar and uncertain. Planning is a strategy for survival.

Companies make business plans for many of the same reasons. Planning is a strategy to improve the odds of success in a business world that’s constantly changing. Business plans are not a guarantee, of course. Business planning isn’t a science that offers you right and wrong answers about the future. But business planning is a process that gets you ready for what’s to come. And making a plan increases the likelihood that down the road, your company will be in the right place at the right time.

In this chapter, we explore what planning is all about, how you can use your business plan and why having a plan is so important. We talk about your business plan as a guide to your company’s future, as well as a record of where you’ve been and how you’ve done. Because your plan is a ready-made description of your company, we also talk about the kinds of people who may be interested in seeing your business plan. Then we help you get a handle on who needs to be involved in putting your plan together, depending on how big your company is. Finally, we show you what your business plan should look like on paper.

Getting the Most Out of Your Plan

A plan originally meant only one thing: a flat view of a building, viewed from above. If you’ve ever had a house built or remodelled, you know that this kind of plan is still around (and still expensive). Over the centuries, however, the meaning of the word plan has expanded to include time as well as space. A plan in the modern sense also refers to a view of the future, seen from the present. You make plans for a birthday party next week or a business trip next month.

A business plan is a particular view of your company’s future, describing the following things:

What your industry will look like.

What markets you’ll compete in.

What competition you’ll be up against.

What products and services you’ll offer.

What value you’ll provide customers.

What long-term advantages you’ll have.

How big and profitable your company will become.

To create a detailed view of the future, you have to make a lot of predictions about what’s going to happen down the road. If your company manufactures crystal balls, of course, you’re in luck. If not, you have to find other ways to make basic business assumptions about the future, which we share with you throughout this book.

In the end, your business plan is only as good as all the assumptions you put into it. To make sure that your assumptions make sense, much of your planning should involve trying to understand your surroundings today – what’s going on right now in your own industry and marketplace. By making these assumptions, you can better predict your business and its future. Will your predictions actually come true? Only time will tell. Fortunately, the planning process makes you better prepared for whatever lies ahead.

Looking to the future

A business plan provides a view of the future. Whether your company is large or small, whether you’re just starting a business or are part of a seasoned company, you still need some sort of planning process to point you in the right direction and guide you along the way. For example:

A brand-new company makes a business plan to get its bearings and often uses the plan to get funding.

An up-and-running company uses a plan to be better prepared.

A large company needs a plan so that everybody sees the same view ahead.

A small company makes a plan if it wants to make sure that it survives those crucial first two years.

In fact, a small company needs a business plan most of all. If you own or manage a small business, you already know that you’re the jack-or-jill-of-all-trades. You hardly have enough time to get your daily business tasks done, much less plan for next we...