Business Planning - Fail to Plan - Plan to Fail

All businesses begin with great ideas. Most of these brilliant ideas sound great, too, and you may be excited to take the plunge into entrepreneurship.

Hold on-you need a business plan.

"Another report? More paperwork?" Yes, of course, and the need for a business plan is well worth the time and effort needed to write.

But a business plan is not just another report. A business plan is your ideas, vision and goals on paper. It's where you want to be and how it is coming. A business plan shows that the competition is, what obstacles you might face and how you will overcome them.

A business plan that shows you're serious about your ideas and have a clear path from A to Z. This proves that your ideas are good ones for a business that earns money. It also helps you determine whether it is worth putting energy into your ideas or make investments in your visions.

Sometimes, people have great ideas, but when they begin to write, they see that long-term forecasts are not that attractive. They can discover points are never considered or reveal a major obstacle to be held thought and careful planning to overcome. They may discover new opportunities, or an easy way to earn money.

There are other reasons to write a business plan, too. Banks and investors want to know what your business is all about before they provide loans, grants or loans. You may need to take a loan to buy equipment to start work, but if a bank can not see that you have the option of returning the money, you probably will not lend it to you first. A good business plan of a bank shows that their risk in lending money is very low.

You can use the business plan as a way to focus on what you must do to achieve your goals. It 's very easy to forget important steps when you are new in business or to deviate from the path of your main goals. Another good idea is to remove information from a financial business plan for leaving a guide for employees that helps them know what your business is all about and to keep your concentration at work.

A business plan is usually about ten pages. These ten pages cover topics such as:

Your company description

The operations of your company

The market and competition

Sales, marketing and promotion

Financial information

The first half of the business plan is all your business from a physical. What makes your business? What is its past, its present and its future? Who are your major competitors? Predict where your business to be in five years? How will you get?

Sales and marketing is an important part of your business plan. What is the price of your product or service? What is the cost of goods sold? How will you promote your business and increase your customer base? How will you ensure that customers buy from you and not go shopping the competition?

This is important. It is not good enough in business to know where you are now and how will money now. You must be a bit 'of a visionary and try to see down the road. With a clear plan of where you want your business to be and what you need to do to reach that point, you have a better chance of success - and attract investors!

The second half of the business plan is all the number crunching. Here is where you should put in facts and figures, where you track your financial information, your current situation and the health of your business as your predictions for its future health.

It 's very important that the numbers show solid backup to all the information you've provided in the first half of the business plan. Do the numbers reflect the activities that you described?

There are many free online tools to help you build a solid business plan well built. It 's vital that you take the time to write your business plan, do not wait too. You never know when it might be necessary to produce this written document, and unless you have at hand, you may end up losing opportunities .......