Planning For Growth and Success, Deciphering The Business Plan For Startups and New Leadership

Almost without exception, every healthy growing business is guided by well thought out plans and projections that ensure that investments are well placed. Today we’re giving you a crash course on how to plan for and run a business with a focus on the most important step.

When planning your business, it’s best to be concise and cut the fluff, this may mean you’ll start by writing a first draft of your business plan and come back through with a heavy dose of red ink cutting out the unnecessary language. If you plan on following a plan it should be as simple and concise as possible as you will reread it, revise it, check up on it, and share it with employees and business partners.

With that said, if you are working on a new startup we need to talk about business goals and how we are going to get there. To start out you should answer some really simple, but extremely important questions:

• What is your Product?
• Who is your target audience?
• What makes your product better than the competition?
• If everything goes as planned, where will this business be in 5 years?

Now the first two questions should be really simple to answer, your product and the target audience should go hand in hand, and targeted marketing will help you answer the third question by giving you an extra edge in regards to who you want to sell to. But the third question needs more than just group focus, you really should do the time to research who you are competing with and how you can handle the market better than the existing competition as they have the advantage of already being established. The final question should take some math to solve. You should have estimates of how much profit your business will make, and with that profit you should consider how to further invest and grow your business. After 5 years of growth, what will your empire look like?
Now not all of us are organizational geniuses, but there exist plenty of tools out there to help get our ideas down in permanent reviewable form.

At the very least, make it a habit to carry a daily planner that will help organize all of your ideas into one concise book to keep the year under control. If you are starting a business or taking the reigns of an existing one and intend to grow it, it’s time to take advantage of every tool you can get to give you the leg up.