1 | Define Your Business
Know who the who, what, when and where’s of your business. These questions will arise when developing your business plan. Remaining consistent will be helpful not only in branding but in overall corporate messaging.
2 | Develop 4 Key Words To Keep You Motivated
When creating my business plan, I outlined my 4 key words that I wanted to focus on for my business. When in doubt, I could always come back to these to remind myself why I started and what path I should take to continue. The 4 key words for Bossfidence are: Empowerment, Inspiration, Strength & Determination.
3 | Outline Your Finances
Is your business revenue generating? If yes, you will want to outline some expenses that you will have to take on to get started and where you project your profits and losses to be in the next 1 year, 3 years and 5 years. By being mindful of your financial status, you know where your goals to gain financial freedom need to be headed. If your business is not revenue generating, you will still possibly need a budget for advertising and promotion of your platform.
4 | Create Your Executive Summary
Your executive summary should include a bio about your company and your goals to reach success. This is the first impression of your business plan so you have to make sure that it is #flawless. It is not the place to establish your voice or tone but to maintain professional verbiage and concise definition of who you are.
5 | Discover Your Demographic
When you think of your business, who are you trying to connect to? What audience do you think will engage the most in your content? Is your messaging going to appeal to them? These are all the key questions to ask yourself when establishing your demographics. Breakdown the gender, age, educational background, ethnicity, current employment status etc. (also, utilize Facebook analytics to help you determine your market size).
6 | Who Is Your Competition
Every successful empire will have an equally successful empire to compete with. Understand what makes them great and define what makes you different. Some of your best ideas come from others flaws, if you walk into a boutique and see so many great things but there is that ONE thing that you would do differently that would optimize or differentiate, that is where you find your leg up on your competition.
7 | Define Your Strengths
This is a time to not only highlight your company’s strengths but your personal strengths that will give whomever is reading your business plan a general understanding of the quality of individual you are. Display how you’ve pushed through adversity, give an example of a time where you were quick on your feet at a solving a problem, etc. These will help them get a taste of your character which always transpires into your business.
8 | Products & Services
What are the products and services that you will be providing to your customers or clients? Outlining and streamlining your services will help provide a clear pictures as to what you do.
9 | Marketing Plan & Start Up Expenses
This ties into 3, outline your finances, but it goes in deeper as to how you plan to reach your target demographic, the process of engaging with them and getting them to engage with you and all of the expenses that comes with that. For me, I utilize a lot of social media advertising to promote my blog, so as my start up expenses I projected the cost of 1 year’s worth of social media advertising and included that in my business plan.
10 | Download Everlance
This does not directly correlate with your business plan but it does correlate to your business. Everlance is a great program that tracks business travel and business expenses so that way when you are doing your taxes at the end of the year, you have a quick resource to reference! Get the app today: https://everlance.com/?_branch_match_id=421040854159674123
Drop a line, I would love to continue the discussion