Create A Business Plan To Boost Your Business - Tips For A Great Business Plan

It's Time For Reality.Com When You Create a Business Plan Because of the fascination with Internet stocks on Wall Street, entrepreneurs are creating e-commerce companies by the thousands, in order to get a piece of this seemingly large, rich pie for themselves. The result of this rush to market has been in many cases a lot of hastily conceived, sloppily planned ventures that have little or no competitive advantage are not going to grow very fast, if at all. Even when the surfing is great, you still have to have skill and experience to ride the waves. They say it hurts to get hit in the head with one of those heavy boards.

The fundamentals of business success have not changed whatsoever; greed is simply warping people's perceptions of what it takes to succeed.

It's funny, but computer software comes with spell check and grammar check, but never with reality check. Hey, Microsoft, get working on it.

Create a Business Plan That Highlights the Positive, But Doesn't Ignore the Negative While it is of course important to talk about what a great opportunity the company represents for a potential investor, don't forget to discuss the risks inherent in the venture also. These are sometimes painful for an entrepreneur to include--sitting down and thinking about what could go wrong and what could cause them to fail--but they are important for several reasons. It demonstrates your willingness to make a full disclosure to investors. It shows your ability to think ahead and anticipate what might happen--the heart of planning itself. And it leads to a discussion of how you might react to these negative events to mitigate their consequences. Highly paid management consultants call this Contingency Planning, but you could also just call it being prepared. Which means that the boy Scouts were the first contingency planners.

Venture capitalists accept and expect large risks: that's why they make you give them such a big chunk of your company. Painting too rosy a picture can be interpreted as an attempt to mislead the investor.

You don't need to go overboard, such as those prospectuses prepared for public offerings, where they have three pages on the company and the management and about twenty pages of "risk factors" written by lawyers. The risk factors are the lawyers' favorite parts of the Plan, because if nothing goes wrong in a business, we don't need to hire them.

Yes, But Can You Actually Sell This Product? It's amazing how many people put a statement like the following in their plan: "The total market for our product is projected to be $1 billion in five years. If we only get 10% of it, we will be a $100 million company in five years." Well, the market doesn't just give you 10% of itself because you're nice and there's room for everybody in a growing market. Your competitors' goal is to make sure you don't even get .005% of the market away from them. And then there's the small matter of distributing and marketing the product. How are you going to go about getting mass numbers of consumers to want your product? How are you going to make it available to them when and where they want to purchase it?

Market size is important to investors because it is easier to build a large enterprise in a large and growing market than in a smaller niche market or a stagnant one. But market size is not specifically an indicator of the likelihood of success. You still have to get the customer to buy.

Create a business plan that is straightforward, honest and enthusiastic about your company.

Do you know what should be included in your business plan? Receive a complimentary business plan template. Just go to Business Plan Template

About The Authors Brian Hill and Dee Power have written several nonfiction books including Business Plan Basics, "58 Ways to Find Money for Your Business, ” Inside Secrets to Venture Capital" and “Attracting Capital From Angels,” Reach them through The Capital Connection

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