How to Make Your Business Plan Stand Out

One of the first steps to business planning is determining your target market and why they would want to buy from you.

The following tips can help you clarify what your business has to offer, identify the right target market for it and build a niche for yourself.

Be Clear About What You Have to Offer

Ask yourself: Beyond basic products or services, what are you really selling? Consider this example: Your town probably has several restaurants all selling one fundamental product—food. But each is targeted at a different need or clientele.

One might be a drive-thru fast food restaurant, perhaps another sells pizza in a rustic Italian kitchen, and maybe there’s a fine dining seafood restaurant that specializes in wood-grilled fare. All these restaurants sell meals, but they sell them to targeted clientele looking for the unique qualities each has to offer. What they are really selling is a combination of product, value, ambience and brand experience.

When starting a business, be sure to understand what makes your business unique. What needs does your product or service fulfill? What benefits and differentiators will help your business stand out from the crowd?

Don’t Become a Jack of All Trades-Learn to Strategize

It’s important to clearly define what you’re selling. You do not want to become a jack-of-all trades and master of none because this can have a negative impact on business growth. As a smaller business, it's often a better strategy to divide your products or services into manageable market niches. Small operations can then offer specialized goods and services that are attractive to a specific group of prospective buyers.

Identify Your Niche

Creating a niche for your business is essential to success. Often, business owners can identify a niche based on their own market knowledge, but it can also be helpful to conduct a market survey with potential customers to uncover untapped needs. During your research process, identify the following: 

• Which areas your competitors are already well-established
• Which areas are being ignored by your competitors
• Potential opportunities for your business

Assessing Your Company's Potential

For most of us, unfortunately, our desires about where we would like to go aren't as important as our businesses' ability to take us there. Put another way, if you choose the wrong business, you're going nowhere.

Luckily, one of the most valuable uses of a business plan is to help you decide whether the venture you have your heart set on is really likely to fulfill your dreams. Many, many business ideas never make it past the planning stage because their would-be founders, as part of a logical and coherent planning process, test their assumptions and find them wanting.

Test your idea against at least two variables. First, financial, to make sure this business makes economic sense. Second, lifestyle, because who wants a successful business that they hate?

Answer the following questions to help you outline your company's potential. There are no wrong answers. The objective is simply to help you decide how well your proposed venture is likely to match up with your goals and objectives.

Financial:

What initial investment will the business require?

How much control are you willing to relinquish to investors?

When will the business turn a profit?

When can investors, including you, expect a return on their money?

What are the projected profits of the business over time?

Will you be able to devote yourself full time to the business, financially?

What kind of salary or profit distribution can you expect to take home?

What are the chances the business will fail?

What will happen if it does?

Lifestyle:

Where are you going to live?

What kind of work are you going to be doing?

How many hours will you be working?

Will you be able to take vacations?

What happens if you get sick?

Will you earn enough to maintain your lifestyle?

Does your family understand and agree with the sacrifices you envision?

post written by: komolafe Oyindamola

How to write a business plan

A business plan is a written description of your business's future, a document that tells what you plan to do and how you plan to do it. If you jot down a paragraph on the back of an envelope describing your business strategy, you've written a plan, or at least the germ of a plan.

Business plans are inherently strategic. You start here, today, with certain resources and abilities. You want to get to a there, a point in the future (usually three to five years out) at which time your business will have a different set of resources and abilities as well as greater profitability and increased assets. Your plan shows how you will get from here to there.

There are steps to consider when you want to write a business plan;

•          Executive Summary

Within the overall outline of the business plan, the executive summary will follow the title page. The summary should tell the reader what you want. This is very important, Clearly state what you're asking for in the summary.

•          Business Description

The business description usually begins with a short description of the industry. When describing the industry, discuss the present outlook as well as future possibilities. You should also provide information on all the various markets within the industry, including any new products or developments that will benefit or adversely affect your business

•          Market Strategies

Market strategies are the result of a meticulous market analysis. A market analysis forces the entrepreneur to become familiar with all aspects of the market so that the target market can be defined and the company can be positioned in order to garner its share of sales.

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• Competitive Analysis

The purpose of the competitive analysis is to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the competitors within your market, strategies that will provide you with a distinct advantage, the barriers that can be developed in order to prevent competition from entering your market, and any weaknesses that can be exploited within the product development cycle.

•          Design & Development Plan

The purpose of the design and development plan section is to provide investors with a description of the product's design, chart its development within the context of production, marketing and the company itself, and create a development budget that will enable the company to reach its goals.

•          Operations & Management Plan

The operations and management plan is designed to describe just how the business functions on a continuing basis. The operations plan will highlight the logistics of the organization such as the various responsibilities of the management team, the tasks assigned to each division within the company, and capital and expense requirements related to the operations of the business.

•          Financial Factors

Financial data is always at the back of the business plan, but that doesn't mean it's any less important than up-front material such as the business concept and the management team.

While figuring the above procedures these should be at the back of your mind;

•          Determine Your Objectives

Close your eyes. Imagine that the date is five years from now. Where do you want to be? Will you be running a business that hasn't increased significantly in size? Will you command a rapidly growing empire? Will you have already cashed out and be relaxing on a beach somewhere, enjoying your hard-won gains?

Answering these questions is an important part of building a successful business plan. In fact, without knowing where you're going, it's not really possible to plan at all.

Goals and Objectives Checklist

If you're having trouble deciding what your goals and objectives are, here are some questions to ask yourself:

How determined am I to see this succeed?

Am I willing to invest my own money and work long hours for no pay, sacrificing personal time and lifestyle, maybe for years?

What's going to happen to me if this venture doesn't work out?

If it does succeed, how many employees will this company eventually have?

What will be its annual revenues in a year? Five years?

What will be its market share in that time frame?

Will it be a niche marketer, or will it sell a broad spectrum of good and services?

What are my plans for geographic expansion? Local? National? Global?

Am I going to be a hands-on manager, or will I delegate a large proportion of tasks to others?

Post written by: Komolafe Oyindamola