Business Plans for Small Business | The First 10 Reasons Why

Business Plans for Small Business are essential to the well being of your small business. You will benefit immensely from the time you take to create the Business Plan. Consider the bicycle. Perhaps you needed training wheels or someone to run behind you and hold your bike. After trials and errors you began to get your balance and could ride alone with assistance and without the training wheels. Business Plans for Small Business are like the training wheels. Think of your business coach as the parent guiding you as you take that first ride. Business plans are the training wheels to help you get your business off on the right foot. Business Coaches help you as you continue learning how to ride that bicycle.

Here are ten reasons why you should consider and use Business Plans for Small Business:

1. To prove that you’re serious about your business. A formal business plan is necessary to show all interested parties — employees, investors, partners and yourself — that you are committed to building the business.

2. To establish business milestones. The business plan should clearly lay out the long-term milestones that are most important to the success of your business. To paraphrase Guy Kawasaki, a milestone is something significant enough to come home and tell your spouse about (without boring him or her to death). Would you tell your spouse that you tweaked the company brochure? Probably not. But you’d certainly share the news that you launched your new website or reached $1M in annual revenues.

3. To better understand your competition. Creating the business plan forces you to analyze the competition. All companies have competition in the form of either direct or indirect competitors, and it is critical to understand your company’s competitive advantages.

4. To better understand your customer. Why do they buy when they buy? Why don’t they when they don’t? An in-depth customer analysis is essential to an effective business plan and to a successful business.

5. To enunciate previously unstated assumptions. The process of actually writing the business plan helps to bring previously “hidden” assumptions to the foreground. By writing them down and assessing them, you can test them and analyze their validity.

6. To assess the feasibility of your venture. How good is this opportunity? The business plan process involves researching your target market, as well as the competitive landscape, and serves as a feasibility study for the success of your venture.

7. To document your revenue model. How exactly will your business make money? This is a critical question to answer in writing, for yourself and your investors. Documenting the revenue model helps to address challenges and assumptions associated with the model.

8. To determine your financial needs. Does your business need to raise capital? How much? The business plan creation process helps you to determine exactly how much capital you need and what you will use it for. This process is essential for raising capital for business and for effectively employing the capital.

9. To attract investors. A formal business plan is the basis for financing proposals. The business plan answers investors’ questions such as: Is there a need for this product/service? What are the financial projections? What is the company’s exit strategy?

10. To reduce the risk of pursuing the wrong opportunity. The process of creating the business plan helps to minimize opportunity costs. Writing the business plan helps you assess the attractiveness of this particular opportunity, versus other opportunities.

Still not convinced that you need the training wheels? Still unsure whether you should learn about Business Plans for Small Business and SWOT Analysis? Still unsure about whether you need a business coach? Take a gander below and reconsider – - -

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Tagged with: Business Plan • compete • planning • Small Business • SWOT • SWOT analysis

Filed under: Small Business

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