Business Planning | Mike McRitchie | Resume and LinkedIn Profile Writer

The Future of Your Business: What’s Your Long-Term Plan?

December 7, 2021 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

When you first set up your business, you’re mostly thinking about getting through the next month or year. You might have grand plans for the future, but they’re not always at the forefront of your mind because you’re so busy getting your business off the ground. However, at some point when your business is more stable, you might want to start thinking about more of a long-term plan for your business and for you. What are you planning to do with your business as it grows and as you get older? Will you sell up, pass it on to your children, or perhaps take more of a backseat role?

Business Succession Planning

The truth is that you’re not going to be around forever. You never know if you might one day be unable to run your business, whether due to injury or disability or your death. You can’t predict the future, but you can be sure that you eventually won’t be able to run your business anymore. Business succession planning helps you to plan for any eventuality. One important step is to visit a site like keypersoninsurance.com to make plans for life insurance. You should ensure that not only are you covered but also any key people in your company are insured.

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Handing Down the Family Business

If you’re running a family business or one you hope to hand down to your children or other family members, it’s a key part of preparing for the future. Whoever you want to take the reins after you retire, they need to be prepared so that you feel confident about letting them take over. This can be a process that takes years if you want them to be ready and have all of the skills and knowledge that they need. One thing to consider is that whoever takes over might take the business in their own direction and find a new way of doing things.

Selling Your Company

Not everyone wants to keep their business forever. Selling up can be very tempting if your business is valuable. By selling your business, you could gain the funds to try out a new business idea or perhaps bolster your retirement fund. If selling your business is something that you think you might do in the future, you should think about how it’s going to be attractive to potential buyers. If the business is too attached to your name, it could be difficult to continue its success when you’re no longer there.

Stepping Back

You might not want to sell your business, but stepping back from being in a leadership role might be something you’re thinking about. Letting other people take care of the day-to-day running of the business so that you can retire, travel or move on to other things could work out for you. If this is something you’re interested in, you’ll need a plan to ensure you have the right people running your business for you.

Think about what you want to happen to your business in the future so that you can make a plan that can be put in place.

7 Things You Should Prepare Your Small Business For

August 11, 2021 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

When you’re running or planning to start up your own business, there are many things that you’re going to need to be ready for if you want to have a chance against your competition. You’re going to be competing for customers at every turn, and you don’t want your business to go unnoticed from the moment you start. If you want a chance of success when running your business, you need to be ready to do what it takes to keep things running smoothly, while also giving your business the financial support that it needs to keep moving.

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A lack of customers

If you’ve just opened up, you should consider that the estimations you’ve made on how many customers you would be attracting can be a little off. If you’ve planned around an expected income, missing out on the customers you thought you would have can cause significant trouble for you and your plans going forward – so you should make sure you’ve allowed yourself some financial wiggle room to keep the lights on. It can take time to build up your audience, and even some experimenting to find what works for you in terms of promotions and marketing techniques.

Maintaining equipment

If the ability to run your business relies on certain pieces of equipment for things to function properly, then you need to be prepared to cover the costs of maintaining them. Generally, having your equipment serviced can be quite expensive when put on top of all of your other posts, but it’s worth it to ensure that it doesn’t break down. It’s something that all businesses have to consider, imagine if it were an important piece of equipment like a medical fridge that started to fail – it would cause all kinds of trouble.

Not only can failing to maintain your equipment be troublesome for business, but it can also be dangerous to you and your employees. If a piece of machinery starts to fail and malfunction, someone could be injured when trying to operate it, making your business unsafe. You could find yourself facing more costs than it would be to maintain the equipment in the first place. It’s better to be safe than sorry if it’s something that your business relies on.

Long-term employee payments

Even the smallest businesses are expected to have the money required when it comes to employee payments. You can’t expect people to work for you when you can’t afford to pay them, and when things are going downhill – you’re going to need your employees to keep things working. You aren’t owed loyalty from them, and having that money to the side when you need them is going to be essential when trying to get your business back on track. That’s not to say you should be ready to hold onto all of your staff when you’re struggling – but no one wants to work for free.

Legal advice

As your business starts to grow and gain traction, there are a number of legal parameters that you’re going to need to make sure you’re working within if you want to stay operational. Different businesses will have different regulations to follow, but you need to make sure you’re in the know whenever you’re making a decision on your business’ direction. Paying for legal advice is normal practice, and it’s well worth the money if it removes any risk from facing fines or lawsuits when moving forward. For a small business, a lawsuit from a bigger business can be devastating – so you’ll want to make sure you’re not under any risk.

You don’t need a legal advisor to be working for you all of the time, but there are services out there available to use when you need them. If you’re thinking of making big changes within your business, or have questions about what you can and can’t do concerning your services and products – it’s better to make sure you’re not breaking any laws when doing so.

Marketing schemes

Like mentioned before, it can take time for you to build the customer base that you need in order for things to run smoothly, and you don’t want to be too short on money to invest in a new marketing scheme. You need customers to make money, but you need money to attract customers – you’ll want to make sure you’re not stuck in that loop from the get-go. Making sure you have enough money on the side to put out different marketing schemes can ensure that you’re able to run the campaigns and advertisements necessary to attract the target audience of your business.

There are many different kinds of marketing schemes to choose from, and some are more effective than others, while some are significantly cheaper. Market research can take time, and ideally, you’d be prepared before you start. TV ads, fliers, posters, social media, etc. can all be great ways to get noticed by the public, but they all take time and money if you want them to work effectively.

Changes in the market

Every competitive business needs to make sure that it’s able to identify different changes and trends within the market. If you want your business to stay relevant with your target audience, then you need to make sure that you’re ready to adapt and make the most out of the current market trends. Sometimes trends last a long time, sometimes a market trend can be over within a month. If you’re not paying attention to current trends in the market, it can be very costly for you as a business.

Consequences of inexperience

Every new business owner struggles with one thing, and that’s inexperience. You can’t have the answers to every problem if you’ve never had to face them before, and it can be a learning experience for you. Sadly, not knowing the answers to everything can cause problems for your business from time to time. This is why a lot of these successful businesses have multiple people advising and making decisions for them, rather than just one person.

Common Business Plan Mistakes (You’ll Probably Find Number Three In Yours)

August 1, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Creating a business plan certainly isn’t the sexiest part of starting a business, but it’s a must if you’re going to figure out what route to take to where you want to be. Your business plan can help you in numerous ways. It can help you to secure funding, keep on moving forward when times are hard, come up with a new plan when something isn’t working, and more.

That being said, there are a number of business plan mistakes that you could make if you’re not careful. Here, we have some of the most common business plan mistakes. In fact, you’ll probably find a few in yours…read on to learn more:

Your Presentation Is Off

Your plan needs to be presented well so that your facts, figures, and other information look pleasing to the eye. Don’t miss out charts, labels, headings, and other things that will make your plan look great and keep it organized. You want it to be easy to read, look at, and understand.

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Grammar, Spelling, And Other Writing Issues

One of the worst things you can do is produce a poorly written business plan. Make sure there are no spelling or grammatical errors or other writing issues. You can use apps like Grammarly to check this over. It’s not going to look very professional to any potential investors if you don’t take your time and proofread it.

You’ve Forgotten To Include Some Essential Information In Yours

More often than not, people forget to include essential information in their business plan. You should outline your competitors, marketing and sales, monthly cash flow and statements and every other little thing you can think of that has anything to do with your business at all. Don’t be one of those people who thinks that their business doesn’t have any competitors. All businesses have competitors!

Don’t be one of those people that misses out expenses and other important stats either. Whether you want to spend a portion of your budget on tungsten carbide rods from sites like https://www.meetyoucarbide.com/tungsten-carbide-rods or you’re planning on buying computers and equipment you need second hand, write it down. Get it all in the plan so that you know you haven’t missed anything out.

It’s Not Detailed Enough/Too Detailed

You need to make sure you find the right balance between not detailed enough and too detailed. If your plan is too vague then it isn’t going to be enough, but if it’s way too detailed people won’t read it all the way through. It’ll become too difficult to read and you likely won’t get investors.

You’re Making Assumptions That You Can’t Back Up

In the best business plans, critical assumptions are highlighted and then a rationalization for them is provided. However, many business plans don’t clearly define assumptions and facts.

Always use facts to back up what you say. Do your research properly.

You Haven’t Researched Enough

Well-prepared investors will check your numbers against industry data or third party studies, so you absolutely must be prepared. Make sure you do your research and that you’re prepared for questions in person. Don’t just write them in your plan and then forget about them.

You Try To Say That There Isn’t A Risk

There is absolutely no such thing as a no risk business. You should mention any risks you can think of and make sure you highlight how you’ll minimize them. Make sure you’re prepared for any questions you might get asked when meeting with potential investors later on. There’s always a risk, so put yourself in the shoes of your investor and think about the things they’re going to want to know if they are going to put a substantial amount of money into your business.

Conclusion: Don’t Make The Above Mistakes In Your Business Plan!

Make sure you don’t mention the mistakes mentioned here in your business plan. Your business plan should be well written and presented, find the right balance between too detailed and not detailed enough, and fit the rest of the criteria laid out here. Carefully map out the steps to take,

do your research, research your competition and customers, get feedback from honest people to help you keep on moving forward, and lastly, get help if you need it. There are people and services out there who can help you to put together a high quality business plan so you don’t have to stress out about it all alone.

Have you made any of these business plan mistakes? Leave your thoughts and ideas below.

Stop Fire Fighting: A Primer On Proactive Business

July 2, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Your business needs to be proactive for many reasons, not least that it can help to minimize losses, maximum profit, and assist your company in being much more successful more quickly. To that end, we have come up with a quick guide on how to stop fighting fires and start proactively running your business. Read on to find out more.

Do use SWOT analysis when planning.

Planning is always an essential part of a making any business decisions and moving forward with your company. However, the right plan is necessary if you are going to be proactive rather than reactive.

In particular, the SWOT analysis model can help here. The reason the SWOT model works so well is that the T stands for threats, something that you most definitely have to consider if you are going to be proactive.

After all, if you have sat down to think about what the possible issue and problems could be, as well as ways to deal with them should the worst happen, you can spring right into action when you get even an inkling that things could be going that way. Something that is the essence of proactivity and that could save your business a great deal of money.

Don’t be passive.

Next, a genuinely proactive business will need to embrace an active search for customers and markets instead of expecting them to come to them. This is because you can have the best product in the world, but if you are too passive and don’t let the world know about your brand, you won’t achieve enough revenue to make your business sustainable.

With that in mind, it is critical to ensure that you embrace a modern and proactive marketing strategy. Something you can read more about in the post here.

Do make sure your IT systems are up to scratch.

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Also, do not forget that to be proactive your IT systems need to be up to scratch as well. In fact, having a reliable and specialized system that is designed for the field you are in, like this best brewery management software is crucial. This is because such as system will be capable of providing a thorough analysis of all parts of your business including the manufacturing, shipping and sale processes, all things you will need to monitor closely if you wish to achieve genuine proactivity.

In fact, by using big data to pinpoint possible problems and bottlenecks before they occur, can take action to resolve them quickly and efficiently Something that means you won’t lose money or customers to unexpected difficulties that take ages to fix.

Don’t leave things until they become serious issues.

Lastly, it is the speed of your reaction that can make all the difference in a proactive company. In fact, the quicker you can respond to a forming problem the more money, time, people hours, and effort you can save.

Therefore encouraging a culture of spotting potential issues before they become massive problems is essential and for this, you will need to welcome staff input and suggestions with open arms. In fact, you would be mad not too, especially if they can eliminate issues before they occur and help you to ensure the long-term success of your business.