Business Continuity Audit » Business Growth

The Business Plan – Describing Your Business Opportunity

admin — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 22:12:15 +0000

The first real stage of writing your business plan concerns describing and articulating your business and what it hopes to achieve. This stage requires you to explain, as clearly as possible, what your business does.

It serves the purpose of outlining your personal vision for your business. So you will not only be explaining what it does, but also what you do and what your business is going to offer to the market.

Your first step is to put together an overview of your business. Firstly, you must be able to state when you started trading or are planning to begin trading. You also have to make sure that you include details of the progress you have made to date.

Then explain the kind of business you are running or are intending to run. This section must be as clear as possible so that your readers – whether they are potential investors or future employees or partners – can understand exactly what it is you do. If you can clarify what sector it is in – e.g. retail, manufacturing etc. – then this will make the picture clearer for the reader too.

Your next job is to outline any history that is important to the business you propose to run. For example, if you bought the business off someone else, it will obviously be important that the business plan shows some details of this transaction, as well as information on the seller of the business.

You must then outline the current legal structure of the business. This means ownership, the structure of the company as it stands in law, and so on.

Finish up the overview by articulating your vision for the future. This means thinking about the plans you have for the business as regards growth. It also means creating a picture of what your company will look like in the future.

After the overview, you then have to describe your product or service in detail. To get this section right, you must explain what makes it different to other products and services in the same sector, as well as the benefits it offers to the customer. To interest investors – or just to keep you on the right path as developments occur – you then have to outline what developments you are going to bring to your product or service. If you are going to run a cafe for example, you may plan to add another story in the future, to add value.

If you hold any patents or design rights, now is the time to declare them. And to finish up, describe the key features of your industry, in such a way that your product or service has a recognisable role in it.

At all times, make sure that you don’t throw in too much jargon, or industry specific terminology. If you are going to use the business plan as a means of acquiring investment, the last thing an investor wants is vocabulary they cannot understand.

So that is a detailed outline of the section of your business plan where you describe your business opportunity. This is often the most difficult section to complete. Be confident, follow the steps above and you will then be on your way towards completing your plan.

By: Sahail Ashraf

Business Growth – Rate Control For Maximum Success

admin — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 01:01:28 +0000

Business growth is something we all want. During startup, however, you have to balance your business growth rate with your ability to keep on top of the business launch. You don’t want to get overextended because that will cause you to cut corners and your future success may suffer.

Controlling the rate of business growth is difficult to do especially if you are moonlighting. In this situation you have so many more balls to juggle because you have work issues to deal with as well as business issues. The key to effective business growth control is excellent organization and planning.

Micro manage for Business Growth Control

During your startup it is more important than ever that you micro plan your major projects. If you sell a 10 node network you will probably quote it by the number of hours for server installation, cabling infrastructure, taking care of the ISP and the telephone company, and taking care of the desktop. To control business growth you need to take this type of calculation to the next level and develop a detailed hourly spreadsheet to account for your hours each week:

Put your total hours and tasks required into a spreadsheet

Break down each of the tasks week by week

Estimate the number of hours you will need for each item during the week

Add in some cushion time to deal with unanticipated issues

Add general administrative tasks, work and family responsibilities, and leisure time requirements into the spreadsheet as well

This type of planning exercise will help you control your business growth because it will be easier to see if you are overextending yourself. An overextended person is a stressed person and a stressed person is not an effective business manager or service provider.

The Bottom Line on Business Growth

To control business growth the best thing you can do is to make sure you have a handle on everything you are working on. Break large projects down into smaller pieces. Fit your projects into the other responsibilities your have whether those are work or family related. Take a look at your weekly responsibilities and ensure you are not spreading yourself too thin in any one area. This micro management approach will ensure your business growth rate does not spiral beyond your ability to keep up.

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By: Joshua Feinberg

IT Vital to Business Organizations

admin — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 12:24:36 +0000

The bottom line is that information technology plays an important role in the success of a business organization. The reality, however, is that not all companies realize this. Most business organizations see information technology only as an enabler when in fact it can be an effective business driver. They do not believe that information technology does reinforce their business goals. As a result, businesses concentrate only on their core competencies and relegate IT to a supporting role. This is a potentially costly blunder because while a company can stay in business, it needs information technology to be truly competitive.

The solution is to have a well thought-out IT vision. So what are the advantages of this to your business?

Businesses are becoming more and more competitive in their drive to be ahead of the game. Having a unique product or service is no longer enough for a company to achieve longevity. Information technology can help companies strengthen their positions in the market for it plays a key role in addressing the increasing demand for products and services.

It can also improve manufacturing capabilities significantly. Information technology also enables companies to embark into new investments and enter into business tie-ups. Furthermore, an information technology landscape plan can help companies achieve all these while lowering costs.

It is important for companies to have a clear-cut IT vision if it is to compete in an aggressive industry. A sound IT landscape strategy can mean tremendous business growth for a company. Businesses can implement their plan in stages. To begin with, a company can start putting in place improvements for domain functionalities such as R&D and F&D. They can then address transactional requirements, for example, ERP components such as payroll and accounting. Combining these into a single system makes for more efficient operations. They can then move on to content management systems. This component is important because it allows companies to maintain and organize the information exchange.

Workflow systems also need to be given due attention. An efficient workflow system makes for a productive business organization because it can bring about speedy accomplishment of tasks and it streamlines processes. Infrastructural requirements also need to be included in an IT landscape plan. For a business to realize optimum IT solutions, it must put in place the right combination of business software applications and hardware components.

Companies cannot afford to neglect their Integration Route for this is where the IT implementation plan will largely be based on. This part of the plan ensures that all aspects of the business work in proper conjunction with each other.

Businesses will soon realize the benefits of having an information technology strategy firmly rooted in their plans. For instance, they can have automated business processes, proper management of these processes and have an effective means of managing knowledge systems within the organization.

It may not be immediately recognizable but having an IT landscape plan can only mean growth for a company. This is because information technology magnifies efforts, expands capabilities and heightens effectiveness.

By: Benedict Yossarian

Business Growth Through Leverage

admin — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 02:02:20 +0000

Lets begin by talking about leverage. What do I mean by leverage?

In it’s most basic application a lever allows you to lift or move a heavy object with a lesser amount of energy. For instance placing a long stick under a rock in order to move it.

But how does leverage apply to business? Can you place a stick under your income statement to boost up your net income?

The answer is yes.

There are many ways you can use leverage in your business to increase the results you are achieving. The term leverage is often used in reference to the financing of a business. Getting in with little or nothing down using someone elses money is a form a leverage.

THE STRONGEST LEVER

Marketing is arguably the most powerful business lever of them all.

Why?

Because marketing has nearly unlimited upside potential with nearly no downside potential.

Leveraging your business success through marketing can improve your results by 100%, 500%, 1000%, or more with almost no risk or downside potential.

Let me give you a few examples.

It costs the same fixed amount of time and money to run a newspaper ad whether that ad creates one response, five responses or a hundred responses. It costs you the same whether you close 1%, 10% or 20% or those that respond. It costs the same whether the fee income you create is $1000, $2000 or $3000.

When you send a follow up letter to your prospects it costs the same to mail it whether it generates a 0.5% response or a 1% response or a 4% response.

So, as you see the risk or downside potential is limited. And if you are already running the ads anyway the risk is nothing. But the upside potential, the opportunity to improve your results, it virtually unlimited.

And what is the lever that makes this happen? Your marketing.

In other words by becoming better at marketing, by learning how to use better words, better systems and better approaches to your potential client you can greatly increase the results you are getting with little or no risk.

Now that’s a lever!

You create leverage on your investment of time and money and create a much greater result. That’s called leveraging your mind.

By: Shawn Meldrum

Business Investments in North Carolina

admin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:39:03 +0000

North Carolina is one of the most business friendly states in United States. It has been received the top rating for any US state to have the best business climate in 2007. At a time when many business processes are being outsourced to some other countries for reducing the production cost and thereby creating a better and competitive pricing structure, creating a suitable and attractive business climate is absolutely necessary for attracting quality business and industrial investment to any state.

The state government of North Carolina should be lauded for their efforts for attracting investments to the state. They specifically have two schemes, which cater well for the business growth of North Carolina. One North Carolina Fund was launched in 2001. So far it has been successful in creating more than 17000 job opportunities and also in romping over two million dollars of business investment to the state. There is another scheme called Job Development Investment Grant (JDIG), which has been set up for providing annual grants to worthy and suitable business and industrial projects. This scheme was started in 2003. Every year 25 such grants are provided. The grants are provided to the business firms, which are strategically important and look to be on the winning path. So far JDIG has been successful in attracting business worth $1.9 billion and in turn creating over 10000 job opportunities.

Some of the big companies that have invested in the state of North Carolina are GlaxoSmithKline, Boon Edam Tomsed Inc., and Dole Food Company. These companies have invested quite huge sums. Their willingness to invest is a glittering evidence for the business friendly environment in North Carolina. In other words, the co-operation and interest shown by the state government to attract investment have been appreciated by the companies.

The Governor of the state, Michael Easley says the government adopts simple plans that can be executed easily for attracting the business organizations. He says, “Our interest has been the simple strategy of improving education and reducing the cost of doing business.” His statement clearly emphasizes two traditional strengths of North Carolina that make the state highly attractive destination for many business organizations. There is an abundant pool of highly talented and educated people, from whom a company can hire any number of suitable employees. But the cutting of cost is no longer a feasible option when competing with international business destinations in this era of outsourcing and globalization.

So the state officials realize this hard and unalterable fact and focus more on the creative a talent pool of the highest quality. Also the government is offering several forms of tax sops and reductions for the companies that are willing to invest in the state.

By: Ian Pennington