Important Steps in Writing a Business Plan

Writing a good business plan requires a lot of time. Business plan is a roadmap of success for any startup, as well as an already established business. It tells where you are, and where you want to go.

Below are some important steps to writing a business plan:

  • Research: Research what is needed by your audience; what can lead your business to success.
  • Concept: Develop the concept of your business in your mind; it contains information about your business and your product or service; in short, overview of your business.
  • Establish your vision/mission: After establishing the concept, establish vision/mission of your business. Establishing mission/vision helps you to focus on one point.
  • Goals and Objectives: Set goals and objectives of your business.
  • Create outline: It contains information about the company & industry, products & services, market, management, financial plan and funds required.
  • Products/Services: Description of products or services and there features and benefits are included in this section. Be careful in writing about features and benefits of your product/service, it should be based on true.
  • Define target market: It contains proper research about market; you should have knowledge about your target market.
  • Know your target customers: It is one of the most important steps of writing a business plan, as well as for stating a business. You must know about your customers, their needs and desires.
  • Demand for your product: Before spending large amount of capital, research demand for your product. For successful business, it is necessary that the demand for your products/service exceeds supply.
  • Competitive analysis: This includes description about your competitors. You must have proper knowledge about your competitors for running successful business.
  • Marketing strategy: This section includes sales target, future products, budget for marketing, sales tactics, etc.
  • Financial projection: It contains your financial highlights, break-even, statements and use of funds.
  • Review & Editing: When you are done writing a business plan, it is necessary to proofread and edit it where required.

Writing business plan is not easy, but by following above important steps, one can write a good business plan that leads there business to success in future.

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The Empty Inbox – Email Nirvana for Small Business Communications

If you’re reading this, you are most likely a small business owner or employee and you feel that you have too many messages in your inbox. You’re feeling overwhelmed by it all, and you’re afraid that the sheer mass of your small business communications might be affecting your ability to do your job, which is probably not centered on email, or the productivity involved in answering it. Eventually, you actually need to do the things you talk about in your emails, the things that you started your small business to do. But at the same time, there are important things that come at you in your email, and you just can’t ignore them. There are customer orders, requests for support, business development requests, questions from your employees, and all manner of other necessary tasks. So, how do you manage this volume of email while still getting everything else done in the limited time you have every day?

Through the course of this article, you’ll learn some email productivity tips that should help you feel more in control of your small business communications, and you’ll feel less like there’s something lurking in your inbox that will ambush you later when it has gone undone for too long. Much of this information on email productivity comes from the David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” program, Merlin Mann’s “Inbox Zero” system, as well as the book Take Back Your Life! Using Microsoft Outlook 2007 to Get Organized and Stay Organized. If any of this article gives you hope on the future on your small business communications, I highly recommend you do further reading, and there are some links at the end of this to help you take the next steps on increasing your email productivity.

Better Email Productivity Equates to the Treasured Zero Inbox State

To be honest, if you get a lot of email, you probably won’t ever get to a Zero Inbox state, but it should be your goal. Email is merely a medium that enhances small business communications. It is the one place that people use to try to interact with you. But you can’t let it control your life or your small business. So, try to only check email every couple of hours or more. And when you do check email – make sure you have some time to give your email the appropriate attention. You don’t want your Inbox to become your filing system for all of your small business communications, orders, and whatnot because that is what leads to the feeling of being overwhelmed and out of control. When you have mastered your inbox (and subsequently your email productivity), you will be able to spend more time thinking about growing your small business with communications that streamline processes, or about taking that vacation with your family, or whatever else it is you haven’t had time to think about.

So, when you do open your Inbox – and you are faced with a bunch of new emails – what do you do? Everything in your inbox should be something you have not yet decided what action to take, and you should only have to read (and process) each email one time. You need to “Process to Zero,” or as closely as you can. What is “processing” in this context? It is the “so what” for each thread you open, where you convert each message into an action in order to reach greater email productivity. What does this email mean to you, and what is it ultimately asking of you? Based on the answer to that question, you need to do one of four things to each email you process:

1. Delete/archive
2. Delegate
3. Defer (i.e. read it later)
4. Do (response will take longer than two minutes, but you still need to do it)

So, how do you know which to do?

Taking Action to Streamline Small Business Communications

Delete/Archive: If there is no definable action (or you have already taken the necessary action on any small business communications you’ve received), you need to delete the email or archive it if the content is something you know you will need to refer to later on (I put them into an “@Archive” folder in Outlook 2007, because that keeps that folder at the top of my folders list and easy to see later). In any case, deleting the vast majority of emails that serve no future purpose will significantly boost your email productivity, allowing you to move on to other tasks.

Delegate: If there is a definable action that someone else needs to take, delegate the action to someone else by forwarding it to them and clearly spelling out what action you expect them to take. Then, you need to either delete or archive that email, because it no longer belongs in your Inbox.

Defer: If the email requires a task that will take longer than two minutes – you need to defer the action (and its associated email). I do this by moving the email into an “@Action” folder. The most important thing here is that you make sure that you get to the things in the “@Action” folder in a reasonable amount of time. You can’t forget about them and let them go undone, or you will stop trusting, and then stop using, the system and be right back where you started.

Do: If the email contains an action that requires LESS than two minutes to complete – you should just go ahead and do that action and delete or archive the email so you get the item off your plate. You’ll rack up a lot of “small victories” this way and feel more productive, because you will actually be more productive when dealing with your small business communications. Don’t say to yourself “I’ll just leave this in my inbox and get to it later;” take the action immediately to see your email productivity rise.

A couple of related email productivity tips from the Download Squad folks –

1. “If you don’t need to read it now, it shouldn’t be in your inbox.”
2. “If you’ve already responded to it, it shouldn’t be in your inbox.”

Remember, you want to minimize the number of times you have to read the same email. Make a decision about it the first time you read it, and just get it over with. It doesn’t help you at all to leave it in your inbox just so you have to come back and do the same thinking all over again. That’s a waste of your time and a serious drain on your overall email productivity.

Hopefully, these small business communications tips have gotten you started down the path of a cleaner inbox and a cleaner mind. The less stuff you have to keep track of in your head, the more you can use your head for productive thinking, like how to grow your small business.

Increasing Email Productivity References

The following links provide more information on small business communications.

–http://www.43folders.com/2007/07/25/merlins-inbox-zero-talk
–http://www.davidco.com/coaches_corner/Kelly_Forrister/article81.html
–http://www.davidco.com/blogs/kelly/archives/2007/11/digging_out_fro.html
–http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/technology/personaltech/05basics.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1
–http://www.downloadsquad.com/2006/11/15/five-simple-rules-for-keeping-an-empty-inbox/

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How to Avail Grants Money to Keep Alive Your Business Plans?

The Canadian government is actively involved with the business communities in the country at all levels. Each year the government gives out huge amount of grants to small, medium, and large enterprises with a hope to strengthen local economies, so as to foster the economic development and thereby create employment opportunity for Canadian residents. All the businesses in the area are interested in availing the government of Canada grants and there is a section who eagerly wait for the grants money in an effort to finance their business ventures. Most wannabe businesspersons who want to set up their business search desperately for government of Canada grants to boost their venture while many among them need these grants money to expand or support an ailing business as well as bring their business plans alive.

When there is an opportunity to avail some grants money through the government of Canada grants then every business should make the most of it. Getting some additional funds for the business can spell good prospect. Of course this will require a lot of search and hard work and once you discover the ways to get them, you can proceed to start your business or go on with the planned expansion you have always wished for.

Majority of the people believe that getting government funding involves a three-step process:

1.    Searching for programs which are available and their covering costs;
2.    Determining the various criteria of eligibility; and
3.    Putting forward the final proposal.

Now there are countless programs which are available and these are ever changing programs, for which one can never be sure whether they are overlooking the one particular program which could actually make all the difference. One can go for research but that would be time consuming and complex. More so it may be confusing too as the information which caters to them are more often described in legal terms which are difficult at times to understand. The best solution would be to locate a good website which has updated information and can work as a good guide toward availing some grants money through the government of Canada grants programs.

Finding out the eligibility criteria and submitting the proposal are definitely essential if one is hopeful about receiving the grants money they need. But before forwarding the final proposal one must ensure and check the probability of getting the grants. This can be done through determining the assessment criteria. This is the rating of the proposal by the officer who is in charge of the application for the grants. It is this person who actually decides whether the proposal put forward by a business is worthy of getting the funds or not. It includes parameters like the analysis of net economic benefit, statements pertaining to competitive impacts, analysis which pertains to the sustainability of the business proposal, and many other related parameters that play a key role in the final decision regarding the proposal.

Proposals toward availing some grants money through government sources like the government of Canada grants is assessed very strictly. And, if the proposal gets passed through the initial phases of scrutiny, there is no restricting factor that can prevent the applicant from availing the funds.

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