10 questions answer business plan
A friend of mine is fond of reminding her clients that they are in the lawn business not the grass seed business. You do what you do so your customer can have a great lawn, grass seed is merely the means to get there. This builds on the previous question, and should be a concise statement that everyone in your business knows by heart. Who makes the decision to buy your product or service? Who needs your product or service? Who have been your customers in the past and who will they be in the future?
Big Questions Every Business Plan Should Answer
I took the train from Philadelphia, where I had been living at the time, for our first ever face-to-face meeting about how to grow Mark Fisher Fitness.
I showed up with an outline of a business plan and a projector, which felt super fancy at the time. We sat on his couch, probably got stoned, and worked on our business plan until our brains were melted and oozing out of our ears. That single document laid the groundwork for the culture and community we were starting to build, guided us in creating our first real website, and helped us get our first commercial lease.
Pretty cool, right? However, a well-written plan creates the foundation of your business beyond predictions of performance. Whether you are planning to start a business or have an existing one, this article will be a valuable opportunity to identify the key forces driving your business and ensure you have a clear vision of your path to epic success.
One caveat. This article is a survey, not a deep dive. Each one of these 10 questions is worthy of many articles to dive into the complexity contained therein. This part of your plan represents the heart and soul of your business, and often includes three sections: mission statement, vision statement, and values. The vision statement is your version of what the future looks like when your business succeeds in its mission.
Your values are the shared beliefs that give insight to the things that matter most to your business. Values are beliefs we put on a pedestal as ideals, so your values should set the tone for the kind of reputation and culture you want for your business. I worked in luxury hospitality for many years. One day, I shared my confusion with a senior manager who explained to me that many our guests have nicer things at home. When they leave their comfortable, well-appointed homes, they want an experience that exceeds their everyday lives.
It sound pretty obvious now, but as a young man who grew up in a trailer park in New Jersey, that insight created a giant perspective shift for me. I felt like I better understood where our customers were coming from, could empathize with them, and ultimately serve them better. Think of this story as you answer this question, who is your ideal customer and what is their problem? Create an avatar of your ideal client. Include demographic age, gender, location, etc.
This is where you start to define your business products and services. This section is pretty self-explanatory, but here are a few tips. Your products and services should speak directly to the core problem you identified in question number two.
When defining your products and services, consider that each is made up of features and benefits. Both are important, but we often forget the latter.
Features might include, 3 classes per week for 6 weeks, unlimited email support, and a detailed nutrition plan. Benefits build value for your clients emotionally and help the understand how your product or service can impact their life. Benefits of a client doing a fitness boot camp might be that they will feel better in their bodies and have more energy, and they will learn strategies for a positive sustainable relationship with food.
Make sure that when you design your services and products, you include both features and benefits. Both your internal strengths and weaknesses as a team or solopreneur and the external opportunities and threats of your environment have a tremendous impact on your ability to succeed. A business plan is the perfect place to reckon with those realities and devise strategies to leverage the good stuff and overcome the bad stuff.
This exercise often takes the form of a S. When Mark and I first did this analysis, it led us many discoveries and resulted in hiring some of our first employees. We identified two big weaknesses. As a result, we hired an accountant and got Mark a part-time assistant. With just a little bit of reflection and analysis our business plan quickly became the springboard for meaningful action.
In the fitness industry it is crucial to stand out from the crowd. However, there is a ton of shit we do at MFF that is different than all of those other places — our brand, culture, community, training methods, and more. That is why this question is so crucial. As business owners we have to present our businesses in striking contrast to our competition.
We have to clearly articulate what makes our company unique, and that thinking starts in your business plan. Serious Fitness. What makes them unique and how do they communicate that to you? That might help get your wheels turning to more easily define yours. Regardless of the type of business you have, you are positioning yourself as an authority.
You are an expert on solving a specific problem for your customers and are asking them to trust you with their time, attention and money. The first question any responsible customer should ask themselves is Why should I listen to you?
How you answer this question in a business plan can take many shapes. You can establish your credibility by including:. From this point, how you continue will vary based on the stage of growth of your business.
For younger businesses you might include some guidelines for defining your brand voice in a way that communicates your credibility. For more mature business, this part of your plan might include some marketing strategies for how you plan to reach your intended audience along with key marketing messages.
My best advise is to simply include the information that you think will be most useful to the next year of your growth. The goal is to sketch your path forward, not to chisel it in stone. Can you believe that we made it all the way to question seven before talking about money? Particularly for those of you who are just starting your business or are still in the first few years, your level of clarity about the first six questions will be strongly correlated with your ability to make money.
Money comes as a result of you being the best at knowing your clients and effectively solving their problems. This is one of those sections I could write about forever. When you are just starting out and growing you can forget all about profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements. A forecast is like a roadmap, a budget is like a report card. Examples here. A forecast is a simple spreadsheet on which you make some educated guesses about your future revenue and expenses.
I recommend doing this for at least one year and for as much as the next three years. Along with each educated guess, list your assumptions. As your business matures you can make slightly more accurate forecasts based on actual performance data. A budget is a second simple spreadsheet that divides your forecast into monthly columns so you can track what you planned to spend and earn against what you actually spent and earned.
The most important factor in considering how your business makes money is to not get overwhelmed. If talking about money stresses you out, just keep it simple. This question is all about creating a vision of your company into the future. Like a forecast and budget, I recommend listing the resources your business will need for the next 3 years. This is your opportunity to think of all the equipment, supplies, and people you will need to grow your business into the future.
Most business plans answer this question by simpling listing the resources they think they will need over time. At what point will you need to hire more staff? How often do you plan to replace your computers and other technology? If you are a busy fitness facility, how is general wear and tear going to impact your equipment and flooring? The crucial numbers that define your business are often referred to as key metrics or key performance indicators KPIs.
A great book on this topic is Scaling Up , by Verne Harnish. There is so much to say about this topic, but I think the biggest mistake people make is thinking the health of their business is solely measured by the money in your bank account. Sure, having money is critical. However, there are much better indicators to tell you if your company is going to be successful before any money is exchanged. For a fitness business, you might count on a weekly basis the number of visits to your website, the number of emails collected, the number of consultations scheduled and completed, the number of new members created.
As you can tell, this topic goes deep. You can slice and dice key metrics a million and one ways. What systems, procedures and protocols do you need to scale?
What are barriers and roadblocks you can anticipate as you work to grow your business? I can say with confidence that nearly all of the challenges we have faced in growing MFF could have been predicted. Think of this process like planning a road trip. You can check road closures and weather forecasts. You can make sure you have enough food and fuel for the drive.
This business plan works the same way. For this section, make a list of potential barriers to your growth along with growth strategies for overcoming them. At MFF, one of our barriers to growth is finding new trainers.
There you have it — the 10 most important questions to ask yourself when building a business. If you really want to tackle these questions and build or update your business plan, go for it! I strongly recommend completing each question in order. They are designed to build on each other as you work through them, starting with the foundation of mission, vision, values and ending with your roadmap of potential future challenges. Expect any honest effort at building a business plan to take at least three solid days of work — or several weeks if spread out into a few hours each day.
Starting and building your own business can be overwhelming. And while many business owners cringe at the mere mention of drafting a. 6 Critical Questions Your Business Plan Must Answer In some ways, writing a business plan is easy -- there are no rules or requirements for.
You may be asking yourself this very question. However, instead of trying to answer this broad question, I suggest instead you ask yourself the following list of 12 more specific questions. After you ask yourself these questions, I highly recommend you check out our guide presenting how to start your own business in 5 steps. However, considering only one simple question like that in starting a business could lead you to a decision that you may regret.
October 13, It lets you use your voice to send messages, dial calls, schedule meetings and set reminders.
Therefore, I have listed 10 essential questions for you to answer before starting your business. When I think about starting a business, I often think about going on a vacation.
10 ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS FOR BUILDING A BUSINESS
Even if you have defined objectives, use your answers to these 10 questions to help you fine-tune your efforts and grow your business successfully. By now, you've set a working direction for the year, established clear-cut objectives. Your first-iteration plan to reach them should be in place. This now seems like an ideal time to rethink the whole thing, doesn't it? After all, one of the effects of internet time is that plans are subject to change just as soon as - or perhaps even before - they are written. Along these lines of thinking, perhaps there are some items you missed.
10 Questions Your Business Plan Should Answer
Crafting the perfect business plan is often a challenge for any number of reasons. However, one of the biggest challenges standing in the way of a good business plan is the fact that oftentimes, no two investors, judges or members of your audience are looking for the same thing when evaluating a business plan. To help, here are six questions every business plan should answer. I always look for what will give the business a competitive advantage relative to businesses that want to offer the same or similar goods and services and an analysis of the competitive landscape. I pay particular attention as to whether there is valuable intellectual property, be it patents, trademarks, copyrights or trade secrets, that will serve as barriers to entry for competitors. The key to any successful business is to be a growing company in a growth market. My frequently asked question is, "how do you plan to feed and clothe yourself and where do you plan to sleep while you're getting this venture off the ground? In every business plan, I like to see the recognition of the need to cover and staff the production, sales and finance parts of the business. Roles should be established for the entity as if it were mature and successful.
By Steven D.
I took the train from Philadelphia, where I had been living at the time, for our first ever face-to-face meeting about how to grow Mark Fisher Fitness. I showed up with an outline of a business plan and a projector, which felt super fancy at the time. We sat on his couch, probably got stoned, and worked on our business plan until our brains were melted and oozing out of our ears.
6 Questions Every Business Plan Should Answer
Every small business needs a business plan. Your business plan should be a living, breathing portfolio that evolves along with your company. By making sure your business plan answers the right questions. Below are six crucial points that you should address with your business plan. Instead, your business plan should highlight what is different, exciting, or inspiring about your product or service. An element of innovation will underline the viability of your concept, and help to persuade investors that you can succeed. Investors like to see new or expanding businesses in industries that are either stable or growing because it presents them with a better chance that their investment will pay off. The competitive edge is more than just a corporate buzzword. A great business plan articulates the differences between your products or services and similar offerings from your competitors. Few companies can remain viable forever as sole entrepreneur operations. Investors want to know that you have smart, realistic staffing plans in place for your start-up or expansion. Your business plan is a place for reasonable goals, with carefully considered, even conservative projections. One of the best rules for customer service is to under-promise and over-deliver, and your business plan should follow that rule.
A Business Plan Checklist: Key Questions To Answer
Never underestimate the importance of your business plan. But finding the right answers to the right questions is critical if you want to lay the groundwork for a stable business and attract sufficient attention from investors. Chances are, there are multiple businesses out there who are already serving the crucial need you outlined from question one. Identify the differentiating factor that will allow you to stand out, and emphasize it. Ask Yourself These Questions. Think about factors like age, sex, education, geographic location, working status, marital status, and perform some preliminary market research to determine the best path forward. Where are you going to sell? How much are you going to sell for? The other side of the question is what are your operating expenses?
