Creating plans for small business

A business - new or established - needs a coherent strategy to keep it on track, and creating plans for small business will set a positive path to success while allowing an established business to build flexibility into its operations in times of financial crisis.

Start with a business plan

“Devising a plan is the number one thing that you need to do when you’re about to embark on a business venture,” says Stephane Majman of David Jaffe and Associates. “You need to have a mission statement and you need to have a business plan.”

The plan will identify your goals and objectives for the proposed business and ensure you channel your work to the correct areas.

A mission statement makes sure you have a defined business strategy that sets out how you plan to get the business started.

Find a point of difference

It is important to outline how you expect your business to stand out from others in the market. “If you plan to open a cafe on a busy main road with lots of well-established businesses, to be successful you need to identify what it is that will be different about your cafe and generate more customers than the others on that street. You need to establish this in your plan,” says Stephane.

Other things to identify in a business plan are:

• the market
• demographics
• potential uptake of market share
• anticipated costs.

A business plan is a living document

A business plan always evolves. When you start, your business planning may identify a need to pitch marketing at a certain demographic or make a certain amount, but as your business develops, you may find that some of the original goals aren’t achievable. Your business plan has to be flexible enough to accommodate this change.

“With our accounting practice, we used to do mainly individual tax returns because that’s what we originally started doing to generate leads,” says Stephane. “Over time, as we got busier and busier, we moved into business planning and over a period of 20 years or so our business has evolved. Now we take on hardly any individuals on a personal level and offer financial planning services to businesses.”

The devil is in the detail

Before you’ve actually started your plan, it’s all simply a concept, a theory rather than a reality. So how much detail should you put into a business plan before you actually start doing business?

“Put it this way: we created a business plan for a start-up business recently and we spent six months and a significant amount of money on it,” Stephane says. “The more detail you put into it, the more you get out of it.”

That doesn’t mean it’s going to be a successful business, but it gives you an indication of what you’re going to work on. If you haven’t done your homework it may come back to bite you later on.

Tailor your plan to the needs of your business

The more capital intensive your business is, the more accurate the costings need to be. “If it’s a service-orientated business, for example, a legal or accounting practice, then you can pretty much start with a computer and a desk,” Stephane says. “Not so with a restaurant. So it depends on the business as well.”

“In terms of structuring the business correctly and moving it in the right direction, you really need to engage the financial planning services of a qualified accountant,” says Stephane.

Contact a financial planner in your area today to create plans for small business: