Archive for the ‘Small Business’ Category

October 27th, 2011  Posted at   Small Business

If you are passionate about fashion and know enough about the latest trends, then you might want to operate your own boutique. Being knowledgeable about fashion is a good starting point but it is not enough to make your boutique a successful business. You need an effective business plan for a boutique so you can lay out everything in details for you to study. First, you need to know what entails a boutique business. You need to buy products, usually from wholesalers, and retail the items to your customers. You can open a shop in malls where there is a huge potential of attracting numerous customers or you can choose a site where there is a convergence of your target customers.

There are plenty of salable items that you can choose to retail in your boutique. You can concentrate on a specific niche or sell different items for variety. You can retail shoes, apparels, accessories, bags, sporting goods, or any items that are considered fashionable at the moment. Whatever item you choose to retail, you need to have an eye for fashion. However, trends are one thing; your customers’ needs are another. The current trend may prove to be too fancy for your customers so you need to consider your target market or the neighborhood where your shop is located. If you aim to cater to working mothers, then make sure that your store displays items that they will find useful and at the same time, fashionable.

You can create a better business plan for a boutique by looking at other shops and observing how they operate. You also need to get acquainted with your competitions so you can provide what they cannot. For your boutique to stand out and get noticed, you need to hone your sales skills. Your sales will come from both new and repeat customers so you have to develop a relationship with them and make sure that they will always find essential products in your store. (more…)

October 27th, 2011  Posted at   Small Business

There are some very compelling reasons for writing a business plan for small businesses. The challenge is that the misconceptions about what needs to go into a small business plan scare most owners and entrepreneurs away.

If you are like most small business owners or managers, you are incredibly busy, if not borderline overwhelmed. The idea of taking hours of valuable time to write a plan for your business may not seem worth it. But the data proves differently.

When writing a business plan for small business, focus on what really needs to be done, and what really needs to be measured. The plan does not have to be a 15 or 20 page document. In fact, it should only be one or two pages maximum. You should also have a yearly budget or financial plan as well. You really do not need to go overboard and do tons and tons of research about the market, and the opportunity, especially if you are already in business!

To write your plan, you will need a few things to get started. If you can assemble any of your sales and financial information for the past couple of years, that would be a bonus. You will need a notebook and writing instrument, possibly a laptop or a computer, and yourself. Then, basically find a quiet place to sit down for about an hour, and think about your business, and where you want it to go, and how you think you can get it there.

Let’s start with where you want your business to go. This is just a fluffy way of saying your vision for your business. Set a timeline for your vision; say 18 months or up to 5 years out. Then think about what your sales would be if everything goes as planned. What are your primary products or markets, and where will you do it.

Here’s an example: Within the next 3 years, grow MS Cut to $750,000.00 in sales providing industrial routing and cutting services to manufacturers and distributors in the Indianapolis market. (more…)

October 27th, 2011  Posted at   Small Business

If you’re looking for investors you need business plan help. Keep these three tips in mind.

The Business Plan Is One Management Task That Cannot Be Delegated

Investors do not like to hear “I have consultant writing the business plan,” or the ever-popular “My accountant is doing the projections for me.” These specialists can be invaluable in assisting you with the project, not in taking it over and making the project their own. Far be it from us to not recommend hiring a consultant to help you. You don’t not want to get into a situation where you cannot explain part of the business plan to an investor because you were not involved in writing it.

Business Plans Written By Committee Seldom Look Pretty

It is always a good idea to obtain business plan help from the other key members of your management team–your marketing expert, your finance guru, the guy who brings the bagels in the morning–but it is not a good idea for each of these people to go off and work on their own independent drafts of the business plan, to somehow be assembled into one document later. What you will end up with is, well, a mess. A better method is to work off one draft, upon which each person is allowed to suggest comments or make edits. Some word processing software even lets you track each person’s changes in different colors, so you can tell which person commented that your brilliant marketing strategies were “lame”.

“Made Fresh While You Wait” Works Better in Dining than In Business Planning

A trend today is to send an Executive Summary of a business plan to potential investors before sending out the full document. Besides saving printing and postage costs, this allows the entrepreneur to determine if the investor is at all interested before revealing too much about the company. And you can sometimes get more timely responses from investors if you ask them to read 3 pages rather than 50. Entrepreneurs anxious to get financing, though, are just writing the business plan summary, and then finishing the business plan only when the investors express interest. How do you write a summary of something that doesn’t yet exist? The Executive Summary is supposed to highlight the key aspects of your plan. It reads better if you actually have some aspects that can be summarized. (more…)