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Writing a Business Plan

Nine Tips for Preparing Your Business Plan to Put Before a Money Lender

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By Dan Boudreau

There are many reasons to prepare a business plan, but the most popular is to get money to advance your business goals. At some point, most businesses will need to borrow money in order to grow. When that time comes, you’ll want to arm yourself with a bulletproof business plan.

Here are nine things you won’t want to miss as you ready your business plan to romance your lender.

  1. Describe Your Business. State your business vision and mission, and clarify how the business is structured, what you sell, and how it works. Weave these things together to create a snapshot of your current situation and be sure to tell why you need money and how much you need.
  2. Write Your Business Goals. Set goals for the term of the loan, including: sales targets, net profits, the number of units to be sold, new products or services, how you’ll diversify your business, and how many new clients you’ll add.
  3. List Your Customers. Describe your customers and the problem your business solves for them. Clarify who they are, what they want, and their main buying motives. A lender will want to know that you understand who you’re selling to.
  4. Describe Your Competitors. List your competitors and compare them according to the products or services they sell, how their facilities are arranged, how many workers they employ, and how long they have been in business. Explain how your business differs from the competition, and clarify why customers buy from you.
  5. Beef Up Your Biography. Provide a summary of your credentials and experience, including relevant academic, work, and business achievements. Feel free to toot your own horn by listing your strengths and successes—highlight your history of following through on your business plans and commitments.
  6. Plan Your Cash Flow. Cash flow is most easily created using a spreadsheet program. Determine the flow of cash into and out of your business—monthly for the term of the loan you hope to borrow, at a minimum for the first year. Key to your business plan, a cash flow forecast will clarify how much money you need to operate each month, as well as showing how you will pay back the borrowed funds.
  7. Project Your Income. While a cash flow projection shows how much money will be in the bank at the end of each month, pro forma income statements show whether or not your business is expected to be profitable in the future.
  8. Explain What You Need The Money For. In your business plan, show how you will use the borrowed funds. If you’re buying equipment, list the items and support your request with quotes. If you need an operating loan, your cash flow should show how much you need and when.
  9. Offer Security. Most small business owners will only be able to borrow against what they already own or can offer as security for the loan. Most often this means providing a personal guarantee and offering equity as security in the event you fail to make loan payments.

Finally, be prepared to invest a minimum of 20 to 50% of your own funds or equity into any venture or project for which you wish to borrow money. Lenders will want you to have enough skin in the game to ensure that you’re motivated to make payments and follow through on the promises made in your business plan.

Ready to get started on your business plan? We have free business planning and tools and resources for you. Visit our Tools page

Writing a Business Plan

Writing a Business Plan: The Dark Art of Predicting The Future

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By Dan Boudreau

The strongest resistance to business planning typically comes from diehard pessimists, who ask, “What good are my 3-year financial projections if I step off the curb tomorrow and get hit by a bus?”

That’s a great question that will stop anyone from ever doing a business plan. And it seems logical enough, until you consider that everything great that happens in the world comes about because somebody decided to make an impact on the future.

Truthfully, you might be the most unpredictable element of your business plan. Here are a few of the ways in which you can become the real wildcard in your business plan.

  1. You might not believe you can succeed, which is the kiss of death for any business. Your lack of belief in your business assures its failure.
  2. You might hate managing people, which is impossible to know until you try. Business owners need to be skilled at managing several groups of people; employees, customers, suppliers, and creative teams.
  3. After going through all the effort of getting your business started, you might discover that you really want to work for someone else and not carry the responsibility of owning and running a business.
  4. You might discover that you can’t turn the business off, that you simply worry about it until you burnout.
  5. You might learn that you’re not a salesperson. Not everyone is, but successful business owners are.
  6. As the owner of a business, you might find that the activities that fill your hours and days—marketing, selling, logistics—are things you really don’t enjoy. This leads to artists who insist on doing all art while ignoring the business. It happens to the technician who gets immersed in his profession and refuses to get out and market his business.
  7. You might learn that you’re hopeless with finances, and that you’re missing some of the necessary knowledge and skills to manage your business—how to prepare a cash flow forecast, how to read an income statement, how to keep records.
  8. You might discover that you’re disorganized, and that you dread having to plan your days, weeks and months. Does freedom unleash your creative spirit, or do you self-destruct when faced with an open road?
  9. After getting immersed in your business, you might discover that you work too long and too hard for the amount of money you earn. It’s true that many small and micro businesses never get fine tuned to the point of earning a profit; too many evolve into a twisted form of enslavement.

Any business worth its salt will present its owner with many learning opportunities. Each speed bump can be taken as an opportunity to learn and grow; or it can be the roadblock that motivates you to change direction and get a job.

It seems insane to attempt to predict the future, but it seems even more so to accept a life of drudgery in a dead end job. For those who aspire to improve their work life by working at something they enjoy, business planning is a great place to start, even if it seems a bit crazy at first.

Related Articles:

Entrepreneurs View Business Through Different Lenses

Myths About Owning Your Own Business

Article Archive: Entrepreneurship

 

Book Launch

Business Plan or BUST! Hits Amazon Best Seller List

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Press Release Nov. 24, 2008

In less than 24 hours Dan Boudreau’s book, Business Plan or BUST!, skyrocketed from a sales rank of #5,208,502 all the way to the best seller list at Amazon.com.

Prince George, British Columbia (PRWEB) November 24, 2008 – Dan Boudreau, Author of Business Plan or BUST! believes in miracles today! He also believes in perseverance, hard work and sticking to a plan.

On November 17, 2008, Dan’s book held the unflattering sales rank of #5,208,502 on Amazon.com. This meant that more than 5 million books were out performing his book at Amazon.com.

Less than twenty-four hours later, Business Plan or BUST! occupied a different position at Amazon, as Dan’s book shot upward to the best seller list in all 3 of the categories it’s listed in:

#2 in Business Plans

#4 in Home Based

#37 in Entrepreneurship

“After publishing, it became clear that the book wasn’t about to market itself and that nobody else, including Oprah, was going to promote it for me.” Boudreau said.

It can be costly and time consuming for an unknown, self-published author to get a new book into bookstores. The competition for space on the shelves is fierce, and bookstores need to stock the best and fastest selling books.

Boudreau refers to this “absence of uptake” on the part of bookstore owners as “a serious speed bump” for new authors. And it makes sense. The marketing of new books by unknown authors is risky and for the most part, unprofitable. Besides, says Boudreau, “The responsibility for marketing a self-published book clearly lies with the author.”

So he turned to what he calls the ultimate marketing tool – the Internet. He studied successful authors to determine what’s really working.

Boudreau learned about a marketing technique called the “e-blast” that appeared to be working for best selling authors like Dr. Wayne Dyer, Dr. Joe Vitale and Jack Canfield. An e-blast involves the engagement of several opt-in list managers to help by getting a message to their list members on a specific campaign day, and to get each of those managers to contribute a special bonus gift for the occasion.

To learn how to organize an e-blast, he enrolled in the Best Seller Mentoring Teleseminar offered by authors Peggy McColl (Your Destiny Switch) and Randy Gilbert (Success Bound).

Boudreau says, “This campaign was successful because of the efforts of many people, who helped to organize the event, the partners who mailed to their lists, and many friends and family who helped to get the word out.

“As well as achieving best seller status and selling books,” says Boudreau, “the biggest benefit of all has been the relationships we’ve built with savvy list managers throughout Canada, USA, and the UK.

Randy Gilbert, Best Selling Author of Success Bound, says “Everybody wins with the Best Seller Mentoring strategy. The author wins by selling books and gaining profile. The list managers win by attracting potential customers, and the customers get an amazing selection of bonus gifts with each purchase of the author’s book.”

Boudreau is already planning an e-blast to launch his next book, RiskBuster, which will be published early in 2009.

To see the Business Plan or BUST! Best Seller Book campaign in action, visit businessplan.riskbuster.com.

Macrolink Action Plans Inc. provides business planning tools for curious and serious entrepreneurs and hosts the RiskBuster Practical Business Plan Oasis at www.riskbuster.com.

Affiliates, Book Launch

Five Things That Can Thwart Your Eblast

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Recently we used a marketing technique called the “eblast” to launch my new book, RiskBuster. Within a few hours the book made #1 in the Home Based Business category and the best seller list in three categories both on Amazon.com and on Amazon.ca. What most authors might find interesting about this fact is that it wasn’t an accident; it was a planned effort and it wasn’t expensive to do.

An eblast is the act of partnering with opt-in list managers who agree to email their subscribers on a pre-arranged campaign timeline, usually 24 to 48 hours. List managers who participate are known as joint venture partners.

The idea is that, during the campaign period, all of the partners email their lists a warm invitation to visit a landing page or sales letter. If all goes well, the sales letter compels visitors to buy the product. This was the third time we’ve used the eblast method, with similar results in each case.

Although an eblast can bring amazing results, it’s not free to set up, and there are number of challenges that can thwart entire effort.  Here are some of the complications that can kill an eblast:

  1. A partner doesn’t send out the email invitation to his or her list. Considerable effort goes into building relationships with partners whose subscribers are potential buyers. It takes a fair bit of jostling to get the right partners to mail during the scheduled timeframe in order to build momentum and traffic. For a variety of reasons, the emails sometimes just don’t go out, which reduces the volume of emails and limits the potential for sales.
  2. Targeting the wrong lists. If the eblast is to be successful, you will need to partner with list managers whose subscribers are interested in your book or product. No number of emails will result in sales if the target recipient doesn’t need what you’re selling.
  3. Bad sales copy. All the email hits in the world are for naught if the sales copy on the landing page is uninteresting or ineffective. A well-written sales letter will catch the visitor’s interest, answer all of the main sales objections and lead the visitor to click on the “buy now” link.
  4. Broken links in the infrastructure. In our case, we wanted to drive traffic to the Amazon website to buy the book, and then return to our website and enter a confirmation number in order to receive a handsome number of bonus gifts. The website infrastructure included roughly 35 different web pages. Any broken or missing links between the pages can result in frustrated or lost customers.
  5. Technical failure. If for any reason your server or your website goes down on the day of the campaign, all your efforts are lost. Fortunately this has not happened to us, but we’ve always had technical people handy to deal with any glitches.

The good news is that all of these challenges are manageable, and the risks can be minimized.

An eblast is an Internet marketing method that should be of interest to any author attempting to sell books in today’s marketplace. I recommend the technique to authors as one part of a multi-pronged marketing strategy. The biggest win of all is the expanding global network of marketing alliances and the amazing friends we’ve made in several locations throughout the world.

Interested in joining Team Oasis?  Become a RiskBuster Business Plan Oasis affiliate.  We offer 55% commission on ebooks and 25% commission on membership and printed books.

http://www.riskbuster.com/affiliate-program/