Almost every small business client I meet is reluctant to commit to completing a strategic business plan for their business operation – yet it is one of the single, most important activities you can do for your fledgling business. When I ask small business owners about the status of their business planning activities, the conversation usually goes something like this:

Karen Paiyo (Business Counsellor): Have you completed a strategic business plan?

Business Owner: Well, no, I know exactly what I want my business to do, I don’t have to write it down. Things change so fast anyway that it would have to be updated every five minutes and I don’t really have the time to do one because I am up to my neck with other things and they take ages to do. I will have to write pages and pages and I don’t really know how to do one and I am not really a good writer and they are way too expensive to pay for one to be written and besides no-one really reads them anyway and it will just end up sitting on a shelf somewhere collecting dust. Even worse, what if my competitor gets their hands on the information some how? They will have all of my business secrets right there in their hands!

I think it is a sure bet that this conversation is being played out between advisors and business owners around the world. Research has indicated that fewer than 25 percent of businesses actually complete a business plan and of those that do, less than half actually continue to refer to the document after it has been completed and fewer still actually apply the strategies outlined in the plan.

I think you get the picture. There are a million reasons business owners use to justify their chosing not to undertake the completion of a business plan for their venture. I would like to challenge this view by offering some compelling reasons as to why a strategic business planning is essential for every enterprise.

Getting Intimate With Your Business

The first key benefit relates to the actual process of completing the plan. Owners who have completed their own business plan become intimate with every aspect of their business. The market research gives them the context within which their business operates. It provides detail and hard facts about the degree of competition and the issues facing your industry. In essence, it forces business owners to remove the rose-coloured glasses and face the harsh realities before them.

Assessing Reality, Planning and Articulating Your Strategy

The business planning process also forces them to assess every aspect of the business, the good, the bad and the ugly, and demands that the business owner, in light of the information they have unearthed, develop a well structured and articulated approach as to how they are going to press forward. It forces them to know each of its strengths and how to play to them and to become familiar with the weaknesses and how to plan on ways to improve on them. It addresses the business risks and forces you to identify and plan mitigation strategies to minimise them. It also assist in the identification of opportunities you may not otherwise have seen.

Facing the Financials

It makes you answer the all important question about money. Specifically, about how much you will need, for which purpose and when. It also forces you to address the key question of where it is coming from and how much you expect to make and when so you know how long it will take before you are expected to breakeven and when borrowed funds are to be returned.

Effective Stakeholder Communications Vehicle

The second benefit is you have a key document for communication purposes. Every time you discuss your business needs with stakeholders you are going to have to communicate who and what your business is, its history, business goals and clearly articulate your strategy for achieving those goals. This includes asking your bank manager or investors for funding, staff who will need to get up to speed quickly and be able to buy into your vision and to rally their activities around your business goals, as well as third-party service providers, such as graphic designers who will need to know your business in order to help you create your image and brand.

Your Business GPS

Another key benefit is that it acts as your touchstone and your compass. When you are buried in the day-to-day activities of operating your business it is often difficult to remember exactly where it is you are headed and what it is you are trying to achieve. Your business plan is your reminder and re-visiting your strategic business goals can help you re-focus, re-task and re-allocate your resources to get your business back on track – ensuring you achieve your goals that much sooner.

Articulates a Shared Vision

A strategic business plan articulates your vision and your goals. Research has shown that businesses who have a shared vision are more likely to grow net profits at exponential rate. Notably, Net Income for those with a shared business vision increased by a whopping 756% compared to a paltry 1% on average for those without.

A shared business vision creates a focus for each of your stakeholders and has them operating in concert with the shared vision. Combined with an appropriately aligned mission statement and goals and you have an effective framework for all decisions within the business, the end result is that all stakeholders are moving forward in unison and reaching your goals and fulfilling your strategic intent that much faster.

Your First Business Test

Think of the business planning process as bit of a test of your entrepreneurial determination, an indicator as to how far you are prepared to go to achieve your dream of owning your own business. There are no guarantees in business and overnight success is often the result of many years of struggle and sacrifice. Seeing how you step up to this challenge is an excellent way to determine if you have what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.

Business accounts are important for small businessmen, dealers or shop-owners. Banks usually offer a variety of accounts such as saving accounts, current accounts, fixed deposits; etc.According to the need and requirement, an individual can select an account for his use. For businessmen involved in businesses on a lesser scale, opening a small business checking account is indispensable. Ideally the businessman should open an account in the initial stages of business expansion. Before opening a small business checking account, there are several noteworthy features to consider such as daily transaction process which includes deposit and withdrawal as well as borrowing costs. Also banks have various offers to suit ones needs. Some of the tips to help you in opening the right account are as follows:

Analyze your business needs.An approximate measurement of your daily transactions such as deposit and withdrawal should be carried out. This helps a long way in laying down the right foundation for your business.

A small business checking account should be created if and only if you are starting a small company or a joint business involving partnership. Sole traders have the flexibility of operating with a single personal account.

Search and analyze the small business checking account schemes offered by different banks. Remember each and every bank has something different to offer than the other. Do not be compelled to open an account with a bank in which you have a existing personal account because your current bank may not offer great deals. So explore before finalizing!

Compare the costs and charges of each bank as negligence on this may create lots of hassles later. Also look out for hidden charges which your bank representative may avoid to inform you!

Opt for well-established banks which have a good track record.

The most important point to be kept in mind is bank charges. If the monthly or daily transactions are large, your bank may levy some extra charge. So be well informed about this! Some banks provide free charges for small period of time.

Your small business checking account becomes even more flexible if there are facilities for online payment and transactions. Online business banking has become popular and most banks provide this service. Transactions can be viewed from the comfort of your pc.

Lastly the bank which has a dedicated team to look after these business banking services.

When starting a business, there are many things to consider. In an effort to get up and running, many business owners neglect their businesses’ and their own insurance requirements.

There are a number of different types of insurances that a business must have in order to adequately protect itself. If you employ staff you must register for the appropriate level of WorkCover insurance in order to protect your employees and your business from the effect of a costly workplace accident.

The premiums for WorkCover insurance are dependent upon your company’s estimated total employment costs at the time of registration or renewal. This takes into account salary, wages, superannuation and fringe benefits to employees to determine how much you should be insured for. To avoid penalties, it is extremely important to alert your insurer to any changes of 20% or more to your total employment costs.

WorkCover insurance will protect your employees, but it provides limited protection for business owners. If you, as the owner, were the subject of an unfortunate work accident, your case would be more complicated due to a stranglehold of regulations and regular interviews with the insurer to determine if you get the benefit, and for how long. For this reason, every business owner should have income protection insurance.

Designed to do exactly what its name suggests – income protection insurance secures your income in the event that you cannot work due to an accident, illness or injury. Similar to other personal insurances, it pays to take out income protection insurance early in life because as you get older, the premiums get higher. By taking out this type of insurance in your 20s, 30s or even 40s, you can get the benefit of locking into a level premium policy, rather than stepping into an inflated policy later on.

With income insurance, you are entitled to payments that equate to 75% of your annual employment income, which is great peace of mind for anyone running a business.

In addition to WorkCover and income protection insurance, business owners should consider business overhead insurance and life insurance.

In the event of a company not being able to operate, business overhead insurance will pay the overheads of the business. This can often be extra little bit on top of income protection insurance, which will keep your business a float in the event of a catastrophe.

While it isn’t nice to think about your own mortality, it is vitally important that you consider applying for life insurance. As a business owner you are likely to have personal and business debt. If you have a family or any dependents, having life insurance can protect them against this debt and help them to avoid any additional financial hardship and suffering associated with financial stress.

We all know that setting up a business is extremely hard work and costly on both your pocket and your time. But with this combination of insurance packages you and your business will be protected against whatever rocky roads may lie ahead.

Mobile Media Marketing, although a unique medium, is a powerful component of a fully-integrated marketing strategy, especially for small business. This strategy has continued to grow at a dramatic pace as many traditional companies recognize the vast potential in mobile marketing. It has achieved global attention in the beginning of the 2000s, just at the time when short messaging service system or SMS started to thrive in countries such as Europe, North America, and Asia.

Business Blogging will continue to become more lucrative as more and more people look to new media such as Blogs and social websites for insight. Small businesses of all market segments are just recently becoming aware of what a small portion of early Mobile media pioneers already know: Online and mobile device platforms are revolutionizing today’s marketing strategies. Mobile marketing is beginning to be the number one and best way of reaching clientele.

Mobile Media Marketing is not truly new nor is it a passing fad. It is just now beginning to gain extreme interest in every segment of today’s business marketing strategies. I am sure you have seen it in use on TV shows, in commercials, and with major retailers.

Mobile Marketing is fast becoming the advertising strategy of first choice, replacing traditional advertising outlets, to boost and build customer bases and continued loyalty. It is a perfect extension of and compliment to social media.

Small business mobile marketing may sound like an impractical strategy to improve sales and attract customers. Small business owners often miss out on the latest marketing and PR innovations because they’re too busy working IN their business to work ON their business.

Mobile marketing is among the fastest growing forms of e-marketing. This type of promotion is also traditionally known as wireless marketing, although it is not always wireless. It is becoming a big buzzword in business and marketing.

This type of marketing is where Internet Marketing was in 2000. This strategy of marketing is still young, in comparison to other Internet marketing methods. Mobile marketing is a great way of marketing products or services of a company. It is perhaps one of the only ways in which you can directly interact with your customers.

The process of Mobile marketing is using an application to set up campaigns based on demographics of customers. It is set to rapidly overhaul all other strategies for reaching out to laser-targeted demographics of your existing or potential customers with your advertising copy. This type of marketing is now regarded as the best way of reaching the buyers.

Mobile marketing is still in the infant stages and the hottest new trend in marketing. It is projected to become huge this year.

Since, it is still new and reasonably priced, making it the ideal type of marketing to try out. This mobile strategy is very easy to get into, but you should have an eye-catching and targeted angle for your offer.

Mobile marketing has a major difference from the traditional means of marketing methods. It has the potential to increase a small businesses return on equity tremendously. It can be used in a variety of manners, in a variety of market segments, retail, education, retail, fitness, golf courses, religious & non-profit, florists, hair salons, restaurants & bars, night clubs & entertainment,, hotel & resorts, service & repair services, and even for rental properties.

Basically designing small, medium, or enterprise class computer networks are principally similar. You need to design your private network infrastructure to provide the availability and reliability of network resources; network security system to protect your network resources against any types of threats, and secure global communication system. Small business computer network should include these three aspects: the private network; the end-point security system for internet threats protection; and a secure way in providing system communication with global internet.

For example, in your business network you need to provide database application to support your finance management, and an email server to support your business communication, you allow authorized users to connect via internet from homes, or probably you need to link other branch offices via WAN cloud connection. Dig as much information as possible before designing your small business network. The following lists some areas you probably need to implement in your design.

Software Applications

You need to drill down the requirements each of the main element of your core business needs. For example, you need a database application to support your finance management. What application software to purchase, contact the vendor and ask them to provide a presentation about their product and see if their product can meet your finance need. How critical your application to support your business will be, if you don’t accept any downtime – you need to provide redundant servers and configure them as failover / failback system. You can dig more information to meet your business need regarding the finance management.

User Account Management

What about user account management? How do you manage the security of your network resources, who can access or deny certain resources and how they can access them? This will help you to design your logical infrastructure need, for example you need to implement Windows server with Active directory (AD) system which should be integrated with your DNS.

With AD infrastructure, you can create group policies that meet your security needs based on different level of user groups. If you implement a Windows server AD, Read the rest of this entry »

The Small Business Jobs Act of 2010, signed into law by President Obama in late September, is designed to tackle America’s continuing high unemployment rate by bolstering that sector of the American economy that has traditionally been responsible for the creation of the most American jobs: the small business sector. Small businesses, defined by the Small Business Administration (SBA) as any commercial concern with fewer than 500 employees, employ slightly over half of all private sector employees and over the past 15 years have generated close to 65% of all new jobs.

It’s no secret that the recent economic downturn has hit business where it hurts. Even in prosperous times, business formation is a risky endeavor: over half of all small businesses fail within their first year, in part because their owners have an incomplete knowledge of the business law necessary to guide them through business formation. In the year 2008, the first year of the recession, almost as many of these businesses closed as were started, and many of those businesses had been in operation over ten years.

The 2008 $825 billion economic stimulus package contained very few provisions aimed at helping small businesses. Read the rest of this entry »

Implementation of ERP ideology in small businesses could be their path to growth. At some point in time it becomes inevitable for a company to implement an ERP solution. As the company grows, it becomes harder and harder for the management to control all the activities, employees, departments, branches etc., without a centralized information system which collects, stores and processes all the needed data for a certain decision to be made. Without such a software it could take much more time for the resolution of a simple problem and sometimes it is even impossible for a decision to be made. Read the rest of this entry »

With so many professional people being laid off in the past 18 – 24 months, and with so many of them having experienced difficulty finding new positions at similar titular levels and pay, many of these people are considering transitioning to small business ownership. Some are considering purchasing franchises, others are considering buying a small business in the area, still others are considering freelancing their skills. If you are one of these people, whichever you are considering, here is some helpful information.

First, working as an employee in corporate America, whether you were a vice president or administrative assistant, is vastly different than owning your own firm. I can’t stress this enough. If you are aware of the potential pitfalls, you can take steps to avoid them or minimize their impact. The biggest difference is that you may have been an excellent marketer or IT representative or HR manager, but that does not a business make. You can output excellent marketing materials and still have a horrible business. Why? You know how to do your functional area very well but you do not know how to run a business.

Second, when you work in corporate America, you have significant support that you take for granted. You have a marketing machine behind you so many businesses and individuals recognize your business’ name, you have an HR and payroll department that handles most of the recruitment and retention of employees (advertising, hiring, benefits, policies, etc.), you have an in-house mail department that sends out the mail and an IT department that fixes your locked-up computer or inability to access the server. When you start a small business, you generally have none of that. You need to mail something, get in your car and go to the post office. Your computer locked up? Go to your local Staples or Best Buy or similar or contact the Geek Squad unless you have a friend in IT. You get the point. All the back office operations you NEVER thought of…now you must handle all of that personally…or hire or outsource it.

Third, you need to understand how to run a total business, not just a group or a department. Take a class at your local community college. There are a number of entrepreneurs who moonlight as class instructors who can help you expand your understanding. Also, check out your local library. There are many books on starting a business. Get a number of them and read until you can’t read anymore. Consider purchasing those that you find the most useful for your permanent library.

Another way to learn about starting up or buying then running a small business is Junior Achievement. Yes, Junior Achievement is targeted at middle and high school students. However, it has an absolutely excellent program called JA Fellows which is targeted exclusively at high school students. No, you can’t participate as a member, but you can participate as a Volunteer. You can still learn all the information and master all the steps as a Volunteer. The JA Fellows program is an in-depth program that has received numerous accolades. Sign up to volunteer for the 2010-2011 session. You will definitely appreciate it.

There are a number of profitable small business ideas that you can consider. Many companies looking for investors, for example, advertise themselves in business magazines and newspapers. You can also find a number of profitable small business ideas posted in the internet. It is however important that you always check out with your business bureau to verify the legitimacy of a profitable business idea that has been offered to you.

This will help you avoid the hassles of dealing with illegal companies whose objective is just to steal money from their investors. It is best that you make a research before dealing with a company regardless if a friend or a colleague has referred it to you. Be also cautious of companies enticing you to invest on business ideas that seem too good to be true. Make sure that you seek for a business advice before signing any document to invest in particular business opportunities. Read the rest of this entry »

Small business marketing should include consulting that utilizes social networking as a way to promote products or services. A business page on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is free for now, but the labor, time and expertise it takes to regularly promote a company on social media are not.

An effective social media company needs to provide specific services in order to run an online marketing campaign. What services should a small business owner expect when hiring a consultant? This article will outline key activities in social media that will lead to more prospects and sales. By increasing the bottom line for a business and increasing friends and members for an organization, it will become apparent why all small businesses need to set-up social networking accounts.

Set-up of Social Media Business Accounts: Having a personal page on Facebook is not enough to promote a company. Opening up a business page is just the first step in embracing social networking as a source of leads and sales. A consultant should offer to set-up a Facebook page in the company name and assign a person to administer this page. A Twitter business account as well as a business page on LinkedIn should also be established.

Regular Posting: There are many ways to communicate with friends and contacts on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. On Facebook, members can post a link to a website, a photo or graphic or a video. This communication is instant and it’s public. When posting occurs on a social networking business page, Read the rest of this entry »