Why Business Plan Is So Important

Doing business is not just about selling and getting the money. Business means something more than just money.

In this modern world of business, it means having a very comprehensive plan and processes from the start until the business ended.

Why having a comprehensive business plan is important?

Imagine that you’re riding a bike on a busy road without any specific goal and understanding the situation of the that road. What will you face along the way? There’ll nothing you can predicted during your trip.

Business plan means understanding the situation, opportunities, analyzing budget, and creating activities to support the business objectives.

What a “good business plan” will look like?

A good business plan will contents:

1. LOC (Local operation country) situation analysis: Analyzing all the situation related to country that your company operating is very important. This more on external situation understanding. This included all political issues, economic issue as well as traditional. These elements is very important and it will impact directly to your business. Thus, understanding these will help you have a very clear/good visibility on the future of your business.

2. People: People are very important for your business. This doesn’t mean that you need only have a very good sales, or even manager to run your business is okay. This mean you have to understand the paying behavior as well as their income as well. You cannot be succeed in your business if you are selling a very premium products in a very poor social. Understanding their paying behavior as well as their income will help you to introduce the products right place, right people and right needs.

3. Product or Service: Just like what I have said, people and product is so important. Understand the people and their paying behaviors, help you to introduce right products with right price so that you business can grow just right to what you already predicted. ” Do not sell Rolls-Roys cars to a homeless man”. Currently, the world is changing from purely selling product features, to including customer services. People are not just buying what they needs, but they also looking for a very good service as well. You need to have a very good service.

4. Marketing: Business is supporting by plenty of marketing plan and activities. Advertising and promotion will help boost your business forwards. You might need marketing people to help you achieve this goal.

5. Legal Issue: Doing business in a right way is very important to reduce or secure yourself from any possible risks. So, you better make your business legal, running it legal and win in the legal ways.

6. Financial: This is very important part of a business plan. All the activities, plans and goals will not achieve if you don’t have enough finance to support. You need to have a very clear view of any cost of each individual projects that you have planned and profit of each projects will bring for you. Financial plan should have been done along the way during you’re creating your business plan.

 

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Do We Really A Marketing Plan?

I believe that everyone of us have our own plan, business plan for your future, no matter how the size of business will be. But before we run our business, we have to think twice about our business plan, and that’s Marketing Plan.

So, do we really need to have a marketing plan?

Marketing plan is not just about plan to sell our products or service, but this is the plan that can make our business even bigger and bigger. Most of us are end up the plan with simple questions: How will we run the business? How our business will look like? How much money will we get from the business?

Money is important, but not in all the cases. You want to run your own business you havet to create a good plan, not just concrete plan, but it has to be an implementable, measurable and achievable plan. So, what you need to think before you run your business?

1. What kind of business are you going to do? – You need to think and think what kind of business and what kind of product/service that you are going to run. Once you find it out, you would easily to just come up with the marketing plan for it. List down all what you want to do, set the best favorite on the top, the most priority one.
2. Floating marketing ideas: To avoid of being stress of business marketing, you need to list down all the ideas you have in mind. Put the most important and priority on the top with supporting ideas for that main idea. You might need to think about the conditions that you’re in right now. Put all everything, every persons, very conditions you have in front of you, group/match it together and you’ll come up finally with a very concrete idea that it might be your future business
3. Marketing planning: Marketing will just easily comes when you identify what you want and love to run in the future. Once you have already chose it, then you might need to have your own marketing plan to support those business. To prepare a concrete plan, you just need to research, and analys the market situation including another companies who are doing business like yours. Those marketing plan doesn’t have to be complicated or very concrete because marketing plan can alwasy be changing along the way as well. Just prepare the plan that reflex to your market. List it down, set the calendar of activities and implement it. A successful marketing plan is not based on how many program, activities that you’re going to roll-out, but it will base on does those plans are relex to the market and will deliver the result or not. I saw many of us are create/putting so many activities in list but at the end, just a few had implemented. And that’s the problem.
4. Post marketing analysis: This part is really focus on how the impactful of our marketing plan after we implemented it. If it is impactful with positive feedback, then we need to continue with it and explore something more. But it has nothing change or improved then we need to adjust or even change it.This is a very important step. It is a step then we need to measure our succeed.
5. Explore something new, adapt and apply it: The implest theory to learn and adapt something new is look, learn, adapt and apply. Along with your current marketing plans, you need to explore more about what’s really happening around you. Business and marketing concepts are always changing and that’s the reason we need to learn more and more about it. Remember that, the 1980s marketing concepts will not work in 2010s market. We need to learn something new to fit the requirement of our current market. Marketing plan should update, adjust and add new every semester and you should have your own tracking list to really see where are you now in terms of progress.

These 6 tips are important for each and everyone of us to think before we start to run our own business. These are what I absorbed from what I’ve learned during my 4 working years. I don’t know it will work with you guys or it might conflict to your ideas, or what you’ve learned, but these are the basic fundamental of business opening.

Appreciate your comments! Let’s share the ideas here so that everyon can have the way of new look of running our own business.