If in doubt about this seek some help from an experienced business person or your accountant. Generally sole-traders and partnerships have simpler tax arrangements – for example, profits are typically taxed as personal earnings – as compared with the more complex taxes applicable to limited companies, which also pay taxes on company profits and staff salaries. Good suppliers have usually seen too many ungrateful greedy people taking them for granted and penny pinching, and will tend to sack clients like these without even telling them why, and move on to more deserving enjoyable work with people who are fair and appreciative, which is how you’ll be I’m sure. VAT (Value Added Tax or your national equivalent) is an issue warranting serious thought if your business is small enough to have a choice in the matter. Increasingly, large customers demand SLA’s to be tailored to their own specific needs, and the process of developing these understandings and agreements is absolutely crucial to the maintenance and development of large contracts. It can double as a promotional tool as well if it’s made available on a wider scale. If you are a competent working with spreadsheets it is normally possible to assemble all of this data onto a single spreadsheet and then show different analyses by sorting and graphing according to different fields.
Market development – Developing new markets for your existing products. Many organizations discontinue products/services that they consider fall into this category, in which case consider potential impact on overhead cost recovery. If you don’t know a reader’s gender, use a nonsexist salutation, such as their job title followed by the receiver’s name. The extent to which this details the sales plan also depends on the needs of the business. It is imperative that you capture all complaints in order to:. Click here to access the eLeadership Academy.
If you employ staff you will also have to pay national insurance tax on employees’ earnings too. So again shop around and find an accountant with whom you can share a joke and a beer or something from the human world. This is because bigger sales and profits and earnings inevitably produce bigger tax bills (percentage of tax increases too in the early growth of a business), all of which becomes a very big problem if you’ve no funds to pay taxes when due. Junior managers have responsibility for plans and activities which feed into larger departmental plans and activities of senior managers. Explore the topics below to learn the aspects of.
Business and enterprise is not just for stereotypical ‘business-types’; the benefits and advantages of being your own boss are available to us all. Preferably one who comes recommended to you. What am I trying to achieve. , and that all these terms might mean slightly different things, according to the situation. Acquire the knowledge, products, and services you need to run and grow your business. If you can make your case on a half dozen pages then do so.
Many people use the words ‘sales’ or ‘selling’ and ‘marketing’ to mean the same thing – basically selling products or services to customers, in the broadest sense. It’s also a personal tool to help you understand your objectives. Sales or selling is an activity within marketing, referring to the methods and processes of communicating and agreeing and completing the transaction (sale) with the customer. Do you know this for sure. You must understand and define clearly what you are providing to your customers.
Sales or selling is an activity within marketing, referring to the methods and processes of communicating and agreeing and completing the transaction (sale) with the customer. This guide from Barclays will help you create your own small business plan. That way you can be fully informed of the tax situation – and your best methods of dealing with tax, because there are usually different ways, and sometimes the differences can be worth quite a lot of money. For businesses of any size; small, local, global and everything in between, the main elements you need to understand and quantify are:. Under normal circumstances competitive advantage is increased the more you can offer things that your competitors cannot. Generally sole-traders and partnerships have simpler tax arrangements – for example, profits are typically taxed as personal earnings – as compared with the more complex taxes applicable to limited companies, which also pay taxes on company profits and staff salaries.
The numbers could be anything: ten times less, ten times more, a hundred times more – the principle is the same. In fact, marketing refers to much wider issues than sales and selling. Your business plan is your compass. The inside address begins one line below the sender’s address or one inch below the date. The extent to which this details the sales plan also depends on the needs of the business. Understanding personality is also useful since personality-type greatly influences the way that a person approaches self-employment or running an enterprise, and what sort of service or business to offer. Leave one line blank after the salutation. Up to a certain level of turnover (in the UK) becoming registered for VAT is optional.
Main thesis about business plan writing
In some circumstances, you may also use a less common format, known as open punctuation. To write the address, use the U. Before attending to the detail of how to achieve your marketing aims you need to quantify clearly what they are. You need to have a scheme which encourages, not discourages, customers to complain, to open the channels as wide as possible. You may not have all the people that you need so you have to consider justifying and obtaining extra. Many organizations discontinue products/services that they consider fall into this category, in which case consider potential impact on overhead cost recovery.
Write your aim large as a constant reminder to yourself, and to anyone else involved. When writing to companies within the United States, use the American date format. What is your product mix, in terms of customer type, size, sector, volumes, values, contribution, and distribution channel or route to market. If you have enclosed any documents along with the letter, such as a resume, you indicate this simply by typing Enclosures one line below the closing. In truth you will have some costs to offset against the earnings figures above, but again for the purposes of establishing a very quick principle of saving a fixed percentage as a tax reserve until you know and can control these liabilities more accurately, the above is a very useful simple easy method of initially staying solvent and on top of your tax affairs, which are for many people the most serious source of nasty financial surprises in successful start-up businesses. In this context, the business plan could be called also be called a marketing plan, or a sales plan – all departmental plans are basically types of business planning:.
Each new section should start at the top of a new page. Typically these names reflect the department doing the planning, despite which, the planning process and content required in the document is broadly similar. The Ansoff product-market matrix helps to understand and assess marketing or business development strategy. Some projects are very substantial and equate to an autonomous (independent) business activity, in which case a business plan is entirely appropriate. Generally sole-traders and partnerships have simpler tax arrangements – for example, profits are typically taxed as personal earnings – as compared with the more complex taxes applicable to limited companies, which also pay taxes on company profits and staff salaries. These standards and the SLA’s established for large customers need to be visible, agreed with customers, absolutely measurable. Customer service is acutely sensitive to staffing and training. Customers get disappointed particularly when their expectations are not met, and when so many standards can be set at arbitrary levels, think of each one as a promise that you should keep. All businesses need a ‘mission statement’. See the quick tax tips below, especially for small businesses which might not easily be able to achieve immediate and accurate control of their tax liabilities, which is one of the major early risks for a new successful small business. After considering your business in terms of the Ansoff matrix and Boston matrix (which are thinking aids as much as anything else, not a magic solution in themselves), on a more detailed level, and for many businesses just as significant as the Ansoff-type-options, what is the significance of your major accounts – do they offer better opportunity for growth and development than your ordinary business. Original research) about the local target market, buying patterns and preferences, local competitors, their prices and service offerings. It is easy to address issues of ethics and corporate responsibility when you are the owner of a new enterprise. Identify key performance indicators here too, such as customer complaints response and resolution levels and timescales. “What you are going to sell to whom, when and how you are going to sell it, how much contribution (gross profit) the sales will produce, what the marketing and/or selling cost will be, and what will be the return on investment.
Add different columns which reflect your own business profit drivers or levers, and to provide the most relevant measures. In the first example, return on investment is the aim; in the second example, return on investment enables some other higher aim to be achieved. Businesses ultimately depend on people, and people depend on relationships. Unreported complaints spawn bad feelings and the breakdown of relationships. If you need to include lots of reference material, examples, charts, evidence, etc, show these as appendices at the back of the document and make sure they are numbered and referenced during the main body of the plan. Customer complaints handling is a key element:. It’s also a personal tool to help you understand your objectives. This increasingly applies to many non-commercial activities (government services, education, health, charities, etc), whose planning processes may also be described as ‘business planning’, even though such organizations may not be businesses in the way we normally imagine.
The world is changing and learning, slowly, but it is, and anyone ignoring ethics in planning today does so at their own peril. In fact often when we are confronted with a complex planning spreadsheet containing thousands of numbers, what we are actually being offered is a ready-made planning tool. For example, you might write Dear Chris Harmon: if you were unsure of Chris’s gender. Strong market share suggests there are likely to be better returns from extending the range of products/services that you can offer to the market, as in the next option. Where a department is a ‘cost centre’ not a ‘profit-centre’ – providing products or services internally to other departments rather than externally to customers – then the language and planning elements may alter, but the principles remain the same. Tip: If the business plan concerns an existing activity, use the previous year’s sales/business analysis as the basis for the next year’s sales/business plan. The figures and percentages are not appropriate (but the broad principle of forecasting and providing funds for tax liabilities is) to apply to retail businesses for example, or businesses in which staff are employed, since these businesses carry significant costs of sales and overheads, which should be deducted from revenues before calculating profits and taxes liabilities. Businesses that have been starved or denied development find themselves with a high or entire proportion of their products or services in this quadrant, which is obviously not very funny at all, except to the competitors. Do not write the sender’s name or title, as it is included in the letter’s closing. This charter sets customer expectations, so be sure you can meet them. First, and especially if you are not clear of your own real strengths, or what direction to pursue, focus on using tools to understanding your own personality style and strengths. Large businesses need extensive and multiple page spreadsheets. Planning in traditional corporations at times forgets this basic obligation, especially when a junior manager is asked to ‘write a business plan’ for the first time. Market information potentially covers a vast range of data, from global macro-trends and statistics, to very specific and detailed local or technical information, so it’s important to decide what is actually relevant and necessary to know.
Additional information about business plan writing:
This is fine if there is plenty of market share to be had at the expense of your competitors, or if the market is growing fast and large enough for the growth you need. If you don’t know a reader’s gender, use a nonsexist salutation, such as their job title followed by the receiver’s name. , production, research and development, warehouse, storage, transport, distribution, wastage, shrinkage, head office, training, bad debts, etc) depends on the needs of the business and the purpose of the plan. This sort of activity should generally be regarded as additional and supplementary to the core business activity, and should be rolled out carefully through rigorous testing and piloting. There is usually a cost for generating new customers, especially in the early stages of a new enterprise.
If your business isn’t going to make any money, it won’t be successful so you need to be very clear on how you will make a profit. Failing to retain funds in a company to pay taxes is a serious problem that’s easily avoided with good early planning. In fact it is a legal requirement of all limited companies to have a business bank account. Essential tips and advice on how to write a business plan to grow your business. Planning very much concerns processes. Generally beware of diversification – this is, by its nature, unknown territory, and carries the highest risk of failure.
Such a strategy can be a suitable reason for acquiring another company or product/service capability provided it is relevant to your market and your distribution route. Focus prospect development (identifying and contacting new prospective customers) on the profile which appears in the top left quadrant. Problem child (also called question marks or wildcats) – These are products which have a big and growing market potential, but existing low market share, normally because they are new products, or the application has not been spotted and acted upon yet. For example: June 11, 2001. Instead the main driver of enterprise may be some other purpose. A business plan gives an outline of your business, the market in which it will operate and . There is a lot of flexibility as to what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘not so good customers’ – use your own criteria.
This sort of activity should generally be regarded as additional and supplementary to the core business activity, and should be rolled out carefully through rigorous testing and piloting. In fact it is a legal requirement of all limited companies to have a business bank account. Keep to the facts and figures. Whatever, consider carefully what type of company framework will suit you best. The level of detail and complexity depends on the size and part of the business that the plan concerns. Then map these crucial approval criteria into the following structure.
And this applies to any type of organisation – not just to businesses. In many good businesses a substantial business planning responsibility extends now to front line customer-facing staff, and the trend is increasing. If your business turnover is likely to be below the threshold for mandatory VAT registration, you must decide for yourself if the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Many organizations issue a marketing budget from the top down (a budget issued by the Centre/HQ/Finance Director), so to speak, in which case, what is your marketing budget and how can you use it to produce the best return on investment, and to help the company best to meet its overall business aims. The central aim is usually return on investment. Good research will tell you where the opportunities are to increase your competitive advantage in areas that are of prime interest to your target markets.
Your people are unlikely to have all the skills they need to help you implement a marketing plan
If you are a competent working with spreadsheets it is normally possible to assemble all of this data onto a single spreadsheet and then show different analyses by sorting and graphing according to different fields. To write the address, use the U. (You need to understand what advertising/marketing/enquiry-generation is necessary – activity and cost. Using this format, the entire letter is left justified and single spaced except for a double space between paragraphs. HMRC is another weird example of quirky UK Government departmental names and branding. The Boston Matrix is a useful way to understand and assess your different existing product and service opportunities:. A business plan is a written document that . In businesses or ‘non-profit’ organisations where shareholder enrichment is not the main purpose, return on investment is less of a driver in business planning, but is nevertheless a crucial requirement. Divide your required annual wage by the number of work hours available to you, and this is your notional hourly labour cost. You may not have all the people that you need so you have to consider justifying and obtaining extra. (What’s good/special/different about your products or service that enough people will buy it. There is a hierarchy or tree structure of cause and effects, all hopefully contributing to the overall organizational aim.
However there’s no point spending days researching global statistical economic and demographic data if you are developing a strategy for a relatively small or local business. Are your selling costs and investment similar for large and small contracts. It may or may not be appropriate to use the term ‘business planning’ for a project. The world is constantly changing, and establishing a new business is a good time to challenge preconceptions of fundamental business structure and purpose. I should clarify that finance is of course a major and unavoidable aspect of business and organizational activities, but in terms of planning, finance is a limiting or enabling factor; finance is a means to an end, or a restriction; finance in itself is not a basis for growth or strategy.
Products in this quadrant need maintenance and protection activity, together with good cost management, not growth effort, because there is little or no additional growth available. While your type of company and business determines precisely which taxes apply to you, broadly taxes are due on sales (for VAT registered businesses in the UK, or your VAT equivalent if outside the UK), and on the profits of your business and your earnings. Join our community of passionate entrepreneurs for daily business advice and guidance. This is because an existing business usually has computerised records of the results of past activities and trading (usually called ‘accounts’). Therefore, you should consult a business writing handbook if you have any questions or doubt the accuracy of the Letter Wizard. Traditionally, in sales and marketing, this perspective is referred to as translating features into benefits.
In the first example, return on investment is the aim; in the second example, return on investment enables some other higher aim to be achieved. Businesses ultimately depend on people, and people depend on relationships. Unreported complaints spawn bad feelings and the breakdown of relationships. If you need to include lots of reference material, examples, charts, evidence, etc, show these as appendices at the back of the document and make sure they are numbered and referenced during the main body of the plan. Customer complaints handling is a key element:. It’s also a personal tool to help you understand your objectives. This increasingly applies to many non-commercial activities (government services, education, health, charities, etc), whose planning processes may also be described as ‘business planning’, even though such organizations may not be businesses in the way we normally imagine.
In fact often when we are confronted with a complex planning spreadsheet containing thousands of numbers, what we are actually being offered is a ready-made planning tool. For example, you might write Dear Chris Harmon: if you were unsure of Chris’s gender. Strong market share suggests there are likely to be better returns from extending the range of products/services that you can offer to the market, as in the next option. Where a department is a ‘cost centre’ not a ‘profit-centre’ – providing products or services internally to other departments rather than externally to customers – then the language and planning elements may alter, but the principles remain the same. The figures and percentages are not appropriate (but the broad principle of forecasting and providing funds for tax liabilities is) to apply to retail businesses for example, or businesses in which staff are employed, since these businesses carry significant costs of sales and overheads, which should be deducted from revenues before calculating profits and taxes liabilities. Large businesses need extensive and multiple page spreadsheets.
If possible present your case in person to the decision-makers, with passion, calm confidence and style
A limited liability partnership offers protection to partners in terms of personal liabilities, in that liabilities are limited to the extent of personal investment and any other guarantees. Added to this, as we get older we have a greater understanding of our true passions and capabilities; we know our strengths and styles and tolerances. If there is a technically correct definition of ‘business planning’, then perhaps we can best say that ‘business planning’ refers to the plan of the overall organization, or to a unit or division within an organization with responsibility for a trade or profit. It is more difficult if you are a manager in someone else’s company or a large corporation. The business entity could also be a proposed start-up, a new business development within an existing organization, a new joint-venture, or any new organizational or business project which aims to convert action into results. This description should normally go beyond your products or services, and critically must include the way you do business, and what business benefits your customers derive from your products and services, and from doing business with you.
