Business Start-Up: Plan your business successfully.

Are you planning to start your own business? What does it takes to have a successful business? Lots of money, experienced business partners or just plain guts!! You’ll be surprised; you just need a good business plan. But what constitute a good business plan? There isn’t any specific rule on good business plan, but here are some precautions that you may consider to avoid failures.

1. Set Company Values through Vision statements. First, you had to have vision for your company. The vision will help you to set-up some values that you want your staff to abide as the company. These values will differentiate you from your competitors. Looking forward, it enhances the growth that will make you proud, someday. Develop a mission statement that will help achieve immediate or minor goals/priorities.

2. Financial forecast and budgeting. Create your own financial forecast and budgeting. It is part of your business plan. Without them you’re planning for failure. But your plan should also covers competitor analysis, market conditions including knowing your industry & customers well. Only with those factors can you plan your budget and forecast well.

3. Serve your customers well. If you don’t serve your customers, others will. Sometimes, customers can be nasty. But if you explained and tried to get them understood, these difficult customers may become your loyal customers. They can also be your centre of influence once they become your friends and liked your service.

4. Always be aware and understand your competitor. You have to be updated of what’s going on in your industry. You can be a big player in your industry, but never be complacent. A newbie in the industry has all the ability to capture your market share without you realizing it.

5. Do take risk. Business is about opportunity and taking risk. However, you have to do some research and analysis to take calculated risk. Make a study on the possible challenges and its potential returns. Don’t just jump into the wagon recklessly. In this way, you minimize your losses.

6. Learn from the expert. You may like to get some feedbacks from an experienced business-owners pertaining to your plan that you wanted to carried out. Even the most experienced entrepreneur does that. The different views may help you to build up on your original ideas better.

7. Prepare for the unexpected. You may have drafted a wonderful business plan. Sometimes your plans still need some twinning due to unexpected events. This may result in amending your budget or forecast, or even abandoned the original plan at all. Therefore, your business plan has to be flexible in accommodating those circumstances.

8. Unique selling points. Your original plan may change with time and circumstances but your customers must be able to experience the difference when dealing with you. Develop a unique selling point to make your company stands out and beyond your competitors. Be it after sales service, follow-up system or whatever. Leave that last good impression with your customers.

9. Rewards and praise your staff. In order to keep your business running, you need a trustworthy, hard-working and dedicated staffs. Without them, your business may suffer. Therefore, you need to incorporate some form of reward system in your planning. This is to motivate your staff better and together, the company will reach greater heights.

10. Review your plan. No plan is wonderful unless you follow through. Identify your milestone. Whenever your sales volume or revenue reached several amount, you need to re-look into your business plan to see the possibility of expansions. Reviewing your business plan occasionally helps you to determine whether your existing process is effective or needs further improvement. Remember, it is your business plan that will turn your vision into reality.

The immediate response to surviving an economic downturn involves battening down the hatches and simply weathering the impending storm, cutting whatever is necessary to make it through the chaos. Marketing usually falls to the wayside, workers are cut, and prime opportunities to position your company as a customer service or market leader pass by unnoticed.

You may be hearing some of the most promising news that’s come along in months, however. Yes, the bleak outlook that companies had just a few months ago is transforming into a positive, though cautious, attitude. While economic experts have noted a five percent growth in the economy, your segment may not fall within one of these industries. Regardless of whether your industry is included or not, Integrated Business Planning or Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) remains a necessity not only to surviving an economic downturn but also succeeding, both now and in the future.

One of the few perks of a recession is that it eliminates under-performing players, practically wiping the slate clean for your company, helping it to gain a better foothold in the market, and effectively evaluate business initiatives and goals. This downtime is key to winning customers and ensuring you have systems robust enough to weather any other potential storm along the way. With a well-positioned Integrated Business Planning, or Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) process in place, flare-ups can be dealt with immediately, and issues can be managed without constant monitoring. Not only are short-term solutions presented, but long-term tools for surviving another economic downturn are addressed as well.

Key Points to Remaining Successful

In terms of weathering this or any other recession, management is the glue that keeps the company together. When management spends excessive amounts of time addressing daily issues rather than focusing on the big picture, however, a lapse in meeting market and customer demand occurs. With so many factors in play, what can management do to ensure the company beats the competition and identifies ways to deal with the eventual uptick in business? Following are three key points to remaining successful:

1. One way to weather the storm is to make preparations that are specific to your business. Luxury items, for instance, are taking longer to rebound in the market; and while people are finally cracking open their wallets, these funds are usually spent on lower-priced items. How has the recession affected long-term consumer expectations? Part of Integrated Business Planning involves an in-depth evaluation of your business model, including asking:

• What are our differentiators? Should they be streamlined to meet the changing business landscape?
• Why do we sell this product? Are we known for our prices? Are we fooling ourselves if we think we can make money on this particular item?
• What are our strengths? Do we focus on higher-quality products with lower prices?

Point blank, to succeed, you must always emphasize your strengths – even though the easiest answer may not be the best solution to your problem. The only way to gain an accurate picture of your current and future situation is to assess your strengths and weaknesses honestly and identify core competencies that set you apart from the crowd.

2. Another solution to surviving an economic downturn is to introduce stress through technology. Technology can provide data models that identify gaps in plans or aggregate data from multiple sources that save the company time and money. These are important tools for successfully surviving an economic downturn. During this period of introducing new technology and evaluating new processes, it’s possible that the company may either lose or gain market share. Over time, your Integrated Business Planning processes will mature, helping you and your team pinpoint supply and demand goals, understand financials in greater depth, identify acquisitions, and improve cash flow management.

3. It is the responsibility of executive management to take the time to challenge themselves to think differently about their business. Oftentimes, however, cultural factors within the work environment can prevent positive breakthroughs. It falls on the shoulders of the management team to challenge pre-existing notions and beliefs about the business. Sure, the economy will change, but nothing is guaranteed, which is why having the proper Integrated Business Planning tools in place ensures the company will continue to profit and push ahead. Strategic Integrated Business Planning, if implemented in every element of the company, should address the following:

• In terms of our competitors, leads, and sales, where are we?
• What are our future goals, and where do we go from here?
• How will we get to that point? What strategy do we have to address these goals?
• Who are our customers? In which market or region will our products/services fare best?
• What do we sell? Will our services and/or products change at any time?
• How will we triumph over our competitors? What makes us different?

Emerging Victorious from a Downturn

Winning (and, for the time being, surviving) in an economic downturn means that you must evaluate your bottom line with open eyes and honestly assess the situation. In many cases, the outlook may still prove bleak, but times are getting better. Integrated Business Planning and preparation ensure you have something to fall back on when the storm gets too rough. Addressing both the short- and long-term issues that plague your business in a downturn through various Integrated Business Planning tools also ensures you’ve evaluated all aspects with a mind responsive to change and growth.

Evolution of S&OP into Integrated Business Planning

Sales and Operations Planning is evolving into what many companies are now calling Integrated Business Planning. It is no longer just a process for aligning product portfolio plans, demand plans, and strategic plans. The key driver of this evolution is the benefits companies realize from integrating ALL company processes into an Integrated Business Planning process that the executive team uses to manage the business. The key differences between S&OP and Integrated Business Planning are:

• Greater financial integration across at least a 24-month planning horizon resulting in improved information for decision-making and greater accountability.
• Financial performance metrics.
• Inclusion of strategic initiatives and activities in the monthly IPC management process, reinforcing that one primary management process is used to run the business.
• Improved modeling and simulations to help develop contingency plans for changing operating and financial parameters.
• Easier translation from detail information to aggregate and aggregate to detail enabling more quicker, more timely simulations and greater granularity of information for operations and finance.
• Improved decision-making through an integrated reconciliation process to keep decisions at the lowest practical level.
• Improved trust throughout the management team with one process, clear accountability, and commitment to the behaviors required to ensure the Integrated Business Planning process is effective.

What makes for a good health club business plan is the same things that make for any good business plan, which just a few differences. The most important thing to remember in any plan, though, is that having A plan is better than having NO plan at all, even if the plan is a little hazy, to start. This can always be corrected down the road. What’s a fact, though, is that businesses that start out with no written plan often go down to defeat within their first three years.

Business plans are like narrative stories. They’ll have a beginning, then a middle, and then an end which will lead to a new beginning. This goes on in what’s called a continuous planning cycle. And no health club plan succeeds well without having a mission, vision and goals, not only for the business but also for its customers.

Like any good plan, a health club’s will address every traditional business metric or benchmark which helps to gauge success. These can include funding sources and short-to-long term planning horizons. Keep in mind that the farther out a horizon is, the more flexible the intermediate steps need to be in getting to that far off destination.

Probably the one area where health clubs go the most wrong is in not understanding how vital marketing itself needs to be. If they think on it at all, it’s as a part of some undefined “advertising” section in the plan.

Failing to get that advertising is one part of an overall marketing strategy fails to fully harness the ability of a plan to coordinate all the little parts into a seamless marketing whole. At a minimum, marketing strategies include short and long-range advertising programs, with quantifiable measures of success.

Successful business plans also account for the ever-changing nature of technology. What many people don’t get is that specific models of computers themselves become obsolete within two years of their introduction. So if that’s the case, why isn’t a savvy business designing its plan around such facts about technology? When it does, it can better position itself for rapid technological change in its advertising and marketing programs.

Look at it this way: Failing to grasp that what is effective marketing today may be redundant and boring a year or even six months from now is a recipe for failure. A smart health club marketing plan, as part of a wider business plan, accounts for this. That way, it can be adjusted quickly to take advantage of the new advertising or marketing environment it encounters.