Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/142672
when exposed to the real world, so keep your list of strategies simple: • pend at least four hours a week on S marketing. • Get to know my target audience and what their problems are. • efine and price at least three new D services in the next three months. • rite down my procedures for W client intake and answering the phone. In many business planning classes, you are told to write a set of steps and stick to it. What kind of advice is this? Circumstances change, things change. What do you do then? There is a better way to plan. It is called scenario planning. Large companies use this type of planning and small businesses are starting to do it, too. Scenario planning is a way to try to anticipate what might occur with your business and then plan your best response. You can't imagine everything that could happen, but chances are you are aware of many of the possibilities. So plan for them. Let's look at some examples: • e get too many appointment W requests for a single day. • e don't get enough clients W week after week. • eople can't understand what our P main therapy, Feldenkrais Method, is and how it could benefit them. • The state medical board begins an investigation of our practice. • larger business wants to A merge with our practice. • e have a dispute between W two therapists. • e have a customer complaint. W For each event, you formulate a plan before it happens. As you can imagine, this section can go on forever. Limit it based on your own intuition about the most likely things to happen. Remember to include a representative number of positive and negative events. Financial Projections This might be the section you think about, or dread, when you think of a business plan. But it is only one piece to the entire puzzle. Banks, potential investors and partners, and even employees will want to see how you project the financial future of your business. This section should include last year's financials, financials from two years ago, current year-to-date financials, projections to yearend, and next year's financials. If your business is new, of course, you will not have financials from previous years. In that case, you may want to show your own personal earning power by revealing your personal income from wages at a job. New business owners are at a disadvantage, to be sure. However, it may help to remember that every successful business owner was a new business owner at one time, and they were in the same situation you are now. What does it mean to document financials? To a businessperson, this means a certain set of financial documents: balance sheet, income statement (also called "profit and loss"), and cash flow forecast. A balance sheet is a point-intime snapshot of your business. It shows what you own (assets), what you owe (liabilities), and what you're worth (owner's equity). An income statement describes a certain period of time and how the company performed during that period. An income statement shows the total amount of money that came in (revenue), the money spent (expenses), and what was left over (net income). If what was left over was negative, that means your expenses exceeded your revenue, and you have a net loss. A cash flow forecast is a prediction of the money coming in and out, usually done weekly. You itemize the revenue items (appointments, product sales, etc.) and the expenses (rent, utilities, office supplies, laundry, etc.). The purpose of the cash flow statement is to understand how much of a financial cushion you'll need to cover the ups and downs of your business. It also shows an investor or banker how much money your business will pump out week to week, which may give either the confidence to get involved in your business. To help you create these financial statements for your business plan, you should buy a software program like Intuit QuickBooks or Peachtree. If you need more help than that, consult an accountant or bookkeeper. Financial statements are not optional. Every business plan must have them.