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Begin to develop that working business
plan.
Every business needs a plan. At the very least, try to write
it yourself. We have a template built into the Learn Online section of this
site that is based on work from Howard University's Small Business Development
Center.
Once you have a
working business plan and you make a commitment to attain certain financial
projections, you have a basis to evaluate your weekly - monthly - quarterly -
annual performance and growth. At the height of business planning, you will
begin to examine your key critical ratios from your financials and you'll learn
how these ratios compare to others within your industry.
- In one of our
very first episodes of the show, we discussed
Business Plans. Some of
that discussion made it into the study guide and other discussions
into Business Basics (Section 4).
- Howard University Small Business Development Center's Business
Plan: A template.
- This template is
also Chapter 4 in Beating the Odds by
Hattie Bryant.
If you are
registered for even just one class on this site and you answer the questions
online, you open a secure database (part of our
Small Business Index of Learning
Companies) and your answers become key paragraphs in an interactive
business plan template. If you build your business plan online, you can assign
levels of security to every field. With some more work, you can leverage that
plan as a Small Corporate Offering
Registration (SCOR) which will be helpful to raise debt or equity capital
(a SCOR is a direct public offering of some of the equity in your business).
We are compiling a
list of professional business plan writers and we will include that list here
as it evolves. |
