Business Planning

Hmm, I shoudl set some. Great reminder Sophie.

easy answer, Yes. A business plan isn't there to sell your ideal to an investor. It is there to ensure you are on the right track. A business plan will help you work out what your pros and cons are. What issues could appear, how to solve them. Your target market. KPI's to check if your on track. 

A business plan is just that. Without it you just have an idea.

Your building an App. So what is the timeline for Dev, what is Beta release. Who is going to take part in the Beta release. How will you measure success of Beta release. Once Beta is completed. How much time is allocated to more dev prior to launch. When you launch, how will you launch. 

Big part of your business plan is dev in the tech world. Do you have a Gant chart to help maintain a schedule for your projects? Pretty sure you would. A business plan is your "Gant chart" for your business.

I have setup businesses without a business plan, very quickly worked out that I needed one. A business plan is not a boring doc you write to make something official. It is a plan of attack.

For small businesses 100 page plan documents full of fluff and not a lot of real accountable substance are few and far between.

From what I have seen even a 1 page plan which is actively followed, monitored and updated every 3 - 6 months is very now and worth its weight in gold.

A practical approach I have more recently incorporated is best summarised as follows:

Plan quarterly

Prepare weekly

Act daily.

The skip tracing industry I have found to be pretty seasonal. My solution for this was to create another industry related product. I created an online skip tracing course and started promoting it. I have found that the industry tends to go through cycles. At times clients want to outsource then all of a sudden they want to try to do the work internally.

Either way I now have a solution, when they want to outsource they can come to me, if they want to do the work themselves they can come to me for training. And it doesn't stop there. Even if they do the work internally I have found they still want to outsource. Because I helped them with training and saved them money, it built trust and they come to me for advice and assistance with other areas of their business.

I have found the same with the data sales industry. There are peaks where a lot of companies want to buy data to help with marketing. To keep busy I worked out it was best to also offer the marketing services. So if they wanted to buy data they can however they could also hire our call center to make the calls or do the bulk mail runs.

As a result more clients and no peaks. Finding out why there are peaks and valleys can help you close the gap. In my case it was a matter of creating new products or offering more services.

As I have said a number of times in my posts, it came down to R&D. A little R&D can go a long way.

There are three possibilities: Product and business at the same time; business first and product second or product first, business second.

The best answer is that it is situational. If it's a completely new product and it needs a business to support its development and market progress then they should be developed together. Issues like getting feedback from the market to support product development is a business exercise that will drive the product strategy. By the same token, product enhancements and ongoing investement will often be driven or constrained by business realities and market reception. And so in this case the product and business development will happen in lock-step and have the highest liklyehood of succeeding -  all other things being equal.

In the next case, if an entrepreneur starts a business to address an opportunity or a gap in the market, the product required may not yet be properly defined. The business may start, raise capital and employ people with the right skills to help conceive and develop the product. In this case the business has to start first and its inherent strategy tailored to the product development cycle. This is a common scenario nowadays.

In the third case, as is common with backyard inventors say, often products are developed to quite a level of completion without due regard to the business issues that will ultimately govern its acceptance and success. It is likly in such a scenario, that both fail, as a good product needs a good business for it to succeed intoday's world.

We work with lots of startups, and as a starting point, I want to mention that it *is* important to have a business plan in some form or other. 

But as some of the other responses have mentioned, the first step is to think about why you need and/ or want one. Begin with the end in mind, as they say, and you’re much more likely to create a business plan that will effectively serve its purpose. 

Having said that, to answer your question, I do think it’s a combination of both. 

That is, a template can provide a great starting point for a business plan. But it’s unlikely to cover everything you need - this is where you’ll need to customise it. 

I’m a fan of efficiency wherever possible, so if you can (quickly) find a template that serves your needs, it will help you shortcut the process. Writing a business plan can be arduous, so anywhere you can get support and help is worthwhile, in my opinion! 

If you’re writing a business plan that needs to appeal to investors, make sure it includes the relevant info in an easily digestible format. Investors want to know your business will have a good return for them - make that your focus. 

The supporting document should be a financial model. A solid financial plan should capture as much information about the business plan as reasonably possible – the team, the value proposition and technology, the market, milestones and the competition – and translate these into measurable, financial values.

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Hi Neil, while most would look at margins, I think that the ability to scale profit while keeping your cost base low is a better way to look at your business' future potential.
If you have to add more resources in line with scaling (which is the standard way to do it), then you're growing revenue but usually profit growth is low. 
Whereas, when you can grow revenue without needing to replicate the same resource to support delivering the revenue, you've got yourself a growth business which certainly will be more sustainable! 
Most people scale by adding more staff, or more services. Both of these add more admin burden which increases costs in line with revenue (sometimes even outgrows the revenue growth and it's where many businesses start to struggle!).