A client recently recounted his experience searching for a consultant to help him plan and launch his small business.

A business plan is a document that will help you to create a successful UK home business and outline your objectives, providing you with an idea of how it will work financially.

Why you should have a plan

It is incredibly common these days for someone who is thinking of starting a new business to create a detailed plan. Often these will be needed by the bank before you can obtain a business loan if you require one. However, even if you do not require a loan or financial backing you could greatly benefit from having a plan in place.

By having a plan set out you can establish if your expectations are reasonable. It will also enable you to work out the amount of money you need to earn and how much work you will need to make the business financially viable. You can set a business plan for whatever time frame you feel necessary. If you set yourself a specific goal then you are more likely to stick to this and achieve it by having a plan in place. Often those who do not have a plan find that it is easy to lose their way.

Items to include

A good plan should include well thought out ways of meeting the goals that you have set for your business. This should mean that you have also carefully thought out the best way to achieve your goals. A business plan is after all no good if it simply consists of a list of objectives that you have no way of meeting. To have a successful business you need to plan ahead and make sure that your UK home business is viable which is why having a business plan is important. The plan will also contain well thought ideas on the best ways for you to find customers and the budget you have for marketing.

If you have no experience of creating one then you will find that there is a lot of expert help available on the internet. This will give you an idea of the things you need to include and areas that you need to focus on along with the best way to write one. Even better, if you know someone that has made a UK home business plan before then ask for their help.

Have you ever done a business plan before? It really isn’t that difficult to find the information, but it can be time consuming especially when you are keen to get your business up and running.

But wouldn’t you rather put in the time before setting up your business and know that you have the right information to start with. It will help you stay focused, know your good points and your not so good points, and allow you to address issues that need improving before you actually start operating.

WHAT IS YOUR PROPOSED BUSINESS GOING TO BE DOING?

Now is when you need to thinking about why you are starting your small business.

Is it because you have always had a mad desire to run your own business, because you have a burning need to prove to everyone how good you are at selling, fed up with being bossed around by a so-called manager who knows less than you do, or do you really want to seriously commit your whole being to running a successful business?

That is what you need to be thinking about at this stage?

HOW WELL DO YOU UNDERSTAND YOUR PROPOSED SMALL BUSINESS?

For example, if you want to have a cafe, do you understand all the health and food regulations that will apply to what you are setting up?

Do you realise that there will be strict council regulations to abide by? What is your view of the menu you want to have – is it just what you prefer to eat and are there thousands of customers out there who will want to eat the same thing?

If you prefer to drink strong coffee, do you believe that all your customers should have the same served to them?

Many questins need to be answered before you start your small business.

HAVE YOU HAD A SERIOUS CHAT WITH YOUR ACCOUNTANT?

Before you set too many wheels in motion you need to have a chat to your accountant and see if you will have the funds for starting a new business.

I know of one lady who got so excited about buying her dream cafe. I, as a business broker representing the seller, asked her if she had the finance. Her answer was, “Yes, my husband just borrowed against the house to buy a semi-trailer so I should be able to get a loan.” Alarm bells rang with me straight away because I knew where they lived and I thought ‘semi trailers are not cheap so there is probably not enough equity left in the house to borrow more money’ and that was exactly the situation.

Before going too far into the idea of setting up your business you need to know:

- If you have the funds available

- If it is going to earn enough for your needs

- If you do not have funds available are you going to be able to borrow any

- What entity you will use to buy the business

By addressing these questions at the beginning you won’t get into trouble early in the piece. Financing a business is a big issue and needs to be very carefully thought out.

A business plan will help you analyse many areas of a new small business and you will be able to solve many of these situations before they arise and affect your new business.

By doing a business plan for your small business before you start spending money you will be well on the road to success. Your planning will be so much clearer and you will have more understanding of your stock, staff, markeing and finance. Many skills make up the success of a small business and having a business plan at the outset will help you start on the right footing.

Copyright (c) 2009 Kaye Dennan

Creating a startup business plan requires more than just a simple template and a can do attitude. Of course you can accomplish it without a good guide to writing a plan but just because you can do something doesn’t mean it is a good idea.

A guide to writing your startup plan will not only help you determine what to write but more importantly where to find the information you need to write about and also how to make critical judgments about the information you are finding. For example, you may understand that you need to include a management team section to demonstrate that the people starting the business are going to be capable of running the business successfully.

But what you may not know if you don’t have a guide to writing a good business plan is that a terrific way to strengthen your business plan management section is to include advisers who have the industry experience and knowledge your team may lack.

Just by adding this simple feature to your plan may make the difference between getting funded and not and yet most people don’t know it and they wouldn’t realize how critical it can be if they are simply following a template they found online as opposed to using a guide to writing a high quality and fundable plan.

There are countless more examples of why there is a big difference between simply filling out the pages of a business plan template and actually having a good guide to writing a business plan, particularly one that also offers you the chance to speak directly to a business plans expert who can answer your specific questions. This is priceless in terms of improving the overall chances of your plan being successful.

When starting a small business venture, it pays off to be objective. You will need to capture your projections in a written format. These objectives are best captured in what is known as a business plan. This functions as your road map and furthermore, it helps you gauge, in the course of the venture, if you are still in the right track.

Making a business plan may be simple or difficult, depending on the nature and scope of operation of the enterprise. As you write it down, you get to capture your short term, medium term and long term goals. These goals are what help you determine whether the enterprise is realizing its dreams or not as it progresses. You also get to gauge the risks at hand and determine how to deal with them effectively.

On a larger scale, the plan helps you do a SWOT analysis. SWOT is an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. This means that you can be able to identify where the venture is doing well, where it is failing or facing challenges, whether it has room for growth and improvement as well as whether it is likely to be at risk by operating in a given way. By so doing you will be able to determine the best course of action.

Writing a plan for your venture should be guided by a number of principles. The first one is that, it must adhere to a given outline, bearing in mind that there are many other enterprises out there coming up with such plans as well. You must also have the audience in mind. Is the plan for funding purposes or for partnership? The depth will be determined by the audience.