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Posted on November 14, 2008 by Triple-A | Posted under Small Business
4 Deadly Business Planning Problems You Must Watch Out For... And Their Solutions
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Yet preparing a business plan is no straightforward matter because it isn't just sufficient to have a plan. You must have a reliable and realistic plan that is based on both strategy and tactics, or on both concept and pragmatics. Many obstacles stand in the way of constructing a business plan, and this article discusses four of them... vagueness in what a business plan is about, confusion with the reasons for business planning, failure to acknowlege the principles of business planning, and not knowing where to start or end. The article also proposes solutions to these and other business planning problems. What is Business Planning? This is the first area where serious problems often arise. Most people starting or running a small business don't even know what a business plan is. How can you construct and implement a business plan when you don't even know what it means. This is a semantic problem. Semantics is about the meanings of words. The more precisely you get the meaning of a word or phrase the more insightful and concentrated will be your understanding of it. And the more ambiguous or vaguely you get the meaning of a word or phrase the more diffuse will be your understanding of it. Moreover, the more diffuse your understanding of a concept the less able you will be to transform that concept into meaningful practical use. Therefore the first problem you want to resolve is... What is business planning? This question is answered later. Why Business Planning? The next troublesome issue is... Why business planning? This question is about the motivation for or the importance of business planning. It is another misunderstood issue. Yet if you don't know precisely why business planning is necessary you will not be motivated to prepare one. After all, preparing a reliable business plan is hard work. And if you don't prepare one your business will be rudderless. You know what happens to a rudderless aircraft or ship? It crashes, coming down with a bang! That's what will happen to your business if you don't have a good plan! We shall discuss the reasons for planning your business later. Business Planning Principles Principles are what define how a good business plan should be prepared. They are constraints that define what makes an acceptable, rigorous, or reliable business plan. They are unstated questions that a good business plan must answer. How can you formulate a business plan that correctly guides your business when you don't even know what principles that business plan must comply with? How can you expect your business plan to succeed in fund raising when you don't even know what makes plans to pass this test? You must know your principles, and that's why we discuss them later. Where to Start Do you know where to start constructing your plan? Do you know the first step, the second step, and so on? If you don't know where to start doing something you simply won't do it. To start constructing a business plan you need a well formulated business planning procedure. This consists of a series of steps to follow, and these steps are well thought out and well sequenced or prioritised. You start from the first step and complete it thoroughly before moving to the next step. You continue in this manner, over a couple of days, until you complete your plan. You must know where to start preparing your business plan, what the next step should be after that, and where to end. That is why we devote time to these issues later. Now let us turn to the answers to this and other questions mentioned above... Unfortunately, we do not have enough space in this article to address the aforementioned questions. So we have prepared a special page with all the answers you need. Before directing you to that page let us first summarise what we have done here. Final Remarks This article has discussed a number of key problems that you will face when you try to construct a business plan. The problems include... 1. Your misunderstanding of the meaning of business planning. 2. Your failure to recognise the reasons for business planning. 3. Your failure to recognise that there are certain key principles that a business plan must satisfy. 4. You don't really know where to start. The article also points at the solutions you must undertake to resolve these problems. The link to these solutions is provided below. About The Author: To resolve the problems highlighted in this article (including others not mentioned here) you must go to this... Top Business Planning Solutions page. Dr Agbormbai runs this popular Business Planning Site. |
Tags: BUSINESS PLANNING, BUSINESS PLAN, ONLINE BUSINESS, HOME BUSINESS, BUSINESS, MANAGEMENT, ENTREPRENEUR
