Learn about the benefits of writing an incredible business plan and why a business plan is so important for the success of your business.
Have you made the #1 mistake that many business owners make?
If you want to learn why a business plan is incredibly important to your business success, you have come to the right place. I had to struggle when building my business and I am here to make things easier for you and hope that you may benefit from my knowledge.
Don’t have time to read this article or already understand the importance of writing a business plan and just want to get you hands on a good template? I get that, as an entrepreneur we are busy people, I am providing a link to my FREE Business Plan template below, so you can get started right away.
If you have the time to read through my article hopefully I can help you find success in your own business and help you understand why a business plan is highly important.
Are you curious why you need a business plan? I know when I began my business I did not think a business plan was worth the time it takes to create, so I dismissed it. Not a good idea!
Read on and discover the benefits of writing a business plan and what affect it can have on your own business success.
I will take you through the problems I encountered on my journey of an entrepreneur and help you to understand how critical writing a business plan is for a successful business.
In the beginning when I was just starting out and creating my online business, no one really stressed the importance of writing a business plan and I really had no idea why I would need one, they are mainly for seeking out financing, right? This seems to be the consensus of many people trying to build a business. Well, I am here to tell you that this just is not true.
I was planning on bootstrapping my new business as I had found ways that did not require a large financial investment to get the ball rolling and I was seeing that many people are finding success creating and building their business online and loved the idea of working from anywhere.
Starting out on my journey, I had put forth some effort into figuring out how to create a business online and got all the legal stuff out of the way.
I even invested in a training program to help me along the way. Life was good, Right?
Following along with the training, I found that I needed to determine what niche I wanted to pursue and identify how I was going to make money. “OK”, I thought to myself, that sounds pretty easy I can do that, I need something I am interested in.
After a bit of thought, I decided I would create a business for dogs, I love dogs and enjoy talking about them, that would be perfect for me.
I commenced creating my business, still with no official plan. The training was great, and I officially started off by building my new website with step-by-step instructions from my training program and thought I was doing a wonderful job.
I learned about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and how that could affect traffic coming to my site and many other aspects of building a really great website, so I thought…
What happened next took me totally by surprise, I found my business was not making any money, and we all want to make money, right?
I could not figure out what I had done wrong. I had been so proud of myself for building what I thought was a truly well-rounded website, and it was, it was packed with all kinds of information relating to dogs.
I found myself struggling in so many ways searching the internet trying to find a solution and falling further behind each day and still not gaining anything.
I spent more money trying to find solutions and tried many different ways to monetize my website and still could not make any money.
I was frustrated and felt like a complete failure. It seemed all the time and energy I had put into creating my business was a total loss.
At that point, I was not even sure what I should try to sale that might be profitable for my business and had no idea how to make my business grow. I seemed to be on a down-hill roller coaster ride lost in the vast sea of the internet and left with no way to create a successful business.
The feelings of defeat set in and I knew if I was going to survive in the business world I had to find out what successful businesses were doing that I had missed.
I asked myself, “What do I do now!” I was determined not to give up, after all I had put so much work into building my business already and knew there had to be a solution.
I decided to start back at square one and after many hours of painstaking research found that I had just made that #1 mistake that many business owners make when creating a new business, I failed to create an official business plan. Benjamin Franklin had it right when he said:
Maybe you are right where I was or if you are just starting out hopefully I can save you some frustration.
Let’s discover some of the benefits of creating an official Business Plan for your business, that may help you understand how crucial writing your business plan is, to you finding success in your business.
Who Can Benefit By Writing a Business Plan
By now you might be asking yourself if a business plan is right for your business? If you own or operate any kind of business, online or brick and mortar, I would have to say, YES!
Business plans are for the small business, corporate business and anything in between.
If you are thinking about starting a business or have already started a business, a business plan will help you to find clarity in your business and help you understand the path you need to pursue for business success.
Even a simple plan is better than no plan at all. Just like in the story of my business ventures above, until I actually set down and wrote out a business plan it seemed that my business had no direction of where it was going.
Maybe you are struggling with this same problem in your business and ready to make that change that will help you jump start your own business and provide the clarity needed for success. Let’s go ahead and jump right in and discover how a business plan might help you.
A Business Plan Helps You Find Clarity in Your Business
We all want a truly successful business, right? I don’t think anyone goes into business with the idea to fail. A Business Plan can help you to gain the clarity for your business you need to become successful.
Determining what your business is about and understanding why it is unique to others is a huge breakthrough and has the potential to jump start your business and get you going on the right path for success.
Are your dreams of building your business totally identified? Do your plans for your business lean toward having an online business or do you plan to pursue a brick and mortar business, maybe both?
The great thing about writing a business plan is it is a working document that may change as you build your business and does not have to be complete before starting your business.
What a business plan does, it helps you identify a business from start-up to success and keeps you moving toward your goals. Without establishing a business plan, you might find yourself wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what step you need to take next.
Getting clarity in your business and understanding exactly what you want to accomplish makes a big difference in your road to success as it helps you to understand the key factors of your business and keeps you focused on what is important and how you plan to get there.
Creates an Environment to Discover and Develop New Ideas
Are you completely clear on what niche you plan to pursue for your business?
Even though we may think that our ideas are the next best thing to chocolate (yes, I am an avid chocolate lover), you may find through the research and development phase of writing your business plan that your idea may not be marketable or better yet, you may find bigger and better ideas related to your business.
After getting a better understanding of your business niche, some entrepreneurs completely scrap the old ideas and go for a totally different idea that may be related to their niche or even a completely different idea, as they may find there is more potential for sales and growth in another area.
Most people go into business to make money and if you find you are unsure of what the next step might be or find yourself at a fork in the road and not sure what path to take, a business plan can help you to overcome the obstacles and get you back on the road to success.
Identifies the Marketing Strategies Needed to Build Your Business
Are you clear on your marketing strategies? How do you plan to grow you customer base?
Any business needs customers to become successful, so building a business plan can help you to identify your market and helps you understand what strategies you need to implement to have a truly successful business.
Determining your market will help you to define what customers to target and also helps you to identify the category your business falls under. Other benefits of knowing your market consists of creating your unique benefit to your customers and helps you find your real competition, it really helps you to understand how your business may differ from the those of your competitors.
Writing your business plan and having a thorough knowledge of your market makes developing your marketing strategies much easier and will help you achieve the success you are after.
Creates a Working Roadmap for Your Business to Follow
I know writing a business plan sounds time consuming and it can be; however, the benefits that you receive from building your plan many times out weighs the time it takes to build your plan.
Make sure and remember that it is a working document so you can always develop your plan as you acquire the information so you do not have to complete it all at once.
A thorough business plan can really make a difference and give you that jump start you are needing to help you to discover what path to take for a successful business it basically creates a working roadmap for your business to follow.
To recap what we have learned so far here are some of the benefits of building your business plan.
- Helps you gain clarity in your business so you
- Understand how your business is unique to those of your competition
- Provides the steps you need to boost and set up your business up for success
- Identifies your target market so you can understand your marketing strategies
With discovering all the great benefits that a business plan has to offer, you should now understand why it is so important to have a business plan and continue to use it as a working document.
The best thing about writing a business plan is you can change it up as you create new ideas and add the tasks needed to make them a reality, all while keeping on schedule leading to the success you are searching for.
The biggest problem I have seen with a business plan is when someone puts together an awesome plan then just simply puts it in a drawer of you desk or files it away never to be seen again.
If you are going to create a business plan to help you find success in your business use it as intended and keep it updated as you go.
Don’t make that #1 mistake that many others make by not having a business plan. You will find it to be a great asset to your growing business.
Before I go, I want to let you know that you can get my free Business Plan Template right now just by clicking the link below, and adding your best email. Take advantage of it now and get your business on the right path for success.
If you like this article and find that it may help others, please feel free to like and share and if you have a question or comment please leave it below I would love to hear from you.
This is invaluable information. And absolutely right. Every business needs a business plan.
My problem is that I get distracted by new ideas and new strategies. They often derail a business plan. Any advice on this?
Also, another problem I find (or maybe not a problem?) is that strategies and pathways that I have planned may not work. Is it all right to review and revise a business plan?
Look forward to hearing your kind advice.
Hi Timotheus, you have some great questions and yes every business needs a business plan to keep going on the right path. New ideas and new strategies are a good thing and as long as you do your research you can definitely incorporate them into your business, in fact you should. A business plan should be a working document, and updated frequently, keeping you on the path to a successful business journey.
Thanks for the answers to my questions, Dena. I now understand that my business plan does not need to be fixed. It can be updated. Especially when we have new ideas or new opportunities.
Hope you don’t mind another question that came to my mind?
I have 3 online businesses – 1 is a travel blog, another promotes a training program and the 3rd promotes good news, health and wellness. I had been working hard to promote the travel blog for the past years. The other 2 not so much.
But the travel blog was taking a really long while to start making money. Then I noticed the one that promotes the training program started to gain traffic and attention. I even had referrals when I hardly done much with it.
So, I thought to change my business plan so that I focus more on the training program and less on the travel blog. BUT just when I decided to do that, the travel blog started to gain traffic. Every day the traffic increased.
My question is – Should I change my business plan to focus back on the travel blog? Or should I just focus on both now?
And to throw in a spanner in the works – the wellness website is also picking up speed. hahaha
I am at a loss. What should I do with my business plan?
No problem answering your questions, I really enjoy helping people get ahead and having a successful business.
You have another great question with having multiple websites. In your case, it sounds like you have three completely different businesses and to grow your businesses you should actually have a business plan for each business.
Writing a business plan for each business helps you to identify your niche for that specific business and target your exact customers for that business, leading you to confidently set goals and milestones for each of your businesses. What this does is keeps you on the right path for business growth for each of your businesses and helps you to define the potential and keep your focus for each individual business. One more important factor, is by writing individual business plans for each business and doing the research for each niche will give you more of an idea of how successful that business may become. Through the research, you may find that one of the businesses may have more of a potential over the others. I wish you much success in you journey and if you have any other questions please let me know, I would love to help.
I have experienced writing a simple business plan to get started with any business even an online business is something you must do, but at the same time I myself stay flexible and open to make changes to my plan when and if I need to, I make it a point every year usually January to make changes to my plan and my website I need and want to, so remember you don’t need to stick to a plan forever, but you need a plan to keep you focused on what goals you want to work on even short-term.
Jeff
Thanks for contributing your experience in writing and using a simple business plan. People can benefit from having even a simple business plan in place as was suggested in my article and I love that you visit it at least once a year. Keeping you business plan visible and working through it is a great way to keep your business growing and because it is a working document it is easy to update as you find that you business needs change.