Small Business Talk

Here’s more hints and tips on small business planning — specifically with respect to putting together a formal business plan.

When possible, use specifics rather than generalities.
Incorporate contingency analysis in your plan to anticipate unforeseen or negative cirucmstances and events (such as “sales 14% ower than expected”). Think about what you will do when things go wrong.
Convince plan readers you’ve covered the bases.
Writing a business plan is an art as well as a science. There are many ways to do it that can work well. If you need the best business plan you can develop (e.g. to get a bank loan), consider getting help from someone who’s done some successful business plans already.

From Chapter 3 - Guiding Principles (Perfect Phrases For Managing Your Small Business)

Your Formal Business Plan

Your business plan must be based on reality, not on wishful thinking, or it will lead you in the direction of failure. Unrealistic assumptions and numbers will lead others to conculde that you are not believable and therefore, a bad risk. Projections should be realistic and supported by evidence.

Well, hurrah! The manuscript is finished, and while we don’t have a final publication date for our new book, published by McGraw-Hill, we can still publish excerpts from the manuscript. So, we have created a new category/section where we’ll be posting short snippets from the book.

For your information you can order the book via amazon (or pre-order) by clicking here.

We think that even if you get ONE significant hint about how to avoid a major small business mistake, you’ll easily earn back the < $10.00 cost of this easy to use and practical guide.