Saturday, 06 February 2010

• Currently Passion, Plan, Profit: 12 Simple Steps to Turn Your Passion into a Solid Business By Christy Strauch see related

  Passion, Plan, Profit: 12 Simple Steps to Convert Your Passion into a Solid Business

  12 steps to creating your business plan. The shelves of any bookstore are filled to the brim with advice on how to write a business plan. The trouble is that many of those books are geared towards teaching the enterprising entrepreneur how to write a plan that will help them secure funding. But what if someone wants to write a business plan for themselves, as a guideline to run their business? The author explains how a business owner, or even someone just contemplating starting a business, can write a plan that serves as a template to empower the entrepreneur to run their business profitably over the next year.
  

  12 Steps
  

  by Christy Strauch

  
  I wrote this book for creative types who haven’t necessarily had a peaceful relationship with numbers or money. Because of that, the first step in this business plan process is to connect with your purpose for being in business. This book is for you who love your work; once you make a deep connection with the purpose of your work, it’s easier to persevere through some of the more challenging modules that come later (you have a Purpose to pull you through!).
  
  Knowing your purpose also helps you communicate with your perfect customers most effectively (Step 5), create a clear vision (Step 2) and mission (Step 3); figure out a strategy that is in line with your purpose (Step 6), and gives you the impetus to blaze through your numbers forecast (Steps 9-11).
  
  Once you know your purpose, step two is to create your vision: where do you want to be in twelve months, and in three years? If the business plan is the road, your vision is the destination.
  
  Step three is your mission. It answers these two questions: what do you do; and who do you it for? Although the answer to these questions may seem obvious to you as the business owner, clearly articulating them to your perfect clients can be tricky. Clarifying your mission means looking more deeply at what you actually provide to your customers, and who those customers really are, through their eyes.
  
  Step Four asks you to articulate your business values. These are your moral compass; they’ll help you make the difficult decisions that inevitably pop up five minutes after you open your doors for business.
  
  Step Five takes you through the process of figuring out who your best clients are: who needs you, wants what you sell and can pay for it, and how best to talk to them.
  
  Just as your values are your moral compass, in step six you figure out your strategies which serve as your business compass. They’ll help you, along with your purpose, to choose the business activities that make most sense to serve your customers and attract the right new ones.
  
  Step seven asks you to figure out what you’re best at: what is unique about you compared to all your competition? Step eight sends you out to look at your competition, as well as what’s going on with your customers, the economy, and your own internal business practices in a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis.
  
  Steps nine, ten and eleven all focus on your numbers: step nine takes you through forecasting your income for the next 12 months; in step ten you forecast your expenses for the same period; in step eleven you select the three or four measurements that you will watch regularly to make sure everything’s on track.
  
  The final step, twelve, is where you take all the information you’ve put together in the previous steps and summarize it into your 5-7 specific goals, and the plans under them, that you will achieve over the next twelve months.
  
  Lest you think you’re finished, there are two auxiliary steps after this: the monthly and quarterly review process. Because things begin to change right after you remove your pen from the paper, these reviews help you keep up with (or even stay ahead of) the inevitable changes that happen to all businesses.
  
  The antidote to any overwhelm you might be feeling now, is to get started on your purpose. Knowing that, connecting deeply to it, will give you the stamina to finish the rest of the process. After all, you were put on the planet to do this work. It’s time to get started!
  
  
  

  Christy Strauch is the author of Passion, Plan, Profit: 12 Simple Steps to Convert Your Passion into a Solid Business. In addition she is president of Clarity To Business and has worked with over 300 small business owners, from artists to real estate agents, helping them do what they are passionate about – and make a profit. Her book is available at Amazon.com at http://bit.ly/9Yk2uo

  
  

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