I’ve sent out over 200 surveys. My assessment forms to businesses who’ve wanted to work with me, and typically I see that a vast proportion of them – 76 % in fact score themselves, five or less on how they rate their business plan And zero being that they don’t actually have one. So that’s 43 % of people. Sorry 43 people out of 200 odd who don’t have a business plan. So – and I bet probably if you’re watching this – then it’s more thank likely that that’s you So yeah, so we’re gon na quickly go through what actually constitutes the business plan and how you can create a very lean business plan and this isn’t about attracting investment or Getting bank loans or anything silly like that,
This is literally just about having a document that you can look back on over. You know in a year’s time or probably every month and make sure that you’re on track. I also noticed it wasn’t quite as high as 76 %, but there was some well over. 50 % of people also were struggling in terms of their goal. Setting Business plan goal setting both go hand in hand. So I bet probably, if you’re struggling with your business plan, you’re also struggling with this problem
So what goes into creating a lean business plan? Okay, so the first thing is one of the biggest mistakes people make with a business plan. Is they create these great big tomes of information that, basically, you know they’re looking you know, potentially it would be useful if you were going to get investment or trade on the FTSE 100 or something like that. But the reality is don’t need. Hundreds of pages of content to go into a basic business plan. It needs to be literally just like four or five pages, So we just want to keep it short initially And it’s as simple as that. So I’m gonna tell you what you’ve got to put into those four or five pages in the next sort of seven or eight minutes, But it does make it look a little bit nicer if you’re documents, no matter what they are, you’ve got some kind of Branding in place that the colours are right, it’s not just something that you’ve chucked out into the ether from a Word document and one of the terrible templates which they’ve got in there.
So you just need to make sure that you’re branding is on there and that’s just for you, so you don’t look at it and go “. Oh my God that looks like a terrible document. .” so do make sure you put some branding in there. The first piece of actual content which you need to put in there is obviously a little bit of information about you, and what you want to do is demonstrate your authority, your credibility, and why people should buy from you In terms of like it could be. Your experience, whether that’s corporate or running your own businesses, maybe some clients, you’ve, worked with or books that you’ve written podcasts that you’ve been a guest on. How long have you been working within the industry? What do you specialize in all sorts of fun stuff like that?
I said clients that you’ve maybe done a bit of work with. Also some people are quite like, especially in the small business community. You want to know a little bit about the person who we’re working with So do drop a little bit of information in there about you, because and I’ll explain why, Like some people are really worried about personal stuff in there and it’s actually not a bad thing To put some personal information in there because we want to build a tribe, we want to build a group of people who love what we do So give them a few personal facts about yourself, because it just humanizes you basically Next up so that first piece about You just needs like half a page, maybe
Maybe a little bit more, maybe a page Second page, then, is a bit about your products and services. Now this is another big mistake. I see people making They go through and they put these massive long feature lists in there and they try and get their pricing. Absolutely nailed and all sorts of fun stuff like that, But actually that’s not the right approach. The right approach actually is to talk more about, like in human terms, like very basic terms. So, for example, I’m a business coach. I offer group coaching and one-to-one coaching for small business owners. The outcome of coaching with me is that we will double your turnover within six months. Okay, So what we want is this, you know common mistake: people want to buy the drill and they look at the features that they’re buying, but actually the reality of the reason why we want a drill is very different to the reason why we think we want A drill, So we look for the benefit behind the benefit. Basically,
And actually the drill will drill a hole, we’ll put that in the wall that we’ll then put a wall plug in and a bracket up, and so we can hang a picture on it and the picture was given to us by a dead relative or something along those lines. Okay, so we’ve got ta, go, we’ve got ta, stop thinking features and we got ta think of the outcomes that our products and services deliver. So hopefully that’s kind of made it clear and literally you only need sort of again half a page or a page to describe your products and services and what outcomes, what benefits they produce.
And then this is the next section, so you’ve got to identify. Who is your target market Now, just a little clue. The world is not your target market. Okay. The internet has created this global marketplace where there’s a lot of opportunity, but the reality is most small business owners in Gloucestershire don’t need to have clients from all around the world. Basically, We can survive quite well and quite nicely with 10 to 20 local clients who are very loyal. Yes, there are some enigmas out there who have global businesses world wide businesses. The reality is for most of us – that’s not the case, So we don’t need the world to be our target market. Okay, So S.M.E.’s Big buck bear of mind. S.M.E .’s small to medium enterprises are not a target market.
There are 3.9 million small businesses in the UK. Sorry, there are 3.9 businesses registered in the UK at the moment, 9,000 of them are considered to be large businesses. Okay, That means that all of the businesses are pretty much S.M, So S.M.E .’s are not our target market, it is still too broad. So our target market is actually Bianca. Who is 48 recently waived goodbye to her to grown-up, twin daughters, who have just started Uni
Having recently been made redundant from a fast-paced marketing career in London, Bianca moved to the Cotswolds and opened a coffee shop in Chipping, Campden, et cetera, et cetera. So we’ve got to have a really clear idea about who our target market is. You can then start to go a little bit deeper, so these are all sections of content you need to put into your business plan. Okay, Half a page to a page on each one of these things. I’M talking about So where do they hang out? So Alex loves listening to Gary Vaynerchuk’s podcast and recently attended an event run by Tony Robbins At the weekends he secretly plays Fortnite and seems to like every single post, that’s appearing on LinkedIn relating to marketing.
So now we can start to get an idea about how we can target marketing advertising at Alex. If we so wish, How many clients do you really need? Okay, this is another section that goes into the business plan, So we have two choices here Now again, if you’re saying you need all of the clients, you are indeed wrong. If you are saying definitely not all of the clients, you are indeed right.
And if you’re thinking well, I have a very specific niche, so I do business coaching for massage therapists, then you are definitely in the right ball park because the reality is, if you help massage therapy businesses to double their turnover in six months, you can probably get A really nice business going with just ten to twenty clients running concurrently at any one particular point of the year, So we don’t need to market to everybody. We just need to find the 10 or 20 massage therapists locally to us who could do with our help? Okay, so we don’t need that many clients Next up so, and this is kind of coming towards the end of your lean business plan. Now we just need to get some basic projections Like I see people with these really complicated like three year. Cash flow forecasts, with all of the overheads broken down into minute detail with these really complicated, like formulas built into their spreadsheet, and the reality is like. We don’t need to do anything like that whatsoever in a lean business plan. Okay, If we just focus on like really specific goals, if our goal is basically just to get to create 100,000 pounds, a year’s worth of revenue, if our perfect client is worth 1,000 pounds a year, therefore, we need 100 clients in the next 12 months.
And then we can sense check that We can say. Is this number realistic Now, if managing 100 clients and marketing to 100 clients is gon na, be really really difficult, then we need up our price potentially and then market test. It Is the price. Realistic. Is the number of clients we can get realistic? Can we get all those clients in the next 12 months? We can sense check it. Okay, So put these into your lean business plan and then at then end of it ask the question: is this realistic or not? Okay, So just to summarise, the lean business plan keep it short, no more than four to five sides of A4. Make sure that you use your branding and that it looks pretty. Then we move into the sections of content. So, put a half a page, a little bit about you and about your company Next page a little bit about your products and your services. Remember it’s about the outcomes and not the features In the next page. Identify who your target market is be granular go into, like all the demographics male female are the 45 to 54. Do they live in the local area? Are they further a field than that Start? Asking the question of where do they hangout? What sort of things are they reading? Who are they following? What podcasts are they listening to All of that sort of thing?
Ask the question of yourself: how many clients do we need, and the answer is not everyone, let’s niche and then finally, to put together some very simple forecasts based on your goals. So, if want 100 grand a year, how many clients do you need in order to earn 100 grand a year Now I focused very heavily on client businesses. Okay, If you want to know more, then go and tap me up just onto robinwaite.com..