Are Business Plans a Waste of Time?

When did you last get your business plan out of its hiding place? Most of us do a business plan at the start of our business, usually because it’s required for funding or when we go to Business Gateway they make us do one! But, like me, you probably put it away in a drawer and never looked at it again – am I right? I don’t know one business owner who updates their Business plan regularly or uses it as a working document.

Do you know why?

It’s just not that easy to use on a regular basis and that’s the reason I use a One Page Plan for clients and for my own business. It’s a way of amalgamating all the information you need to run your business into one simple page of A4.

It does require discipline to use though as it only works if you look at it regularly. I’ve been using it with Kerri from Peaches Wax Bar and it’s helped her increase her turnover to £250,000 in 7 months. So what makes it so ‘magical’? Once you get your head around what you want to measure in your business it helps you to keep track and monitor your results monthly.

It’s not just about profit or turnover though, it’s about how you can make sure your achieving what you want from your business. So that might be about how many enquiries you want, it could be about measuring your conversion rate, it could be about which bits of your marketing are working and which bits are not.

There is no excuse these days to say you don’t know what works for your marketing as it’s so easy to track what you do, whether you use tracking numbers, online analytics or voucher codes. If this is something you’re not doing then you could be wasting a lot of money on your marketing or advertising.

If you’re not measuring what’s going on in your business then you really are relying on luck to run your business. It’s not a good thing to do and one of the big reasons over 50% of small businesses fail in the first five years. I’ve seen many that limp along, not making much money while the business owner runs themselves ragged trying to keep up.

If you would like a copy to use, you can download it for FREE here http://queenofprofit.co.uk/services/Just scroll down to the bottom of the page.

I’m also running a live workshop on this very topic in June, see http://queenofprofit.co.uk/events/ for details.

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