Let’s jump right in by discussing why business planning is a necessary effort in planning for success (you do plan to be successful, don’t you?). The primary intent of business planning is to provide you with the focus you need to prioritize your work, develop your communications, and invest your dollars. There is much more beyond this, but this is where you will want to start. Once you have a business plan, you should be aligning all of your work activities to the plan to avoid wasting extraneous effort on items that don’t support your business goals.

Let’s start by asking the seemingly most basic and straightforward question: What do you want your business to be? In other words, what are you going to be selling? Is it a tangible product such as jewelry or will it be a service such as graphic design? Mind you, services often come with tangible end-products (i.e. Graphic Design may end up with a logo, a banner, etc). Sometimes you can confuse the two, as happens occasionally in sewing. For instance, if you pre-sew plush dolls and sell them, you are offering a product. If you are taking an order for custom apparel, you are actually offering a service, even if the end result is a tangible product.

The reason this distinction is so important to understand is that it affects the overall way in which you will structure your business, affecting everything from how you market to how you price. Think about your business in terms of how you expect your customers to interact with you in order to make a sale. Is it a relatively simple transaction with minimal contact or is it more involved, with a high level of interaction?

Second, think about the overall ‘mission’ you have for your business. ‘Mission Statements’ in small and medium businesses are valuable tools. A mission statement is a part of business planning that in one or two sentences sums up what your business is about and what your business core values are. Again, these are used to line up your activities. If your activities aren’t in line with your vision, you need to question whether or not you should be doing them! Let’s look at an example.

This is the mission statement for one of my businesses that is in development:

Supporting Artisans will provide quality references and easy-to-use tools for artisans in business while assisting in the development and enrichment of the artisan community as a whole.

It’s a very broad mission statement in terms of what could qualify as a reference or tool, and community is the broadest reference of all. These may need to be tweaked but for now they provide a good frame for what the business will do. That the focus is on artisans is very clear and it is apparent that this business is not catering to other groups.
Before next week, think about what you mission statement should be. Try to keep in mind that your mission statement should speak to what you provide, who you are providing it to and how you will excel.

Next week I’ll pick back up with the mission statement and from there transition into customer definition. In the meantime, post your ‘mission statements’ here!