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. Read More