Small Business Success Tips - Planning

What's the most important thing in putting up a small business? Planning! We even have the saying that: "If you want to be a failure, just fail to plan!" That easy! But of course we don't want to be a failure right? We don't wanna waste our effort, time, and money for nothing right? So what do we wanna do? PLAN!

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BUSINESS PLAN is very important before setting up a small business. All of businesses, small or big, need BUSINESS PLAN.

Don't know how to make a business plan? Well, lucky you, I found guidelines on how to make a powerful business plan. Just click on the links.

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Below is an article I found which is very helpful to small business enthusiasts. Read on.

Some small business owners plan to the smallest detail, sometimes planning themselves into a nervous breakdown from long hours and stress. Others are completely impulsive, shouting orders madly and cursing the dolts who didn't order enough whatchamacallits. Neither extreme results in smooth production in all areas of the business.

The first trick to planning is to plan for the positive. Trying to anticipate and prepare for every possible obstacle is a negative approach, and self-limiting. The only necessary plans are those that will lead to success. If you want 200 attendees at your next event, plan how to bring in 400, even if your hall will only hold 250. Don't let your production capacity keep you from bidding on jobs that will strain that capacity.

The second trick to planning is to identify the essential elements of success. For your event, you need a sound system, refreshments, and your printed materials. Sure, other items will come up, but set up the essentials, and you will have a framework for any other needs to fit into.

The third trick to planning is allowing lead time. "Too little, too late" should never apply to your business. Being "too busy" is never a valid excuse. "Too busy" comes from an earlier lack of planning. If you are in this vicious cycle, the only way out is to discover what is essential and do only that until you are caught up.

The fourth trick to planning is thoroughness, which is different from obsessing over details. Whether you are planning for a major client project or a minor office rearrangement, make a list of the essential actions. Always, always make a master written list of essential actions when planning. The list can change over time, but the list is absolutely necessary, or guaranteed, something will slip through the cracks and lead to a crisis.

The fifth trick to planning is to plan with a purpose. Plans can encompass any time period from minutes to years. Merely planning how to use your time, however, will not move you forward at any great pace. You can get a lot done and still not accomplish much of what you need and want to accomplish.

Example: you plan to meet with the mayor from 3:00 to 4:00 to talk about parking ordinances. If that is the whole of your plan, you may not accomplish much. A real plan would be meet with the mayor in order to show him how changes in the parking ordinances would benefit the city. With that plan, you can gather your data, practice your arguments, build your Powerpoint presentation, all with a single end in mind.

Similarly, planning to double your landscaping equipment sales in the next year does not give you much of a framework to hang actual actions on. Instead, plan to quadruple your client base by expanding your sales area and establishing the superiority of your equipment through dramatic demonstrations throughout the year. That plan will get you where you want to go.

Finally, be sure to include others in your business plans, especially your staff. They have to plan their own actions and decisions to fit in smoothly with your plans. Key staff should have a complete picture, and lower-totem-pole staff need to know about anything that will affect their decisions and actions in that department. After all, your staff will be the ones who will help you bring your plans to life, even if your staff is only one part-time bookkeeper.

In summary: no planning means constant fires to be put out and bridges collapsing; too intensive and painstaking planning means projects take too long and cost too much. Just enough planning means the company grows through a series of successful actions that always contain some element of surprise. Some level of occasional challenge keeps life interesting. Plan on it.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Don_Dewsnap

Small Business Success Tips - Promotion

Promotion is one of the challenging steps in building up a small business. One secret to promote your product? TRUST YOUR OWN PRODUCTS! With you having high confidence in your own products will be very confident in promoting it. For me, what I do is that I acquire more knowledge first. I am actually an ebook fan. Oh well, thanks to this software that gives an unlimited download of ebooks. Small business owners and enthusiasts will appreciate this.

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I found an article in Ezine which will definitely help small business owners out there on determining why promotion is very important in succeeding in a small business.

Promotion is not the same as marketing. Promotion of a small business encompasses all methods of getting the word about your small business out into the community. Marketing, public relations, networking, advertising, press releases, and many more actions all are forms of promotion.

The purpose of promotion is name recognition, without negative association. Famous criminals are not sought out for business relationships. Positive association is best, but even neutral or no opinion association is valuable. The objective is to get the most people possible saying "I've heard of them" when your business name comes up.

The reason name recognition is important to your success is because people are more likely to approach something they are familiar with. When they need the product or service you offer, and are looking at their alternatives, they are most likely to call the business whose name they recognize (unless they have heard bad things about it).

Part of promotion has to do with presentation. Negative association is more likely to come from poor presentation than from enemies whispering unflattering things about you. Therefore, a great deal of your promotional energy should be devoted to the quality of your promotion. Amateurish, error-ridden promotional work will turn people off, and once they are turned off, it is very hard to again make them receptive.

Presentation reaches beyond the quality of your printing or advertising. Every single contact your business name makes with anyone reflects on their impression of your business. Every email, every conversation, how you dress, how quickly your website loads, and any other interaction between you or your business and people are all promotional actions, and are affected by the quality of their presentation. So be professional at all times, and project competence and other positive qualities to the best of your ability.

Books have been written full of promotional ideas, and many can be found for free on the internet, by searching for "inexpensive promotion" or "promotional ideas" or the like. Many of them are impractical or inappropriate to your business, but some of them will make sense to you.

A fifteen-dollar table at a church flea market might result in 500 new people hearing of you or seeing your name. High school event programs are seen by hundreds of parents and are cheap to put a small ad in. Always having a business card to hand to anyone who will take it is a basic of promotion. There are hundreds of ways to promote a local business, including on the internet.

If your business is not local, but internet-based, promotion follows the same rules: keep the quality of presentation high, and seek out ideas with a search for "internet promotional ideas" and similar words. Beware anything that says "free" except downloadable ebooks. There are ways to effectively promote for free on the internet, but most of them are not advertised.

Look for bloggers with many followers, and make intelligent comments about their blogs. Get your website included in specialized directories (not the huge directories that no one uses or even sees). Offer a free ebook on free ebook sites. Probably the best inexpensive way to promote on the internet is with an ezine that you email out regularly, but that route is time-intensive and requires a firm commitment. You will find many more ways if you look for them.

You can measure the success of your promotional efforts in a local setting fairly easily: each month, ask 30 or more strangers if they have heard of your business, and keep track on a graph of the percentage who have. If the graph line isn't going up, you need to promote more or with better presentation or both.

On the internet, promotional success is clearcut: keep track of the number of unique visitors to your site.
One final warning: promotion is not marketing. Do not neglect actual marketing actions, as they are what will produce actual leads and actual sales. Promotion plows the field; marketing sows the seeds; salesmanship tends the crop and reaps the harvest.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Don_Dewsnap