Deadly Principles Of Business Planning. You Must Know These

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Whether you are running, or planning to run, an offline or online business the traditional basics of achieving business success apply. For instance, it is well-known that a business that has no plan is almost certain to fail. No matter how small a business is, it needs a plan. A business plan compels you to think before you act. It compels you to find out about your business area before you start; i.e. to research your business area or to establish its groundwork.

A business plan forces you to think hard about your competition and how you are going to beat them in the market. It forces you to establish whether your business idea is worth pursuing. Why start a business that is going to fail? Isn’t that stupid?

A business plan forces you to establish the expected costs and revenues of your business, and hence to determine profitability. Why run a business when, at any time, you cannot tell whether or not the business is succeeding? If you don’t know your costs or your revenues you cannot compare them together to tell whether your business is succeeding or failing.

An online business is no different from an offline business, when it comes to business planning. It needs a business plan! Yet, how many newcomers do we see trying to make it online without even understanding the concept of business planning? Is it then a surprise that too many fail?

This article discusses 12 fundamental principles that you must understand and use in your business planning if you are going to run a successful business. The principles are as follows…

1. The Requirements Principle

A business plan must comply with the requirements of funding bodies. This is particularly key when you are applying for funding, but is also necessary when you are not applying because the compliance act itself makes the business plan rigorous. Funding bodies always have requirements that a plan must meet, and some of these are: technological innovation, presence of technical risk, and presence of commercial potential.

2. The Objectives Principle

A business plan must have clearly defined objectives and it must accomplish those objectives. A business plan is a strategic business document, and fundamental to any strategic planning process is the need to have objectives which the formulated strategies must aim to accomplish.

3. The Motivation Principle

A business plan must have clear motivations which highlight its importance. The motivations of a business plan are the reasons for completing the plan. These reasons tell us why the plan is important.

4. The Background Principle

A business plan must be the work of someone with a relevant background (the founder, for a start-up business), and the plan must comply with its authors background. A business plan should be prepared by the person or team who is going to run the business. For a start-up business, this is critical because the planning process prepares the owner for running the business. If the planning is delegated to someone else then it is unlikely that the owner will understand the plan sufficiently to be able to implement it. In these circumstances, the owner abandons the plan and does his or her own thing with deleterious consequences for the business.

5. The Detail Principle

A business plan must be sufficiently detailed to inspire confident action when executing the business; yet it must be flexible. A detailed plan is easier to implement than a superficial plan. A detailed plan suggests that the plan has been thoroughly researched and thought over. Detail inspires confidence in the owner of the business (assuming that he or she prepared the plan). A detailed plan should be flexible to accommodate changing times.

6. The Conservatism Principle

A business plan must be conservative. This means that it must always underestimate revenues while overestimating expenses. The reasons for this are underpinned by risk. A business is always executed under uncertainty… we never have all the knowledge we would like to make business success certain. An immediate consequence of this is the tendency to underestimate cost, only to find that we run out of money at critical times of a business’s execution. We also have a natural propensity to overestimate revenues… to dream!

7. The Cash Balance Principle

A business plan must always have a positive cash balance. A negative cash balance means that you plan to run out of money… to be insolvent! If you cannot realistically get the cash balance positive, without padding figures, then this is a sign that the business idea is not worth pursuing.

8. The Insolvency Principle

A business plan must guarantee against insolvency… against running out of cash. There are four ways to do this: conservative estimates so that the business always outperforms its plans, detailed cost identification to minimise omitted costs, contingency planning to accommodate forgotten items, and a positive cash balance throughout the plan.

9. The Risk Management Principle

A business plan must manage risks by convincingly dealing with uncertainty, reducing it to as close to zero as possible. This is simply stating that a business plan must be thoroughly researched, including desk research and field research. The more thoroughly a plan is researched the more it rests on sound facts, knowledge, and understanding, and the less the uncertainty and risk associated with the plan.

10. The Evidence Principle

A business plan must rest on supporting evidence, and guess work must be minimised. Sound evidence increases the reliability of a business plan and reduces the risk associated with it. And the less risky a plan is the more likely it will guide a business to success.

11. The Rigour Principle

A business plan must be rigorous complete, correct, and reliable. This means that the plan must be derived from a systematic process that attends to all the issues that must be addressed. In particular, the plan must not be rushed. The issues must be sequenced and dealt with, each at the right time.

12. The Collaboration Principle

A business plan must be founded on collaboration (not confrontation) it must satisfy the collaboration principle. This means that a business plan must be based on the works of others. It must not be opinionated. It also means that a collaborative, rather than a confrontational spirit, must exist in any business planning team if the results of that team are to be worthwhile.

Final Remarks

This article has discussed 12 killer principles of business planning that any plan must satisfy if it is to be taken seriously. Five of such principles are: requirements principle, objectives principle, motivation principle, background principle, and detail principle. These principles are a must for anyone running an offline or online business. If your business is failing it is more than likely that your failure to comply with one or more of these principles is to blame.

Online Business School Seeks To Disrupt Business School Pricing And Value Proposition Model

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Tulsa, Oklahoma, February 14, 2015 /PressReleasePing/ – Thrive15.com, the online business education platform for entrepreneurs, business owners and employees looking to improve their business skills, launches out of beta, after nearly three years of development. The online education platform is already disrupting the business school pricing and value proposition model. According to Bloomberg, the least expensive business schools such as the Illinois – Urbana Champaign School of Business and William and Mary Mason start at over $34,000 per year and many business schools like Cornell University are priced at over $50,000 per year.

“We’ve worked very hard to make our business school $49,400 less per year than other business schools and much more entertaining, engaging and interactive so you will actually retain what you are learning,” says Thrive15.com Founder and Chief Operating Officer, Clay Clark.

Thrive15.com currently has subscribers in 33 countries has been attracting the attention of both non-college graduates and college graduates who are amazed at the quality and the practicality of the website’s ever growing content. One Thrive15.com subscriber and a private Ivy league Graduate from Southport, Connecticut says, “I think if you were to go to one of those websites that evaluates schools, my school would rank in the top 3 in the U.S. However, theres no training on how to be an entrepreneur and run a business. What is provided is not considered to be important by the students. They have professors who have never built a business, but are giving them critiques on their work. When go out in the real world, you enter this foreign world of entrepreneurship.

Thrive15.com’s Founder, Clay Clark says, “We think Steve Jobs (Apple co-founder and former Pixar CEO) was correct when he said, “It is absurd that American classrooms are still based on teachers standing at a board and using textbooks. All books, learning materials, and assessments should be digital and interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time.”

Thrive15.com’s business education platform offers courses in 20 areas of business mastery including leadership, capital, accounting, marketing, sales, legal, and more. Thrivers rate themselves and their current proficiency in each area and can then choose from the ever-expanding course catalog consisting of thousands of business education videos.

Even proud pillars of academia such as Harvard Professor, Clayton Christensen, see a brewing storm for America’s colleges, “Generally universities are doing very well financially, so they don’t feel from the data that their world is going to collapse, but I think even five years from now these enterprises are going to be in real trouble.”

Thrive15.com videos are taught by world-class mentors including NBA Hall of Famer turned successful entrepreneur, David Robinson, the former Executive Vice President of Operations for Walt Disney World Resort, Lee Cockerell, the New York Times bestselling author and publicist of choice for Michael Jackson, Prince, P. Diddy, Charlton Heston, and countless celebrities, Michael Levine, and countless other experts.

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Quick Facts Thrive15:

Thrive15.com provides 15-minute practical online business courses taught by millionaires, mentors, and everyday entrepreneurial success stories.

Thrive15.com features many celebrity mentors including:

David Robinson, NBA Hall of Fame Basketball Player and founder of Carver Academy charter schools and Admiral Capital Group, which currently has a valuation of over $250 million; Lee Cockerell, the Former Executive Vice President of Operations for Walt Disney World Resort who once managed 40,000 + employees; Michael Levine, the founder of Levine Communications who has been the publicist of choice for Michael Jackson, Prince, P. Diddy, Charlton Heston, Cameron Diaz, and countless other celebrities; David Nilssen, the cofounder of one of the nation’s largest small business funding solutions, Guidant Financial and; Jonathan Barnett, the founder of the 400 + OXI Fresh franchise.

Thrive15.com has teamed up David Robinson and the U.S. Chambers, Hiring Our Heroes Program, to provide free subscriptions to U.S. military families as part of the 1 for 1 HandUp Movement.

Thrive15.com has been mentioned in Forbes, Pando Daily, Yahoo Finance, Business Insider, Entrepreneur, and numerous media outlets since launching in BETA.

Thrive15.com offers best practice and practical online education in the core areas of business mastery that every entrepreneur must know including: legal, real estate, investing, execution, purpose, mindset, networking, business modeling, overcoming adversity, capital, branding, marketing, sales, customer service, product/service development, quality control, accounting, management, human resources, and leadership.

Thrive15.com was founded by Chief Operating Officer and Oklahomas former U.S. Small Business Administration Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark.

The Chief Executive Officer of Thrive15.com is doctor, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist, Doctor Robert Zoellner.

Thrive15.com offers points instead of grades and gives its users a chance to win a business boost package of over $10,000 every six months to the Thriver with the most points.

Thrive15.coms content is created by combining entertainment, gamification, and best-practice practical business education to increase the retention of training provided on the platform.

Press Contact:

Deedra Determan

D2 Branding

1609 S. Boston Ave

918-520-8012

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Why Android Is A Great Match For Mobile Business Users

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The smart phone industry is expanding greatly, and business users are left wondering which smart phones best match their needs. While BlackBerry has been the historic winner, many businesspeople are starting to look much more seriously at Android as a strong contender.

What makes Android so attractive to business users? This can be broken down into a few key areas: flexibility and choice, pricing, apps and software, and business integration.

Flexibility: On the whole, Android presents a lot of flexibility for users – they can choose from a variety of phones, a variety of providers, and an app store that is not heavily regulated (unlike Apple’s App Store). Business users have differing needs depending on their industries, position, and even lifestyle, and Android makes it easier to find a smart phone that’s a perfect match.
Applications: On other mobile operating systems, applications are heavily policed. While this has some advantages in terms of reliability, it also means that one company is choosing exactly what people do and do not want on their mobile phones. It excludes small niche programs designed for specific types of business people from existing – a problem that is rectified on Android. Android’s applications are open to all software developers, which means more innovation for the business user.
Strong web browsing capabilities: Android supports Adobe Flash – a popular way of encoding web pages that the Apple iPhone does not support. In other words, Android users are able to view a number of web pages that iPhone users would not otherwise be able to. This is important when you need one quick piece of information on the go!
Prices are much more competitive: Because Android is available on many different types of phone, there’s much more room for the budget-minded businessperson to find a price that works for them.
Strong Exchange integration: Many businesses use Microsoft Exchange, though mobile support for Exchange is sometimes hit and miss. BlackBerry requires of the installation of their BES server. However, Android integrates with Exchange without any need for add-ons – perfect for easy integration into the business world!

Financial Management Vs Business Management Your Way To Success!

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It is the sole responsibility of the business manager to run an organization quite effectively and successfully. At present time, the school curriculum and college curriculum comprises of both finance and business management.

These days many of people are into the business of running an organization. With support of the effective Assignment Help it has become far simpler and manageable to get the desired results. There are many factors and reasons which play a vital role in the development of the complete understanding of the market potential, capital invested and getting in hand knowledge of the understanding of the strategy of the business core!

In the organization with support of the business and Financial Management Assignment Help, the understanding of the working of the organization is a perfect advantage for the workers, as they now know the importance of each in process of running an organization.

With total and accurate information about the business and finance of an organization helps in making the right decision which helps in taking the firm to great heights and splendor. Through these, one can also easily identify and solve the problems of business strengths and weakness. Reduction of the certain loopholes in also very important. The joint and sustained effort of the people of the organization helps in taking the individual organization and firm into a profitable venture.

Through, finance and Business Management Help, the challenges of running the organization effectively are overcome by undergoing the thorough understanding of the topic by the students and even the professional workers.

Several students around the world find it difficult to complete and cover their assignments on time. Here, the support and help of the online assignment help comes into play. The support of the experienced tutors online gives expert guidance to the students that enable them to get the results that really matter.

The best part about these online assignment help is that students can seek the guidance of these teachers and online tutors at any time of the day. Through continuous help and guidance students can easily work to become professional worker. This enables and makes them competent enough to understand and meet the needs of all.

Challenges Faced By Small Business Operators

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For many, the idea of owning a small business is a dream come true. People conjure up images of working reduced hours and having a fistful of cash. Whilst this is definitely a possibility for long term success stories, the truth of the matter is that owning and operating a small business is very hard work, can be stressful and the owners are often stretched financially until the business gains momentum. It is, therefore, important for individuals who are contemplating owning or starting a business to be aware of the challenges and reality that can present in day to day operations. This article examines a few key areas operators will need to address.

Operating a small business requires an individual to draw on a diverse range of skills. Often, the owner has strengths in some core areas and has weaknesses in others. Hopefully, this was identified in the business plan. Irrespective, business owners must face facts that they will need to outsource or hire personnel when skill deficiency presents. Trying to be an expert in all the business facets can drain organizational resources and draw the business owner’s attention away from core business imperatives. Part of good business management is knowing how to focus and use your skills in the most appropriate and productive way.

Financial responsibility is an often overlooked and misunderstood area of business operations. This is often the case in organizations that are run by sales personnel who are strong at generating and closing business but not so good at running operations. Having a centralized accounting system with designated personnel or employing the services of a bookkeeping service can assist business owners to deal with the accounting side of the business. It is also important that the business owner consider outside advice from an accountant to assist with the financial and strategic direction of the organization.

Maintaining strong organizational culture has many fringe benefits for business operators. Staff who respect managers and are content with their work environment are inevitably more productive and do not take as many sick holidays. Lower staff turnover reduces staff replacement costs. Building a business requires dedicated and focused staff. Investing in staff training also raises operational IQ and allows managers to delegate tasks to individuals who have upgraded skills. This improves the overall organizational effectiveness. Maintaining good staff relations is an important and often overlooked area of small business management.