NSAN

FREE ESSENTIAL BUSINESS EDUCATION

Strategic Planning

​

Start with your own skill-building. You cannot be an effective business owner if you don't bring value to the business. Be relentless in your ongoing skill building. You become more in-demand and can charge higher fees based on your knowledge and expertise.

Check your experience level. An expert is defined as having 10,000 hours of experience with the topic they claim as their expertise. If you use a traditional 40-hour workweek as your ruler, that means you need at least 5 years' full time experience with your small business topic in order to call yourself an expert.

Determine your Big Why. Before you get down to the nitty-gritty of designing your business and getting clients, figure out why you want to be a business owner and help this specific target audience. What is your motivation? Knowing this will keep you going when you hit the inevitable speed bumps along the way to building your business and serving your clients.

Determine what "success" looks like for you personally. Keep your eye on the target. The definition of success differs from person to person. Take some time to visualize all the ways that a successful business practice will manifest in your personal and professional life.

Write a business plan. Go through all the same steps you would go through with a startup business, and work on your own business model design even if you already have an existing business. Things to consider: what legal format you'll use, what are your mission and vision statements, what are your offerings, your pricing and profit models. Include the resources you will need to succeed, like money, time, skills/knowledge, equipment, and people resources. Set goals and milestones for the next 1, 3 & 5 years. 

Write a marketing plan. There are many businesses out there. How will you be remarkable & stand out from the crowd? How will you connect with your audience and build rapport and trust? Will you use traditional marketing techniques only, or combine traditional and internet marketing? Which of the 100+ available techniques will bring the best results? How much will you invest in marketing (in both time and money)? What are the goals of your marketing?

Learn coaching skills. You will be working with human beings who have their own set of strengths and weaknesses. Learn deep listening skills and how to ask meaningful questions to get clarity and provide focus. Learn how to hold clients accountable for implementing their action plans, and how to deal with difficult client situations.

Choose a focus or niche. Determine if your specialty requires you to have a license or certification (financial and tax advisors, legal advisors, insurance advisors). Will you work only with local clients, or will your business be national/international?

Decide if you are going to advise yourself, or get outside professional consultation. Some consultants are more like mentors and advisors, who work with the business owner to do planning and strategy work. Other business consultants provide a specific service as a sub-contractor, to augment the client's staff.  Decide which, if any, is best for your situation.

Learn the problems that most business owners have and formulate a strategy to define and solve those problems. Use readily available strategies, tools and assessments to help solve these problems, or create strategies of your own. Consider putting together your own business owners toolkit.

Deeply understand the seven elements of a business model to help your business in the areas that are causing the most damage or have the best return on investment if they make a change (see below for the seven elements).

Systemize your own business so that you have maximum efficiency. Use templates, automation & sales scripts. Prepare early to create these systems to free up your time & attention for more important tasks.

Get help with the administrative and marketing work. Outsource the tasks that you do not want to do, that you are not an expert in, or that take away from your revenue-generating time.

Get your ego out of the way. While your work can and should be meaningful to you, you are not a business owner to pump up your own ego. You are a business owner to serve your clients.  Decide in advance what a "successful client engagement" means to you.

Be honest about your own areas of personal development. No one is perfect. Sometimes we procrastinate. Sometimes we get distracted. Sometimes we let anger or fear get the better of us. Sometimes we don't communicate as well as we could. Discover your weaknesses and either learn how to overcome them, or hire staff to help deflect them.

Choose marketing techniques that bring qualified leads to the sales conversation. Track your marketing relentlessly. If your marketing isn't bringing the desired results, revamp it. Do not choose marketing techniques because they are a hot trend if they don't bring in leads or help build your brand recognition.

Learn problem solving, decision making, project management, and time management skills. These four skills will provide the backbone of the assistance you will offer clients and help you run your own business successfully.

Learn from the masters. Why reinvent the wheel? You can discover savvy shortcuts by paying attention to the leading businesses in your industry. In any business niche there are always several people who have risen to the top of their profession. Study their offerings, their marketing methods, the way they run their business, and the way they work with clients. Determine if those methods would serve you and your clients, too.

​

Business Model

7 Elements

1. Identify your specific audience.

Targeting a wide audience won’t allow your business to hone in on customers who truly need and want your product or service. Instead,  when creating your business model, narrow your audience down to two or three detailed buyer personas. Outline each persona’s demographics, common challenges and the solutions your company will offer. As an example, Home Depot might appeal to everyone or carry a product the average person needs, but the company’s primary target market is homeowners and builders.

2. Establish business processes.

Before your business can go live, you need to have an understanding of the activities required to make your business model work. Determine key business activities by first identifying the core aspect of your business’s offering. Are you responsible for providing a service, shipping a product or offering consulting?

3. Record key business resources.

What does your company need to carry out daily processes, find new customers and reach business goals? Document essential business resources to ensure your business model is adequately prepared to sustain the needs of your business. Common resource examples may include a website (get your FREE website at Wix.com), capital, warehouses, intellectual property and customer lists.

4. Develop a strong value proposition.

How will your company stand out among the competition? Do you provide an innovative service, revolutionary product or a new twist on an old favorite? Establishing exactly what your business offers and why it’s better than competitors is the beginning of a strong value proposition. Once you’ve got a few value propositions defined, link each one to a service or product delivery system to determine how you will remain valuable to customers over time.

5. Determine key business partners.

No business can function properly (let alone reach established goals) without key partners that contribute to the business’s ability to serve customers. When creating a business model, select key partners, like suppliers, strategic alliances or advertising partners. Using the previous example of Home Depot, key business partners may be lumber suppliers, parts wholesalers and logistics companies.

6. Create a demand generation strategy.

Unless you’re taking a radical approach to launching your company, you’ll need a strategy that builds interest in your business, generates leads and is designed to close sales. How will customers find you? More importantly, what should they do once they become aware of your brand? Developing a demand generation strategy creates a blueprint of the customer’s journey while documenting the key motivators for taking action.  Utilize online marketing tools for your website to optimize its performance.

7. Leave room for innovation.

When launching a company and developing a business model, your business plan is based on many assumptions. After all, until you begin to welcome paying customers, you don’t truly know if your business model will meet their ongoing needs. For this reason, it’s important to leave room for future innovations. Don’t make a critical mistake by thinking your initial plan is a static document. Instead, review it often and implement changes as needed.