Business Planning – The Key to Success

One of the most beneficial and vital documents you can prepare for your business is a business plan. Many people think that business planning is only necessary if you plan on seeking financing for your small business. Banks will almost always require a method to display your plan has been thought out. If for that reason only, it should illustrate why it’s so imperative to have some sort of business planning in place before you start executing.

Proper business planning forces you to think of issues that may have never crossed your mind if they weren’t brought up beforehand. Issues like insurance, retirement plans, 5 year expansion plans, loss mitigation, employee benefits, and many other aspects all must be laid out on paper. This also gives you something to fall back on and check yourself against from time to time. Owning a small business is chaos. It requires long hours, hard work, dedication, and self sacrifice. By putting together some sort of business planning before you are hit with the tidal wave of business ownership, you have written your own reference guide for what’s to come.

It also makes it easier to obtain financing if you do end up needing it. Business planning requires an in depth market analysis of your products or services, competition, and demographic. If nothing more, you will gain an incredible in depth knowledge of your customer base and your market competition that you will soon be going head to head with.

There are plenty of references available to you to help you conduct business planning as well so don’t see it as a daunting task. It is in depth and time consuming, yes, but it will pay dividends by the time you have a complete final draft. With mentors, small business owners groups and clubs, and innumerable books and websites on the subject, there are plenty of things to provide you a basic outline to reference and follow. Consider getting in touch with businesses that may be willing to give you a hand with information and tips for properly planning your business. Mentors can be found nationwide and there’s bound to be one that has experience in your field. If you can’t find one, though, it’s not the end of the world. Plenty of information is available on many different forms of business. In the end, having a business plan is one of the absolute best things you can do for your up and coming company.

Business Ethics – Become More Conscience Focused

Business ethics are a side of ethics that play into the business world. When developing your business structure, it is key to know where your business stands on issues that may arise and how you want your business portrayed to the public. Since the turn of the 21st century, businesses have become more conscience players in the economy and are being held more accountable for their actions. One of the prime examples of this is the “green movement” and consumers willing to pay a little more to support an ethically moral business model.

You don’t have to be a green company to make yourself known that you keep employees and yourself morally responsible. Business ethics come into play on a much larger scale once you start hiring employees as well. It’s easy for you to know where you stand but every employee is now a face and personality that represents your brand to the public. It is imperative to have your ethics lined out, usually in some form of employee handbook, so that everyone can be on the same page.
If you lay out what is considered to be unethical or unmoral to your company, you will have a business ethics code to hold your employees by. If you were a green company like one that was mentioned earlier, you may find it unethical to use anything but energy efficient light bulbs in your office. It sounds bizarre but being that you’ve created an environmentally friendly company, it’s not farfetched. Unless you spell that out, though, there’s no way for the person whose responsibility it is to order light bulbs to know it was unacceptable.

The biggest issue is that your business will gain a reputation just by being in business. It’s how you decide your company makes money and to what extent you are willing to take it to that the issue of business ethics is raised. Ethics come into play in almost every aspect of business from wages paid to products sold. If you own a retail shop, you should determine the ethics behind the companies of the products you carry. Huge multi-million dollar companies have been fined countless times for unethical business practices as well as small businesses losing customers because they gain a bad reputation in the area in which they work. Identifying early on what is acceptable and where the line is drawn ethically for your company can help build a positive relationship with your community.

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