You haven’t researched your market. Many business owners don’t have enough information about who is buying their products and why. You need to find out who your ideal customers are, what their income is, what their buying habits are, and how they make purchasing decisions, for a start. You can do this by conducting surveys or polls online, interviewing people you consider potential customers, and searching for existing data on your demographic. Organizing the results will give you a clear picture of your customers’ perspective. This is an advantage when you develop messaging and begin to “talk” to them. All public relations and customer communications should center around customer pain points.
You haven’t researched your competitors. Know who your competitors are and stay up to date on their activities not only helps you make strategy decisions, it is a learning experience as well. You should know who has the best quality product or service at what price and who has the least, what customers are saying about the company, any financials made publicly available, and what kind of marketing or advertising they do. As you follow your competitors’ movements, you will be able to observe the rewards and consequences of their decisions on many levels, and adjust your own strategy to expand, advance, or target your market in new ways.
You haven’t planned for growth. A business plan is an action plan. It’s hard to motivate yourself, your employees, and your investors with research and projections. Be sure your plan outlines an actual plan for at least one future scenario. I say at least one because you should make plans for factors beyond your control that may derail your first plan.
You don’t know your numbers. Running a business is all numbers. Sales projections, production yields, profit estimates and more can swallow the heart of a business plan: the viability of your business model. Don’t get so focused on month-to-month numbers that you lose sight of whether your business idea, operations, and strategic decisions will allow those numbers to be actualized.
Your business plan is not up-to-date. If your plan is outdated, you will not be able to use it to run your business. Most business plans are created before launch. When your new business meets the real world, however, you often need to make adjustments that aren’t incorporated or reflected in your written plans. If you haven’t looked at your business plan in a while, ask yourself why. Is it because you’ve made so many changes to daily operations, or your numbers don’t correlate with what’s on paper at all? Take the time to sit down and go over your business plan once again and decide whether you need to make changes or make a new one that will better reflect your business’s current direction.
Do you have any other common business plans mistakes for small business owner?
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Melinda F. Emerson, known to many as SmallBizLady is one of America’s leading small business experts.