The path to creating a dream company can become frustrating and daunting for many aspiring entrepreneurs without specific goals and ideas. There is much more to business than just the idea. Sure, you will think of legalizing it first and get an online private limited company registration done to simplify the tasks. But further in business, an action plan is needed that outlines leadership, financial requirements, estimated sales, product or services designs, and offerings, marketing strategies, and much more to ensure running a viable business.
Turning your business plan to an action plan require you to take it as a business plan that involves business activities not covered by the marketing and sales plans. Marketing and sales strategies define the business ‘moves towards achieving its financial and sales objectives.’ The action plan outlines how you operate and manage your business and run such activities smoothly and handle unforeseen circumstances like COVID-19. It also includes the back office operations which do not explicitly include the delivery of products or services to clients.
Such include activities include:
- Hiring the team and managing personnel.
- Arranging supplies by contacting vendors that involve key business agreements in place.
- Ensuring planned production and service offerings.
- Enabling top-notch after-sales customer support and service.
- Predefined process for order fulfilment.
- Strategizing the change in the business environment.
Moreover, the ideal way to go about creating a robust action plan requires businesses to take the necessary steps as mentioned below:
Conducting Thorough Research
When you start marketing and building a customer base, start working at the grassroots level. You can know about your target market as best as you can, and ensure the action plan suits their needs by identifying them correctly.
Researching consumer needs and desires will help save long-term capital. This may mean making small openings, focus groups, or even giving free product samples to social media influencers that can help promote and review.
Administrative activities
Growing business deals with many operating issues that are part of the overall organization. Someone must open the mail, pay the bills, maintain the books, collect taxes, provide customer service, manage collections, and do hundreds of little things to run a business. One way to do so is to opt for a business service professional to redefine the processes. But, be aware and do not commit a terrible mistake to ignore the demands made by these activities for you and your business.
A good starting point is to list all the things that someone has to carry out in order to keep the business going. For instance, a house painter may do other tasks that are not directly linked to the application of fresh paint in a room. Someone must buy ladders, tarps, paint, pins, masking tape and other things. Someone has to offer jobs, charge customers when jobs are done and deal with concerns if a customer is not happy. These are just things that require time and more than that, an effective action plan. Have you got the action plan ready for such admin works? If not, start listing out those things mentioned above and add more to it that is specific to your business.
Integrating Accounting System to a Plan
A significant part of the business plan is the financial forecast — get the spreadsheet estimate of the company’s sales, expenditures, and income on a month-by-month basis. When actual monthly statistics are available, they are compared to the predicted numbers to decide if there were any major positive or negative variances and the explanations for the variances. Understand the expectations vs reality of a startup differs where the latter may hit you hard if not prepared well in advance. When the business owner completes and approves the forecast, accounting staff integrates the forecast numbers into the accounting system and establishes the framework for monthly comparison with forecast reports.
Creating a Contingency Plan
A contingency plan is an attempt to avoid affecting your business if market or economic dynamics change beyond what you are able to do without significant business changes. Something that the businesses across the globe are faced with amidst the COVID-19 crises.
What kind of contingencies are you to prepare for? Luckily, you have already a list of several of the most relevant considerations if you adopted our suggested planning approach. The SWOT analysis lists the internal and external variables that pose the greatest risks. If, for example, a direct competitor opens up near your site is a big external danger, you may prepare on this. Maybe you can lower rates, remain open for longer hours, or implement a regular customer incentive program.
Contingency arrangements can be used in a variety of forms in your business strategy. Of example, the financial statements should contain a footnote stating that the expected rate of interest can be raised by up to 3% before the profit margin is seriously affected. Or the conversation about how many workers you would need can mean that when sales of a certain amount are made, an additional worker is hired.
Conclusion
Staying focused on certain aspects of business planning is critical to the longevity and success of your startup. Putting things in action require founders’ trust in the people and confidence in their activities to accomplish given tasks. Here, communication is the key and action-items need to be translated into breakable weekly/monthly sprints for critical evaluation.
