How to use the Small Business Administration business plan generator
We may not get a lot of help from Washington D.C. but the Small Business Administration business plan generator is one of the real exceptions to that general rule. The system breaks down into two basic components: Narratives that explain your business idea, and Spreadsheets that capture your financial projections. If you’re already in business and you jumped in with both feet without a business plan, working your way through the Small Business Administration business plan generator would be an excellent exercise. You’re likely to discover some aspects of running your business and planning for your future that you have overlooked. So, whether you’re in your initial planning stages, or you already own and operate your company, creating an account on the SBA website and using this tool should prove very worthwhile. Here are the steps that the SBA business plan generator will take you through: Cover page and introduction. You shouldn’t have any problem here. It’s all basic stuff. However, if you plan to have others look at the document – for funding, for example – it would be a good idea to have a professionally designed logo ready that you can upload. Executive summary. Here you’ll give the “fly over” description of your company, the products or services you plan to sell, who your customers are, and where you see your industry going in the future. Company description. Now we’re starting to focus in. What kind and how many key employees will you need? Your mission statement will go here. You’ll also need to provide details about your offerings that make them desirable and the big picture on why your business will be a success. Market research. Here you’ll explain your industry sector and how it is evolving. Who are your competitors? Your target customers? Products or services. This is the place within the Small Business Administration business plan generator where you describe in detail how your offerings will meet the needs of your target customers. Explain your benefits over the competition and where you are in the development of your product: do you have a working prototype? Marketing and sales. Are you going to advertise? How do you plan to reach your customers? Why choose those strategies? What kind of growth to you see? All of the points so far are almost exclusively “narrative.” You’re telling the story of what you envision and what you plan to do. Understanding the differences between a value proposition, elevator pitch, and positioning statement will be useful when you tackle the topics above. The final section of the Small Business Administration business plan generator has you inputting numbers in an online spreadsheet. Financial projections spreadsheets. There are four of these you need to work your way through: Profit and Loss Projection Cash Flow Projection Projected Balance Sheet Breakeven Analysis As you work through all the line items on these spreadsheets, you’ll be forced to come up with some solid figures. At the end of the exercise – if you’ve been honest in your estimates and projections – you’ll have a good picture of the feasibility of your proposed business. Be sure to add a safety margin to your figures – 20 percent or more – so you’re erring on the conservative side. Below is a screenshot of the “Profit &...
read moreIs productivity growth on your KPI radar?
We’re heading into baseball season and if you have a favorite team and favorite players, you can expect them both to go into a slump sometime during the season. (Despite their incredible success over the years, it even happens to my Cards!) In recent years, U.S. productivity has experienced a slump. Last year, the economy notched its longest stretch of falling worker productivity in 40 years. Hours worked increased faster than output. Large corporations regularly consider their productivity growth, but I don’t think productivity growth – at least in the direct sense of the term – figures in the plans of most small business owners. We know that the overall growth of small business is the catalyst for overall economic growth, so I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to suggest that improvements in small business productivity growth will make a significant impact on improving our country’s productivity. However, if you aren’t measuring it, you can’t control it. Get the productivity facts Do you know how many worker hours go into every thousand dollars of sales? Count everything. Overhead, marketing, sales, direct labor, and every other department in your organization. Get a feel for your productivity growth over time. Roll the calendar back through the years and compute this figure over time. Plot the figures on a graph. Is the line going up, down, or staying the same? If you see that your productivity is improving, give yourself a pat on the back and keep doing what you have been doing. If your line is flat or going in the wrong direction, it’s time to take a step back and see if there is a problem. If you’ve been trying to establish a new business area, it’s reasonable to expect a drop in productivity. However, if you’ve just been cruising along and not making any bold moves, you need to take a cold hard look at your management and leadership. One of the recent headlines in the news has been how the burger chain Wendy’s is going to install some automated ordering kiosks in 1,000 of its restaurants. If this is successful, it will eliminate jobs and this will be reflected in an uptick of Wendy’s productivity growth. No one likes to see anyone lose their job, but in the larger picture, we need to be educating and training people to do higher level tasks. I hope that Wendy’s will be able to find positions for any crew members who get replaced by a kiosk. Productivity growth strategies Automation and computerization are two major ways you can improve productivity growth in your small business. If your small business relies on sales reps who travel, improvements as simple as moving to a smart travel expensing software system can make your team more productive. If you have delivery vehicles out on the road, smart GPS tracking and route planning can boost productivity. All the steps within your sales funnel can be made less labor burdensome with a wide variety of apps. Customer service can become less labor intensive with FAQs, user forums, and artificial intelligence chatbots (check out this Mixergy interview between Andrew Warner and Dmitry Dumik all about chatbots) and other business-oriented bots. Also, consider the huge selection of cloud-based services. They can enhance your productivity because you...
read moreA roadmap for taking your email marketing automation to the next level
Email marketing automation is one of the most developed areas of online marketing. There are apps, services, and pricing tailored to every level of online marketer. As a small business owner, one of the best things you can do to boost your bottom line is take your email marketing automation to the next level. And, if you don’t yet have any email marketing automation going for you, it’s time to take it at least to “level one.” After getting some experience there, you can start to “level up,” as gamers would say! I’m going to look at the topic from the entry level of email marketing to the more sophisticated uses and point you toward some of the services most popular with small business owners. Autoresponders The most simple form of email marketing automation is the use of the autoresponder. Virtually every email provider has autoresponder capability built into it. An autoresponder will send an email when an event takes place. You can send a thank-you email when someone signs up for your email list or makes a purchase from your website. Good, user-friendly providers like Constant Contact make it easy to use autoresponders. MailChimp is another popular choice with the small business community. Autoresponder campaigns If you’re already sending out automated welcoming emails and other simple messages, it’s time to start amping up your email marketing automation. You can “connect” two or more autoresponders to create an automated email marketing campaign. Scheduled autoresponder campaigns Often it’s smart to create a series of emails in advance and send them out on a regular schedule. Today these are typically called “drip” campaigns; they slowly drip information to people on your email list. With a drip campaign, you’re trying to stay “top of mind,” nurture leads, and eventually make some sales. There can be some “branching” within the campaign. For example, if someone clicks on a certain link, it might change the sequence of emails being sent. These can be very useful and if you do it right, once you create a drip campaign, you can use it forever. The key to this is to load your emails up with evergreen content. For example, the owner of a local nursery might do a year-long drip campaign tied to milestones in the area’s planting and garden tending schedule, e.g. when to plant various seeds, when to watch out for certain pests, when nearby wildflowers are in bloom, and other local garden-related items. Within these emails, there would be special items featured for purchase. Further (and this is important) they could build to various commercial crescendos using sequences like: Email 1: We’re sure looking forward to tomato planting season… Email 2: Your tomato plants should start going in the ground or containers in about two weeks. Email 3: It’s tomato time and we have all the best varieties in stock! Email 4: Now’s the last week you can plant tomatoes and harvest them before frost hits our area. Check out our closeouts on tomato plants. Sequences like the one above could be woven into a drip campaign that outlines gardening throughout the year. You can use almost any email service provider (including Drip.co) to build a drip campaign, or you can use many Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to be the engine of...
read more5 lessons 10 years of Fitbit teach us
They call Istanbul “the crossroads of the world” because it’s a place where three major continents come together. In a similar way, Fitbit – famous for its ubiquitous little black wristband – is a crossroads for many (if not all) major streams of commercial technological and marketing innovations. And, as Fitbit is celebrating its 10-year anniversary, it’s a good time to look at how the company has leveraged five important technologies and marketing strategies to power its growth. Player in a new product category For the last few years, we’ve been reading a lot about “wearable tech.” It’s one of the new product categories that holds great promise for the future, although it has lost a bit of its shine recently. Fitbit is probably the most recognizable brand in the wearable tech sector. Sure, there are other health and fitness devices competing for the business, but Fitbit is the name most people know. In fact, if you say you have a Fitbit, everyone knows exactly what you’re talking about. It’s possible that the name will someday enter the language as a commonly used noun, like Kleenex®. Old made new again Despite the fact that I’ve started this by relegating Fitbit to the new product category of wearable tech, we need to recognize the fact that at its heart, Fitbit is an old product that has been revitalized by new technology. After all, most Fitbits are essentially pedometers that have been supercharged by digital electronics. This is not a knock on Fitbit or similar devices. Recognizing how new technologies can be applied to existing products is very smart because the basic understanding and acceptance of the product already exist in the marketplace. I suspect that thousands of people who used pedometers for a while and then relegated them to the bottom of their sock drawer went out and bought Fitbits when they understood how much more useful they are due to the addition of new technologies. In fact, they probably realized that back in the day when they bought their first pedometer, it was really Fitbit functionality that they wanted. Physical product tied to the online environment There are two riddles many businesses are trying to solve today: How to bring users of physical products/stores to the Internet, and How to get Internet users to use/frequent a physical product/store. It’s fairly easy to be all-Internet or all-physical (brick and mortar). It’s much more difficult to be both simultaneously. Fitbit accomplished this through the “dashboard” that updates users on their activity levels. Fitbit syncs with a mobile device app and with the user’s account on the Fitbit website. This helps create a deeper relationship between the company and the customer. Fitbit users see the devices on their wrist nearly 24-7 but the company also has the opportunity to relate to them via the online world. Freemium and premium accounts The success of my previous point hinges on Fitbit’s strategy to offer a free account. Today, all kinds of businesses are leveraging freemiums to build their user base. Once they have a good population of freemium users, two revenue streams open up to them: Advertise to the base of freemium users, and Upsell freemium users to a premium service. The beauty of Fitbit’s free account is that it is extremely useful. It’s something Fitbit...
read moreTesting Checklist: How To Test A Mobile App [#infographic]
By Phillip Lew What’s one of the inevitable side effects of living in a world where technology makes practically everything accessible almost instantly? We’ve developed a low tolerance for errors. We’ve come to expect that the mobile apps we use to chat, shop, look up information, or otherwise entertain ourselves will always work whenever we need them. Compared to desktop computers, mobile operating systems have emphasized reliability. As a result, we have very little patience for mobile apps that don’t provide flawless functionality. Only 16 percent of smartphone users will try to use an app if it fails to work twice. For businesses that rely on a mobile app to engage with customers, this is sobering news. Customers aren’t willing to accept the idea that an app may be buggy or provide them with a less-than-optimal user experience. There are so many other options available in the mobile app landscape that they won’t hesitate to find an app that can deliver the functionality they want – even if it’s with an unfamiliar brand. For all these reasons, diligently testing a mobile app before it is released to the public is absolutely essential. There’s much more to testing a mobile app than tapping on the icon and making sure it starts – although that’s certainly one of the biggest concerns. Testing a mobile app has to be undertaken with the same level of care as testing a car. It needs to be put through its paces and pushed to its limits to ensure that it will be able to handle virtually anything done by a user. There can be no assumptions that a user won’t try to do something in the app – every possibility has to be explored and verified. The expectations for mobile apps have never been higher, and customers won’t be patient with an app that crashes when the phone is plugged in, or seems to become unresponsive when processing a command. Whether you try your hand at a DIY app-building service or sign up with a professional developer, you need to know what to look for when testing your app. Use this checklist to look for possible errors that could lead to an unsuccessful app launch. Testing Checklist: How To Test A Mobile App created by XBOSoft • • • Phillip Lew is Chief Executive Officer at XBOSoft, a software testing company. He oversees strategy, operations, and business development through his expertise as a software engineer since founding the company in 2006. Lew holds a PMP certification and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from Beihang...
read moreFacebook’s dramatic organic reach reversal and what it means to you
It’s fascinating (and fun) to watch the ups and downs of some high-profile tech stocks. Sometimes they go from bad buy to impressive price faster than daytime soap opera characters morph from evil twin to great guy. If you consider how Facebook stock took a tumble after its 2012 IPO – losing half of its value as it bottomed out at less than $20 per share – and then look at its price today of more than $130, you would suffer a case of financial market mental whiplash. But, when it comes to Facebook, that’s not the only metric we watch; for small business owners (or any business owner, for that matter), the organic reach of posts has always been an important figure. And, just as some people dismissed the company’s stock when it tanked, some of us dismissed organic reach when it went down. Facebook organic reach The story over the last couple of years has been that Facebook was suppressing organic reach to boost its sale of advertising. However, news of the death of organic post reach on Facebook might be a little premature. According to an in-depth Ignite Social Media study that analyzed post reach and engagement over a nearly two-year period, median fan reach for organic posts improved significantly between January 2016 and December 2016. In January, it was just over a half of one percent and by the end of the year it was just under 2.5 percent. Further, average fan reach for all types of posts – links, video content, and photos – increased significantly between 2015 and 2016. By the way, according to the Ignite report, video posts rank the highest, followed by links and then photos. This marks a distinct reversal of the widely reported Facebook trend. When Ignite looked at brand page reach earlier, they reported that between 2013 and 2014, organic reach had decreased by an average of 44 percent. Ryan Sweeney, who authored Ignite’s excellent post on the recent study, put it this way: “…it seems that Facebook organic reach is no longer dead, but is showing some signs of life.” New enthusiasm for Facebook? I think this is a smart move on Facebook’s part. If the social media giant wants to get more small businesses on its platform, “Step A” has to be to lure owners. Organic reach is like chumming the water; it will get SMB owners to bite and once they are “on the line” Facebook can then “upsell” them into buying ads, including Facebook dark posts (posts that are not distributed organically). All of the articles and blogs that bemoaned the dramatic drop in organic reach couldn’t have made the folks at Facebook feel very good, and that negative publicity certainly wasn’t doing anything to recruit new business members. However, if what Ignite has discovered holds up and this “good news” gets spread as far and wide as last year’s “bad news,” it should rekindle enthusiasm for the establishment, care, and feeding of Facebook business pages. Exploit this change Did you lose your drive to push Facebook in your social media marketing campaigns when you heard about the drop in organic reach? If so, take this organic reach renaissance and run with it. While I suspect Facebook will keep its reigns loosened in this area,...
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