Business Plan Outline

Here are a few key items to include when creating a business plan for your company:

1. 1. Mission Statement: What does your business do; what is your business’s purpose; and what difference is your business making in the world? Many people assume that mission statements are only for big corporations, or that a mission statement has to be boring and stuffy. But this is not true! Even the smallest businesses can benefit from taking some time to sit down and write out exactly what your business does and why it exists. This can help you clarify your thinking for the rest of your business plan outline.
   2. Business Model: How does your business make money? Does your business sell to consumers (B2C) or to other businesses (B2B)? How will you price your products or services? What is your average profit margin on each sale? Will you sell some products as “loss leaders” in order to make bigger profits from the more profitable items in your inventory?
   3. Target Markets: Who are your ideal customers? If you sell to consumers, what are your key customer demographics in terms of age, income, location, and lifestyle? If you sell to businesses, what are the ideal parameters of your buyers — type of industry, size of the company, and typical business challenges that you help them to solve?
   4. Marketing Plan: Now that you know “who” you want to reach, make a plan for how to reach them. How are you going to spread the word about your business and connect with potential customers? There are many different marketing strategies and tactics, ranging from search engine marketing and targeted Facebook ads to traditional methods like direct mail and brochures.
   5. Business Goals: Where do you want your business to be in five years? Do you expect your business to grow by certain revenue targets or expanded hiring? What are the milestones that you will use to measure this progress?
   6. Location: Where does your business operate, and where do you want to operate? Do you want to run a small local business or operate in multiple cities, regions or countries? If you want to expand to sell products or offer services in multiple locations, will this require multiple offices or regular business travel? Make a map of where you want your business to go.
   7. Financing: Are you going to use your business plan to raise money from investors or to get a business loan? If so, you will need to have a detailed financial plan for how much money you need and how you will use the money, and how you can repay the loan or help your investors achieve a return on their investment.
   8. Operations: Give some thought to the overall day-to-day operations of running your business. How will you work with suppliers and vendors? What workspace or retail space or warehouse/inventory storage space do you need? How will your products get from one place to another — what are your plans for shipping and logistics? Use your business plan to map out an overall picture of how the “work” of your business gets done.
   9. Hiring Employees: What is your plan for hiring employees? How many employees do you expect to hire within the first year and what will they do? Which functions of your business do you want to handle yourself (sales, technical support, product design, etc.) and which functions do you want to hire for immediately? If you’re not ready to hire full-time employees, can you hire freelancers and independent contractors to help get your business up to scale?
   10. Lifestyle Design: Your successful business plan is ultimately not just about “business,” it’s about your life. Your business needs to support your overall life goals. So, as part of your business plan, give some thought to how you want your life to be and how your business can support that. For example, what hours do you want to work, and how many days of vacation would you like to take each year? How can you get away from the business when needed? Can you work on your business remotely, or do you have to be “there” and be on site everyday?

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-It is important that you document all of your processes and procedures so you can refer back to them and make improvements.

-Make sure all of your processes have a written standard operating procedure that you can refer back to.  

-Look back at your processes every month to find ways to improve them.

Be Consistent With Your Brand

-Make sure your brand voice and tone is consistent.

-Be sure your marketing and messaging feels consistent across channels.

-Prospects and customers pay attention to consistent messaging.  Consistency will help you gain new customers and keep customers long term.

Focus on Your Overall Business Strategy

-Always have a business strategy plan.

-Review your strategy monthly. Figure out what is broken and how you can fix it.

-If your strategy is working, it will be easy to grow and scale your business in the future.

-Strategy will always be evolving and changing. Constantly reflect on your strategy to stay ahead of the curve.

Focus on Customer Relationships

-Sales will come if you focus first and foremost on relationships with prospects and customers.

-Customer relationships and feedback will help evolve your products, services, and overall business offerings.  

-Always make your customer service strategy and process a priority.  

Invest in Online Channels

-People are searching for services and buying online more than ever before.  It is important you get your business online.

-If your online presence isn’t up to speed, your business may be overlooked.

-Invest resources in the channels where you will see the biggest growth.

-If you do not have the knowledge or expertise internally, find a trusted agency to help with your online strategy.

Choose A Niche For Your Business

-When starting a new venture, it is easy to find yourself exploring many different opportunities.  Choosing a niche early on is key to long term success.

-Future growth comes much easier to companies who have identified and focus on a niche market.

-If you have the opportunity to become a leader in a specific niche, you will be able to grow as that market matures.

Plan For Diversified Growth

-Have an open mind to different avenues for growth.  

-Be open to working with different size clients to see what fits best.

Implement An Execution Plan

-It is important to have a plan and to set realistic goals for your business.

-Determine your execution plan for each of your goals.

-Track your success in meeting your targets/goals.  

Hire a Business Coach

-Find a coach who has experience in your industry / vertical and has accomplished what you are looking to accomplish with your business.

-A trusted and experienced resource can help you avoid mistakes and speed up your future growth.

The post 9 Things To Do Today That Will Grow Your Business Tomorrow appeared first on BooXkeeping.

A great customer service organization will recognize the types of potential customer service issues ahead of time and provide solutions for each. Such a system allows employees to service customers in the best possible way in the face of certain customer service problems your business is likely to encounter.

Having pre-packaged customer service remedies in place will allow you to train employees and researse potential situations in advance. This will allow your employees to handle these common problems with ease and grace when they do arise. As an example – if you are in the restaurant business, it is only a matter of time before an employee spills a drink on a guest or rings in the wrong order. Since these situations are both common and recurring, it is important to plan your response to such matters in advance.

Since not every employee or customer mishap can be planned in advance, pre-packaged fixes will not cover everything. This makes it essential to create a general framework for how your business and employees cover any potential customer service issues. Building a framework around customer service is important because it is challenging to solve customers service issues from scratch without any structure. When a customer is upset or angry, employees most likely feel upset as well. With the mix of emotion happening, even the most trained and professional employees have a difficult time handling customer issues.

Below are the 4 steps we recommend for creating your framework:

1. Make time to listen
2. Acknowledge & apologize
3. Meet your customer’s expectation of a solution
4. Act and follow up

Make Time to Listen
-Stop what you are doing and show the customer you are listening
-Make sure your body language shows you are listening. Face and look directly at the customer.
-After the customer has explained, ask questions to make sure you fully understand your customer’s situation.

Acknowledge & Apologize
-Start by acknowledging that you are aware of the situation.
-Even if you feel the customer is at fault, acknowledge that you understand what they are experiencing.
-Sincerely apologize to the customer.

Meet Your Customers Expectation of a Solution
-Align yourself with your customers expectation for what a solution should look like. Determine what might be acceptable to them and for you to make that happen
-Once aligned, explain the agreed upon solution.
-Commit to resolving the issue for the customer.

Act & Follow Up
-Resolve the issue for the customer.
-Follow up with members on your team who were assigned part of the resolution.
-Follow up with the customer to make sure they are happy.
-Examine the situation and try to learn from the error.

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Create a habit of cost reduction

The culture of cost savings needs to be something both business owners and workers are always thinking about. All team members must have the same mindset and it is up to you to initiate this practice. The management team needs to operate with a motto of savings!   Make it a culture and attach reward to any of your workers who obey this practice to help the company stay profitable. Look for savings in all areas of your business – from your suppliers to your production, negotiate contracts and even employee wages.

Don’t equate loyalty with savings

Being loyal to a supplier for a very long time doesn’t mean that you are getting the best price! It is fine to throw in a big every once and awhile to reduce costs and to also re-negotiate contracts when they are up for renewal.  You can also save costs by switching vendors. Keep communication open and make sure that your vendors and their competitors know your business is always up for big.

Save money, spend some

To save money, you need to spend money wisely. Avoid constantly updating your equipment and technology to the latest and greatest.  Consider lightly used and referbished products. Security is also essential in business, don’t mince when it comes to this. Get quality security services at an affordable rate. Your business is never too small to fall victim to fraud, theft and other kinds of attacks. With a secured business, you can be rest assured of safety.

Be transparent

You should know exactly what you want to buy, what you are paying for it, and who is doing the buying. If you are clear on what you need down to the details, you can be sure to get accurate bids from supplies.  Your strategy for cutting costs in one area of your business may be different in another area of your business, so it is important to adopt several strategies to cut down expenses and get all teams on board.

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Here are 5 reasons to hire a bookkeeper:

Time

Keeping up with your books is time consuming. It consumes both time and energy. As a business owner, you can easily spend more than 5 hours a week or more updating records! And, even more time at year-end! Crunching numbers takes away your valuable time that could be spent on operating your business. 

Passion

As the brain behind your business, it may be difficult to let people take over (especially when you are just starting out). You want to ensure that all activities are going as planned because of the sensitive stage of your business. Your business is fragile at this stage and you have to carry and care for it like an egg because a little error can affect your business growth. If not interested in crunching numbers, it is advisable to focus on what interests you and hire a bookkeeper who is passionate to handle your financials.

Expertise

As a business owner, there is a need to know your strengths and weaknesses in many areas of your business. Hiring a bookkeeper helps you to focus on other aspects of your business like marketing, production, delivery, business expansion and others. The bookkeeper knows his job because he has proper training in the field.

Growth

The growth of your business is important . Dedicating your time and full attention to your core business needs will increase its growth and development. Invest your time and effort in other tasks to ensure better output for your business. Devote yourself to the bigger picture and don’t allow record keeping to slow you down from performing other functions. 

Expense

Saving costs is always important for a business! Hiring a bookkeeper will not only reduce cost but pave way for you to focus on other tasks. 

Hiring a bookkeeper will mean you no longer need to dread tax periods or year end. Focus your time on growing your business and outsource your bookkeeping to a professional!

The post 5 Reasons to Hire a Bookkeeper For Your Growing Business appeared first on BooXkeeping.

Follow our tips below to increase workplace efficiency and time management in the workplace.

1. Assess Personal Time Management Skills

In an age of shopping online, social media and frequent personal messages coming through your devices, it’s easy to become distracted and lose a sense of time when you’re scrolling through your news feed. Of course, at the same time, employees are expected to manage their time efficiently and get their tasks done each day. Instead of enforcing a heavy-handed cell phone or social media policy, try to focus on encouraging effective time management in your business.  This can be as simple as developing a tutorial for filtering priority emails or introducing efficiency software to increase in-house productivity, such as Booxkeeping.

2. Match tasks and skills.

Different employees will have different skill sets and behaviors, meaning they’re suited to different office tasks. Understanding your workers’ talents and where best to place them is key to maximizing efficiency. If you’re running employment opportunities for interns and graduates, for example, think how their skills could be suited to your business environment. If a candidate has demonstrated great creative skills, ensure they get can get some work experience in a function where they can use that talent. Ultimately, before giving any worker an assignment, ask yourself: “is this the person best suited to perform this task?” If the answer is no, find someone else whose skills and talents meet the needs of the task.

3. Get Proactive With Performance

The first step to improving workplace efficiency is assessing and understanding your team – the next is your own accountability as an employer through regular team performance. After all, it’s much more efficient to provide regular feedback to your team rather than just an annual assessment. The longer you delay feedback, the more inefficient team habits can grow. Additionally, if an employee realizes that his or her work is measured independently of others in her team, it will allow them to feel more accountable for their own actions – and there’s no reason to play ‘office politics’.

Increasing workplace efficiency ultimately means looking at your current processes and business environment to see what factors can be improved. These tips are a great way to increase time management skills and boost efficiency in the workplace – but try not to take one tip alone at face value. In most business environments, it’s a matter of utilizing lots of good practices, so try and find a way to make them work for you.

Want to keep reading up on our business tips and resources? See more of our blog posts here.

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How Outsourced Bookkeeping Services Boost Productivity

Hire a company for outsourced bookkeeping services that can show you how to streamline your record keeping process and reduce the paper trail. This will boost productivity and morale. With an offsite partner reconciling your books, you improve the accuracy of your accounts and remove a source of frustration. Then, you can concentrate on the requirements of the franchise and winning new clients.

What A Bookkeeping Service Does

Bookkeeping services vary, but most provide monthly reconciliation of transactional processes such as sales made versus bill paid. If you feel lost trying to decipher accounting transactions efficiently and accurately, outsource your bookkeeping to a company that can manage transactions with your customers, employees and vendors. Some of the available services include:

-Updating monthly transactions in a general ledger
-Recording cash and credit card transactions
-Budgeting, forecasting, and cash management (often a requirement of the franchise)
-Balance sheet reconciliation and other month-end close duties
-Variance analysis comparing income versus expense
-Payroll Processing
-Tracking key performance indicators important to the franchiser

San Diego Franchise Bookkeeping Services Is a Strategic Move

Once you get into a routine with your bookkeeping company, you will eventually want more sophisticated analyses that requires additional forecasting and modeling. By contracting with a third party you can obtain metrics dashboards using data analytics to monitor key performance indicators and produce the following valuable functions:

-Benchmarking against other franchisees and market competitors
-Accurate and robust tax compliance
-Audit support

Benefits of Outsourced Bookkeeping Services

Let the experts crunch the numbers, while you run your business. This improves your decision-making capability, because you have real-time information for important decisions. San Diego franchise bookkeeping services offer guidance on evaluating new opportunities. A third party with an uninterested view can help you improve profits.

Outsourcing your bookkeeping is an additional expense but cost much less than doing it in-house and yields major paybacks that can fatten your bottom line. Get your quote today!

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A Bookkeeper Saves Time You Could Be Spending on Your Business

Outsourcing your franchise business bookkeeping means you don’t have to manage a person full-time, which distracts you from devoting time to growing the franchise. Hiring an expert bookkeeping pays for itself, and you only pay for the time you need. Otherwise, you are paying for a full-time employee for what’s essentially a part-time job. This can be a costly mistake.

Bookkeepers Bring Up-to-Date Knowledge

You don’t have to understand all the changes of the latest tax laws at the local, state and federal level if you hire a professional bookkeeper to take care of that for you. Ask your franchise business bookkeeping expert for information about the latest regulatory changes instead of handling your taxes yourself. This helps you stay in compliance with regulatory changes affecting hiring, payroll and other processes. Without this expertise, you would lose a lot of time double-checking your same work twice to for the latest compliance standards.

Bookkeepers Provide Up-To-Date Records

Your outsourced bookkeeping expert can show you an up-to-date profit and loss statement each month. This helps during tax season, because it makes it easier for your accountant to file your taxes in a timely manner. No more staying up all night sorting through shoe-boxes full of receipts. Finding an expert bookkeeper makes it less likely you will owe more taxes to Uncle Sam.

Franchisee Penalties

When you own a franchise, your contract details violations and the associated penalties. For example, you forget to credit ad money back to the franchiser as stated in your contract. A list of fees and fines tells you how much you owe the franchisor for that. This can all be avoided with a professional bookkeeping expert.

For more information on how you can hire an expert franchise business bookkeeping firm click here for a quote today!

The post Expert Bookkeeping Can Save You Time, Money and Even your Franchise appeared first on BooXkeeping.

While the job can certainly be rewarding, it is important that you, at some point, hand over the reigns of the business to someone else. The reason for this is so that you can move on and engage in activities that you love and enjoy. Many owners of bookkeeping businesses often put off the thought of selling them until they are very well into old age. This might seem like a good idea initially, but in the long run, it is advisable to save time with regards to this process.

This is because certain leisurely activities you might want to undertake are best enjoyed while young and some become virtually impossible as time goes on. Needless to say, these steps should be taken as soon as possible. You should also keep in mind that working a demanding job for decades can easily take a toll on one’s health. As a result, it is necessary to not only work to create a solid and reputable bookkeeping business but to work towards selling it off on time. This not only gives you enough years to enjoy yourself but can save you health problems down the line.

However, you might wonder, “What is the best way to sell my bookkeeping business? Who should I sell my bookkeeping business too? Do I need a broker to sell my bookkeeping business?”

First of all, your bookkeeping business should be sold to another bookkeeping firm. The reason for this is that a firm in the same industry will be able to properly absorb and run your business in an efficient manner. Another type of firm acquiring it might lead to inefficient running as they might not be experienced in the business of bookkeeping.

Another tip to consider when selling off your bookkeeping business is that you might want to avoid using a broker. By selling your bookkeeping business to another bookkeeping business, you will probably want to handle the negotiations and handover by yourself since you and your prospective buyer are in the same industry, a middleman will likely not be needed.

For more information on how you can sell your bookkeeping business to a reputable bookkeeping firm contact us today!

The post Why You Should Sell Your Bookkeeping Business Earlier Versus Later! appeared first on BooXkeeping.

Problems with Brokers

Brokers provide a means of connecting your clients to new bookkeepers when selling bookkeeping business clients. However, they charge for their services, often placing significant demand on the industry. Furthermore, their interest is in making the most money in the transition, and the fate of your clients may be of little interest to brokers. While larger companies might be able to accept these problems, many bookkeepers have moral and financial concerns that should push them toward private selling.

Finding the Right Private Buyer

When selling bookkeeping business clients, interviewing private sellers is important. Even if your clients won’t be providing you with money going forward, you still have an obligation to ensure they’re placed in the hands of competent and capable bookkeepers. Furthermore, clients who are unsatisfied with their new bookkeepers might be less likely to recommend your business to others in the future and might even leave negative feedback online.

Asking the Right Questions

Ask potential buyers about their experience, and focus on their experience in the specific area of bookkeeping where your clients operate, as bookkeepers moving to new areas often struggle, especially if you’re giving them a large number of clients at once. Ask about how heavy their workload is now and how they plan on caring for new clients. See if any of their existing clients are willing to talk with you, and ask the clients about their history and relationship with the bookkeeper. Most importantly, share with them the demands taking on your clients will entail, and see if they understand what their obligations will be.

For more information on how to sell your bookkeeping practice contact us today!

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