1. Fine-Tune Your Profile from the Word ‘Go’

Packed with tips, tools and expert guidance, this workshop teaches you what questions to ask before you decide to buy into a franchise.

This workshop is delivered depending on demand. If you're keen to take part, send the workshops team an email at ws. This workshop teaches you everything you need to know to take your innovation or idea from drawing board — to market launch. Overcome your fear, and get the edge you need to become a confident networker at this two-hour workshop. Facilitated by experts in their field, this workshop offers valuable tips and guidance on how to tap into the power of networking.

Learn how to build trust and establish connections to promote opportunities that will help your business grow. Less time on paperwork means more time for your business. This essential introduction to good practice record keeping will help you put an end to paperwork that's getting the better of you. This essential workshop unlocks the strategies and tools to help you manage your time more effectively. You'll leave this workshop feeling determined and ready to take back control of your day, knowing you have the skills to save time and energy for what matters most — both at home and at work.

Make sure you've got the right systems and practices in place to ensure your business delivers consistent products and services first time, every time — from the get go. This essential three and half-hour workshop provides step-by-step guidance on how to streamline the backend of your business, improve customer service, staff engagement and productivity. Give your business the best chance to shine — because consistency will keep your customers coming back. Learn how to make informed choices about websites and social media, get across search engines and online advertising, and size up the benefits that each one offers your business.

Taking you right back to basics, this workshop shows you how to access the right tools to begin, and builds a complete picture of the opportunities ahead. An effective marketing strategy should boost your brand, capture customers, keep them coming back and ultimately save you time and money.


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Find out why having just a website and Facebook page doesn't cut it anymore at this back-to-basics workshop. You'll learn how to develop a marketing action plan to keep your effort and resources focused in the right areas. Behind every business success story is a great team making it happen. Find out how to identify the right people for your business, and how to motivate them to stay. Investing in your staff is one of the best investments you'll make for the future of your business. This three and a half-hour workshop is packed with practical advice, tips and templates to show you how.

Spending more time juggling cash than running your business? Making a profit but still struggling to pay the bills? Cash flow is the life blood of every small business — if your business doesn't have enough cash flow, things can start to go wrong. Without cash flow, no business can survive. Find out how to put in place effective plans and procedures to make sure your customers pay on time, every time — and what to do when they don't.

Priced too low — and you'll run headlong into cash flow problems. This essential workshop shows how to set a price point that's just right to give your business the best chance to thrive. Overdue payments to small operators in the building and construction industry can quickly escalate from financial stress to insolvency.

Step-by-step, the workshop takes you through the payment claim and adjudication process providing you with the right tools, so you can take back control of cash flow. Every business faces exposure to risk. It could be a natural crisis event such as a bushfire or flood, or man-made such as accident or illness. Not having a plan in place to activate in the event of an emergency can seriously compromise your ability to shield your business from crisis fallout. This three-and-a-half-hour workshop shows you how to put in place a practical plan to follow in the event of a threat to your business.

Don't take the risk and be on the back foot in the event of an emergency — be prepared because you never know when you'll be thankful that you were. Get some smart tips on how to trim costs, win customers, boost your brand and lighten the environmental footprint of your business. Bring your utility bills to this two-hour workshop and take away practical, realistic and affordable ways to save water and energy, and reduce waste. It takes just as much planning to exit your business as it did to get started.

You owe it to yourself — and all your hard work — to make sure this last big decision is a success. Whether you're selling or setting up for succession, find out how to get yourself prepared for your next steps at this essential workshop that puts you in control of how, and when you move on. It's not enough to stand apart from your competition — successful marketing is also about being ready to respond and take advantage of change. If you've already got a marketing strategy in place, this essential workshop shows you how to ramp-up your current activities to work smarter and stay one step ahead.


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Are you already online and thinking 'now what? Find out how to make your online choices work harder, deliver smarter business outcomes and get the most return from your digital dollar. Whether you're communicating with your customers online through a website, a blog or social media, this essential small business workshop unpacks how to make your content compelling — while keeping it aligned with your business goals.

Social media is everywhere! Learn the basics of Facebook marketing success at this essential workshop. Get the skills you need to extract the best from this powerful online marketing tool — a tool that few small businesses can afford to ignore. To illustrate further, a company relies heavily on its employees and their level of performance and skills. In contrast, companies that invest in employee welfare not only demonstrate a keen knowledge of business success on a micro and macro level but are also providing an environment that is conducive to enthusiasm, happiness, comfort, and ultimately, increased productivity.

In contrast to the internal factors that comprise the business environment, the external factors instead focus on concepts such as the following:. External factors such as the ones detailed above are of crucial importance for businesses. With an ever-evolving world, businesses are tasked with staying abreast of multiple environments that are shifting on a continuous basis.

Whether it is the introduction of a new law that could have profound negative or positive impacts on the company, a gradual shift in the consumer base that suddenly explodes into a completely different type of customer with new needs and desires, or even adhering to new technologies in order to stay relevant and competitive — businesses must be able to move seamlessly within the many shifting changes. These changes ultimately dictate the overall welfare of their enterprise with respect to productivity, profitability, and more.

Companies ought to implement a systematic process that analyzes the many external elements that interconnect and make up their collective business environment. Whether the systemized process is implemented on a weekly, monthly, or yearly schedule is largely unimportant because the overall goal remains the same. The goal is to establish consistency when overlooking and analyzing the external forces affecting the company and how those forces ultimately determine what business strategies need to be adopted, removed, improved upon, or modified. There is an array of tools that serve to help businesses construct a constant source of highly useful data about shifting industries, consumer preferences, and the overall market at large.

Among the many tools available are the highly recommended apparatuses that provide in-depth analyses into the shifts of the industry, competing forces, the current market, and the projected market. An analysis of the specific industry you are operating in should be performed prior to drafting your business plan. Conducting an industry analysis provides crucial data that can be incorporated into a business plan to describe the strategies and methods your company will be undertaking to successfully perform in the market, and how it ultimately conducts its business to succeed in this industry.

The important data provided by an industry analysis serves to provide an in-depth look into the various opportunities and risks present in the current and future markets. Through an industry analysis, businesses are given the ability to develop optimum strategies that take full advantage of the multitude of opportunities they are presented with, while also minimizing or mitigating identifiable risks.

Succinctly describe the history of the industry, the locale s the industry services, the consumer base that it caters to, and the products and services that it offers. If you desire, you can also include information which details historical factors that have changed the market, in addition to any market trends example: While you may start to delve into the concept of trends in step one of the industry analysis, you can be more in-depth about this when writing step two. In this step, you will want to thoroughly review proven trends, growth patterns, and market declines that exist within the industry and related market.

Identify major factors that influence the industry as an overarching entity.

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Common inclusions for this step include regulatory and deregulatory policies put forth by the government, new laws and legislation, and the competitive practices employed by other businesses in your field. Make a well-founded and thoroughly educated prediction using data gleaned via careful and comprehensive research. Your forecast of the industry and your own company can be detailed in long- and short-term descriptions. Confidently describe how your business will position itself within the industry and how it will take the fullest advantage of the opportunities afforded by the industry.

While most industry analyses take up one or two pages of the entire business plan, if you are writing a more complex business plan then you might need to use more pages. One of the best ways to ensure that everything is thoroughly covered in this section is to use charts and tables with useful yet compressed data.

The competitive analysis section of your business plan is of significant importance. This section details how your business compares to not only competing businesses but also other companies in general. Comparing your business to other businesses involves taking stock of your company in its entirety. Questions you may want to ask yourself during this process can include the following:. Upon obtaining the answers to the questions above, proceed to the step-by-step guide listed below.

In this initial step, you will need to identify and make a list of your competitors. This list should not include a couple of competing businesses; instead, it should be inclusive of all the directly competing companies you are aware of. Your goal is to create a snapshot of all your competitors so that you can cultivate strategies that uniquely differentiate your company. This will result in a superior position in the market. Regardless of the format, though, the list should be inclusive of the following for each competing company: In paragraph form or spreadsheet format, list the weaknesses, strengths, advantages, and disadvantages of the all the companies on your list.

In this step, you will analyze the strengths and weaknesses present within your own company. Be frank about the present state of your company and the various aspects that can be improved upon. Next, you will want to focus on how your company will not only minimize the weaknesses within its infrastructure but how it will overcome any disparities to gain a superior position within the market.

Also, detail how your company can use its strengths to its advantage, using them to boost its overall prowess, profits, and productivity. The information detailed here will assist you in making intelligent marketing decisions and implementing business strategies.

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Step five requires you to provide a detailed description of your business. You will want to include information such as how the framework of your company and its owners, management, employees, location, structure, products, services, and various resources will sit within the current and future market.

An effective competitive analysis should be succinct yet detailed. You need not exceed the five basic steps comprising the competitive analyses. The importance of writing a competitive analysis cannot be emphasized enough. While your general business plan states how your business compares to others within the same industry, it is nearly impossible to make an accurate prediction of how your company, its products, and its services will fare in the marketplace in relation to the experience of your competitors.

Constructing a careful analysis drawn from your research enables you to inject the relevant data and analyses to support the performance assumptions listed at the beginning of your business plan. As a reminder, the collective of competitor-related data and the research you delve into should all be procured well before starting your business plan. Your market analysis should offer a comprehensive overview of the marketplace as it is in the present day, along with the positions your competitors hold within the market.

Provide a description of the current market and industry you wish to enter. This section should include any pertinent information about potential shifts in consumer needs and demands, educated opinions about projected growth, the anticipation of trends or economic cycles, and overall product and service performance in the present and future. Describe your customers by detailing the product or service that satisfies their needs. In this section, you will need to describe how big the market is. Using your market research and data analyses, you will be able to detail if the market is growing or shrinking, and as a result, you can also pinpoint when and how your company will enter the market.

Also, include within this section any research that supports your predictions for future growth and overall success. This step entails describing, in detail, the specific and various pricing structures practiced by your company, and in addition, those of your competitors.

This concluding step involves a brief summation of the highlights and most salient points found within the competitive, industry, and marketing analyses to strategize market superiority and positionality.

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This section will require you to use hard facts and verifiable numbers. Some of the best and most reliable sources for this kind of information include:. This is the section that will help you outline how you are going to build a brand that not only attracts customers but retains them and is competitive enough to stay afloat and prosper.


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There are several questions you need to consider when crafting your marketing plan. A well-crafted marketing plan gives you complete control over your business. It allows you to make the right decision when it comes to critical components of running the business such as:. The most crucial aspect to bear in mind is that you will have to review and update this part of your plan more regularly than almost every other section.

That is primarily because the market environment is very dynamic, meaning customer needs and desires are constantly changing in accordance with trends and other forms of aggressive marketing. Discuss in detail the strategies you are putting in place to facilitate the communication processes between your company and its customer base. Akin to the engine that runs a machine, your operating plan runs the machinations of your business. Not having an operations plan in place often results in dire consequences with nothing of importance being accomplished, including meeting benchmarks, short-term goals, and long-term goals.

The absence of an operations plan renders a business and its activity stagnant.

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The overall importance of the operations plan translates into increased time and effort needed to complete this section of the business plan. While the operations plan section of a business plan is sizably larger than the other sections, an easy and effective method of completing it is to combine it with the Team and Management section listed below.

You can then rename it as the Operations and Management Plan, subsequently writing the details for the section by creating a chart that shows the title of employees and managers and their respective duties, responsibilities, and supervisorial capacities. This section discusses the various people who comprise the management team and ownership of the company. Readers from within and outside the organization should be able to clearly, and easily, identify the people who are in charge of the business and how the business hierarchy is constructed.

While this section does not need to be lengthy or overly complex, the scale of the writing remains dependent on the sheer size of the company and the number of owners, partners, and upper management personnel that exists. As such, the team and management section of a business plan written by a sole proprietorship will be significantly shorter than the same section written by a sizeable company with key members, i.

Regardless of length, the team and management section of your business plan should always clearly list the owners and managers. This serves to remove any confusion about the figures in charge of the organization, which is a benefit for employees, customers, and people new to the enterprise. Additional information pertaining to the company should include the points listed below.

Dependent on company-related specifics, the depth and breadth of each bullet point may vary in terms of overall length. Along with naming the owners and members of the management team, be sure to include a description of the particular role each person plays in the operation of the company. The financial projections detailed in this section are much more than just brief hypotheses on how your company will fare financially in the future. Companies that have been in existence for years typically include the financial data detailing their past performance. When writing this section, include financial data such as income statements, cash flow statements, balance sheets, and other related material such as accounts receivable statements, accounts payable statements, and documented debtor obligations.

Additionally, the projections made must always include supporting data through diligent research and analysis of the many components involved, including competitors, the industry and market, and the products and services involved. The absence of a financial projections section of the business plan results in a lack of direction, a sense of stagnancy, and no clear-cut goal to work toward. Company assertions made about things that could influence projected financial figures example: Inevitably, there will be people from outside the company who will want to view plenty of supporting evidence and documentation of the financial projections made by the business.

Adding these documents are of immense benefit to owners, as they provide security for future discussions with lending entities, while also providing the business plan with integral information, rendering it complete, polished, and professional in scope. Support for financial projections can be achieved through charts, graphs, credit history, or even reference letters.

Essentially, anything that a company and its owners believe will add credibility to financial projections should be added to this section. Consider adding financial projections information in the appendix section of your plan for ease of reading and the purposes of creating a neat and organized document that flows. While the information and documentation used to support the many strategies, assumptions, and protections within a business plan are found in the body of each specific section, the appendix differs in that it typically contains financial information that business owners want to limit access to.

As an example, a company preparing a business plan with the intent of obtaining lender financing could utilize the appendix as a means to submit tax returns and confidential data, such as credit history information, just for the eyes of the requesting lenders. The appendix can also be used as a means to organize supportive data, photographs, reports, and any other information that can potentially exceed more than a few pages. Your appendix should always commence with a clearly articulated table of contents with each section specifically corresponding to the related business plan section.

Your business plan is the essential foundation of your business. Learning how to write a business in a practical, efficient, and compelling manner is among the most important things you can do when starting up your business. Your business plan functions to assist you in operating your business.

It creates the rules, guidelines, and distinct protocols needed to outline business activity; internal and external environmental factors; owner, management, and employee duties and responsibilities and so much more. Assisting you in navigating the many key elements of your business, the plan that you create is a document full of research, careful consideration, and data collection. This ultimately produces an assemblage of information that conveys the present position of your company and how you intend to create optimal positionality for your company in the future.

The importance of having a business plan in place is paramount and cannot be underscored enough. It not only helps you run your business, but it is the essential roadmap or blueprint that you and your workforce will follow for years to come as you work to stake your claim in your respective industry and the marketplace at large.

A well-crafted business plan will not only guide you through each stage of beginning your business but will also assist you in managing each aspect of your operations, resulting in reliable and continual growth. It goes without saying that a business plan is the very foundation of your company and its entrepreneurial endeavors. However, as mentioned earlier, the business plan that you craft is akin to the motor that powers a machine. In the case of your business, it is the machine, and your business plan is the motor, powering you to new and exciting horizons full of blooming success and countless accomplishments.

As the owner and founder of your business, you are at the forefront, the helm. Captaining your vessel, you can use your expertly written business plan to steer your way to unchartered territories full of achievement, success, and so much more. The Small Business Administration is among the most venerable and trusted organizations for the counseling and assistance of entrepreneurs and small business owners today.

Their website is chock full of advice, tips, services, and referrals for all the things small business owners need to be aware of to keep their organizations running smoothly. For those entrepreneurs who are just starting out, the SBA has an extremely helpful Business Planning Tool on their site that provides small, medium, and even larger businesses with an easy to understand step-by-step guide. The guide will help you with the process of creating your very own business plan filled with all of the specific information, facts, and data related to your company.

Conveniently, the Business Planning Tool lets users save their plans online for future updates and editing, or users can download them into PDF files.