We’ve written four books about business management, the latest being The Pocket Small Business Owner’s Guide to Business Plans. This year our novel Treasure in the Moonlight was released, a suspenseful adventure blending a contemporary treasure hunt with 18th century pirate lore. While researching the novel, we discovered that pirate captains, just like modern-day CEOs, Continue Reading
We’ve written four books about business management, the latest being The Pocket Small Business Owner’s Guide to Business Plans. This year our novel Treasure in the Moonlight was released, a suspenseful adventure blending a contemporary treasure hunt with 18th century pirate lore. While researching the novel, we discovered that pirate captains, just like modern-day CEOs, Continue Reading
How to Market Fine Foods Fine foods run the gourmet gamut from asparagus in aspic to zinfandel zabaglione. Getting the food from your shelves to the customer’s kitchens depends on effective marketing strategies. Whether you run a fine foods shop or make just one special product, potential buyers need to know about you and your Continue Reading
Yes, But Can You Actually Sell This Product? It’s amazing how many people put a statement like the following in their plan: “The total market for our product is projected to be $1 billion in five years. If we only get 10% of it, we will be a $100 million company in five years.” Well, Continue Reading
By Brian Hill Your Business Plan is a roadmap that guides your company to growth and profitability — the two major objectives of any business. But the planning process itself yields other benefits that small business owners are not always aware of. These benefits are a powerful incentive for all businesses to embrace planning as Continue Reading
Don’t make the assumption that the reader can understand your assumptions. By the time you are finished with your projections, you will be very familiar with the assumptions you used to construct your financial models. A first time reader of your plan will not. Are you certain that you made it easy to follow your Continue Reading
This is a Fatal Flaw seen in many business plans. Everyone likes to think that their product or service is so unique that no one else can successfully compete against it. In rare instances, a new technology may come on stream that truly is a new and better solution to a problem, but even then Continue Reading
Many people think that the more complex their financial models are, and the more “what if” scenarios they concoct, the higher their chances of being funded. A variation of this is the plan that has projections seemingly for decades. Fifty pages of imaginary numbers are not better than five. Particularly in this age when technology Continue Reading
It is always a good idea to obtain input on the plan from the other key members of your management team–your marketing expert, your finance guru, the guy who brings the bagels in the morning–but it is not a good idea for each of these people to go off and work on their own independent Continue Reading