Business Planning

Definition of a Business Plan:

• A way of thinking about where you are now, where you would like to be and how you are going to get from one to the other 
• A plan that helps you as people with a common interest to look ahead, allocate resources, focus on key points, and prepare for problems and opportunities. 
• A map that describes your business, how it is going to succeed and what you need to do to ensure that it does
• A central location for storing all the vital information about and plans for your business

Services:

• Writing an effective Business Plan: Without a plan, a business can be directionless and day-to-day activities haphazard and reactive.  Often things continue the way they are just because ‘they’ve always been that way’, rather than because it is the most effective way to do things.  By committing your thoughts to paper, you can understand your business better and chart specific courses of action that need to be taken to improve which in tern will help to ensure that your business has a future. 
• Financing your business:  Any good Business Plan will include a section on how you manage your finances including budgeting and cashflow forecasting, which in turn will lead to increasing your income and profitability
• Writing an Action Plan:  Many people forget that a ‘Plan’ is something you implement, and their Business Plan ends up being just a statement of where they are now and where they’d like to be, not how they intend to get there!  We can help you analyse your Business Plan and formulate an Action Plan with clearly defined goals and targets
• Applying for Funding: Many funding applications fail because they didn’t demonstrate clearly how they met the criteria, because they asked for too much or because the people completing them weren’t prepared enough.  We can help you with your funding applications to maximise the chance that you will be successful.

Benefits:

• A business plan will clearly define what you would like to achieve and inspire you to work harder to achieve your goals
• It will help you to understand how the various of your components of your business are contributing (or not) towards the achievement of your goals
• It will help you assess the effectiveness of your strategies and lead you to the development of an Action Plan. 
• It will give you a strategic direction for your club and a clear plan to explain to your customers
• It can be used to clearly demonstrate your worth to potential investors or funders and help them to understand your future plans thus increasing the likelihood that they will invest in you
• It will help in ensuring that you remain financially viable for the long term

Remember: It’s better to have any plan than no plan, therefore it’s perfectly normal to start with a short one and expand it as you go along.