Business Plan

At the very least I would recommend it’s worth writing a SWOT analysis, this will give you focus and allow you to visualise your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats more clearly and perhaps spot something that’ll be crucial to your success or failure. Depending on how fast paced your industry is, it’s always worth re-evaluating the SWOT analysis every now and again.

Once you’ve written your SWOT analysis, show your friends, family and colleagues and see if they can add to it at all. Don’t worry if they criticise it, if you can’t justify or argue your point, perhaps it needs a little more thought.

Defiantly, when setting out less is more. It’s easy to setup i.e. a web development business for only a few hundred pounds but by having lower overheads, it will mean as you earn off your first few jobs, you’ll have more to invest in the company.

What benefit is there to your company if you go out and get the best PC, the biggest office with a couple of secretaries and some flash car? In reality you’re more likely to struggle as you’ll be setting off on the back foot. Make sure you carefully weigh up any purchases, perhaps by categorising them into i.e.:

• Need
• Would improve work capacity
• Would like, could perhaps improve work capacity
• Would like but wouldn’t improve work capacity
• Don’t need but look, it’s cool!

If you’ve got investment for the company and can afford to buy all the cool kit from the offset, great but it may be a better idea to keep that for a rainy day. Although I’ve got no proof I’ve always felt that had I not had to earn every penny we had to spend as a business I would have been far more complacent and so lazy and the business wouldn’t be where it is today. Along the same line of thought, I sometimes wonder if I could have done anything differently/better if I did have money to invest at the start and whether it would have got The Site Doctor any further.

This is a very good point, it would be worth noting this down in your targets and goals list [Targets and Goals] as it will give you something to focus on. Think of all expenditures on an annual basis, then when you have the annual expenditure you can work it out on a average number of jobs and/or a monthly figure making it feel more achievable.

Targets and Goals

Personally I can't stress how important targets are enough. Have a set of personal targets as well as business goals -NOT "Make loads of money". The targets should be SMART* (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely), write your targets and goals down somewhere as it commits you, you don't need to read them again just as long as they're there.

*Thanks for the acronym Stacey!

When setting out I had a few:

1. Turnover £500pm for the first 12months (then rising in year two)
2. Pay off all and any accumulated debts that we had (credit cards etc)
3. Go on holiday once a year
4. Be able to buy and afford to run an RX-8 (long story)

Tick them off as you go and add more as needed, they'll give you focus and drive. I would recommend having a selection of goals including something that would appear to be unrealistic as it will give you something to really strive for. It's also worth telling other people about your goals as in an odd way, it commits you to the goals.

A new one on me that I’ll be reading up on tonight! Guanxi [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi]

At the end of the day, a business plan should enable you to visualise your goals as a business which in turn will allow you to focus your efforts. Don’t panic about not achieving everything at once, prioritise and attack one thing at a time.

Setting your rates

Firstly check out my previous post about how I suggest you go about set your rates [Pricing your work] as it has a great way to quantify your rates with meaning that’s also scaleable.

I agree and this is something that I’ve only come to appreciate relatively recently. When setting out I decided that the first few jobs would be relatively in-expensive to build on our portfolio, this was a real Catch-22 as I felt compelled to deliver amazing results for next to no reward. This temptation is great when you start out. You end up becoming a busy fool, working all the hours given for little financial reward (which limits potential investment in your company). You end up begrudging your clients and if you were to let it continue I would imagine start offering a lower service, or worse decide that running your own company wasn’t a good idea.

We recently re-jigged our pricing structure while analysing where I felt the business could do better and the only difference it has made is to my happiness, I feel far more rewarded for the work I produce. Interestingly the quantity of work being obtained has also increased somewhat dramatically so don’t think that your price will always sway the decision –a lot of the time it’s more about whether the client responds well to you.

It’s also worth pointing out that higher (not extortionate) rates, aren’t always a bad thing, I’ve lost out on pitches before because we’ve been too cheap and the client has opted for a more costly company, this isn’t always the case but oddly being more expensive often suggests you’re better.

Finding a niche isn’t always something you can do when you first set out as until you’re within a market you may not know the market well enough. If you do find a niche however, make sure you run a SWOT analysis on it first, it may not be that no-one else has noticed it, it may just be that others have tried and failed –that’s not to say that you can’t make it work however!

It’s defiantly one of the best things you’ll ever do –I would imagine this still counts even if it goes terribly wrong. I was once told that once you’ve been self-employed you’re effectively unemployable ever again and after having been self-employed for 3 years now I can see what they were getting at. I don’t think it’s so much from an employer’s POV but an employee’s, I would find it very hard to give up the freedom/control myself and so will do almost anything to avoid it!

I think this is a nice place to close this article, so in closing I’ll say that even if it fails you won’t regret trying, it’ll most likely be one of the hardest but also most rewarding and filling things that you’ll ever do. The worst thing you can do is not try and end up forever wondering what if…