Are you new to business planning for your business? Do you understand how important business planning is to the management of your business? Then let me share a few things with you that can help you with business planning for newbies.
If you are new to business planning, then the following tips will help you get off to a great start:

Start off with a small list of things that you want to include in your business plan so that you don’t get overwhelmed.
When determining your starter list, make sure that you include specific steps that involve your business finances, support staff and business …read more

Developing a business strategy and then launching it can sometime be overwhelming but if you have the right tools, focus and fortitude then the launch of your business strategy can be successful. As a business owner, having a business strategy in place is very important to your online and offline efforts to grow your business
Some of the essential parts to a successful launch of a business strategy are:

Create a solid foundation with a vision statement. This will help you keep in mind the goals and objectives for your business.
Build on your foundation with a mission statement and a list of …read more

If you have taken a vacation this year then you know that when you return you have to play catch-up for a few days with your projects and clients. Sometimes this can be hectic and other times it may even take you a while to catch-up. This may leave you wondering why you decided to take a vacation in the first place.
Just know that as a business owner, vacations are a way for you to destress and also to take a break from the pressures of your business. So when you are back from vacation, having a plan in place …read more

So the summer has started with a big bang and you have plans to take a vacation away from your daily life. As a business owner, sometimes Summer vacation ca be scary to take. Basically, if you don’t have a backup plan in place where you have alternate source that can keep your business funning while you are away, then you might have to shutdown.
Shutting down could be the kiss of death for some businesses and thus some business owners may not feel that they can take a Summer vacation. For those of you who think that you can’t take …read more

Writing a creative brief can help you plan your advertising by helping you to focus and providing a good basis for your ad (or other collateral). It should provide your basic purpose for the ad, list some supporting information, and set the tone for your brainstorming.
A basic brief can start with these three things:

Objective
Support
Tone

Here’s what they should generally include.
Objective
What is this ad or other marketing item supposed to accomplish? Think about your SMART goals and make this measurable and specific. Include a brief outline of your target customer here.
Support
What are you promising or claiming and how are you going to …read more

An internet business strategy is basically a plan in how you want to manage your online presence for your business. There are many components to the strategy where some are easy, some are tedious, and some are hard to implement. Regardless about the level of complexity, it is important for business owners to develop an internet business strategy.
So you may be asking, what are some of the key components of an internet business strategy? And here’s your answer… It’s the PITTS, which is short for:

Planning: spend time research and preparing tasks for what you need to do to develop a …read more

Have you ever felt like someone looking for Waldo/Wally when it comes to your business plan? Has your business plan been missing or you just couldn’t figure out how to organize your business just like it is when someone is trying to figure out “Where’s Waldo/Wally“?
Just to explain for those who don’t know about “Where’s Waldo/Wally”, it is a book that has pages of different images which contain tiny people doing various things. The whole object is to find Waldo/Wally amoung all of the tiny people in the image. The image to the right is a sample of what a …read more

The word “recession” is so prevalent in our society that one can rarely go through a day without hearing the word. As a business owner, it has become necessary to have a recession-proof plan in place with the state of the economy.
Depending on past success with a specific way of doing business may no longer work. Creative thinking and planning is coming into play so that business owners can “recession-proof” their business.
Recession-proofing is becoming a normal way to conduct business according to an article entitled “Recession-Proof Your Business” that was written by Karen E. Klein for BusinessWeek.com. In the article …read more

I’ve come to see a schedule as the backbone of every project. Because if you forge ahead without some kind of timeline, isn’t successfully completing your goal just a shot in the dark?

Sunday I talked about utilizing a planner. And for any project that contains more than a step or two, I’ve learned it’s vital to break the big picture down into segments that can be estimated in terms of time, energy, and resources. Without doing that, I suppose it’ll get done eventually. But will it be done on time? And will it be a good product?

In industries such as …read more

Since I left the corporate world, I’ve been having a bit of a time dilemma. When I was working in an office, I had distractions, sure. But those were all within the realm of work. Trying to stay productive here at home is a little different.

So my planner and I had a come-to-Jesus meeting on Friday, during which I was reminded of everything that made me successful at managing my time when I was immersed in the whirlwind of producing magazines. Being a good employee, I responded with an outline of how I plan to use it now in my …read more