Posts tagged business plan

Time to Review your Business Plan?

Apr 22nd

Posted by Deb Baron in Community Outreach

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Creative Carrot recently participated as a judge in Florida Atlantic University’s 2010 Business Plan Competition.  Over 120 business plans created by students, faculty, and local businesses were submitted, screened & judged. This was a fantastic event – what better way for students to have their business visions judged for product viability, market research and analysis, and financials, etc.

I am hoping that the groups whose plans I judged, learned from my feedback. I coached them as we coach our clients – that a business plan is the key to running a business. A website is a business plan brought to life. If the plan is good (considers the viability of, competition, threats, price points, etc) – the chances of having an effective website are also good.

This experience was a great reminder that we need to review our business plan as it is a living document.   A few clues that it is time to review your business plan are:

  1. If you have three obstacles for which you have not planned
  2. You see a slump in sales
  3. You experience unexpected growth and need to bring on staff
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Is my Business Ready for a Website and Online Presence?

Jan 18th

Posted by Deb Baron in Website & Social Media

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As an online presence is vital to survival in today’s marketplace – it can also be lethal if your business it not ready! What does READY mean? It means that you have a detailed and defined business plan outlining who your target market is, who your competition is and how you are going to differentiate yourself, what your plan to market is, what your pricing structure is, what your customer service entails, and what your budgets are going to be.  With any of the above being unknown, having anyone create a website that truly suits your needs, is unlikely.

As it takes a few months to have your SEO and social media efforts really take hold, we recommend that our prospective customers have an “Under Construction Page(UC)” created with some quality copy (start generating a buzz about your company).  This UC page can begin to drive traffic while you define your business plan – which is your roadmap to success.

How do you learn to define your business? We recommend that you take some classes for entrepreneurs that walk you through the above topics.  We attended the Business Building Blocks Series (for more info go to www.BBBseries.com).  We also recommend that you hire a consultant who specializes in writing business plans (we hired www.ecouncilinc.com).  We have learned that it is much less expensive to do things properly the first time with professional help, than to do it incorrectly ourselves!

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